Search engines and social media platforms are great for getting discovered by future customers, but email remains the best way to maintain and strengthen existing relationships over time.
With such a competitive landscape whereby climbing Google rankings is only getting harder it is vital for business success to focus on how to build the value of a customer over time and not just be concerned with that initial acquisition. Besides which, people prefer to buy from those that they have a relationship with and email marketing is an excellent tool to help you build relationships with your customers.
The great thing about email marketing is that is ‘owned’ i.e. you have complete control over the content and message that you are choosing to send to your customers. You are also able to tailor relevant messages to selected recipients.
Source: Shopify data shows that email as a channel had the highest average order conversion rate during Black Friday Cyber Monday.
Email marketing can help you:
- Increasing average order value
- Provide product recommendations
- Upsell or cross-sell complementary products
- Set order minimums for discount
- Set up a customer loyalty program
- Bundle products or create packages
There are three main categories of marketing emails – transactional, promotional and lifecycle.
- Transactional emails are sent during checkout and other purchasing actions and are more functional in nature, sending key information to individual customers such as order confirmations, receipts, and order-shipped emails.
- Promotional emails are designed to raise awareness for a specific deal or promotion. For example the launch of a new product, a limited-time only discount email, a Christmas promotion email and so forth.
- Lifecycle emails, also known as “triggered” emails as they’re sent based on what action a shopper took and where that shopper is in the customer lifecycle. For example, a cart abandonment email only sends after a customer leaves products in their cart.
Don’t neglect the importance of newsletters. These are an excellent way to build relationships with your customers and encourage brand loyalty. Look at ways to add value to your customers such as educating them and offering hints and tips –Blogs and news are an excellent way to drive customers back to your website.
There are also three main ways to grow revenue in a business:
- Increase your number of customers
Automated welcome and abandoned cart emails can increase conversion rates
- Increase the total number of purchases per customer, i.e. the frequency
Bounce-back or win-back campaigns can increase a customer’s number of purchases
- Increase the average order value
Lifecycle campaigns and broadcasts can automatically highlight high-value products to the right customers
