Email marketing is so important in E-Commerce-  lets explore why!

Hi %FIRSTNAME%

For many years now, email marketing has been one the most important channels of communication. I have heard “Email Marketing is dead”  and sure online technology and software are improving rapidly, and not only are there a million other ways to communicate with your customers Email marketing should still be one of the essential parts of your business growth strategies.

What if Facebook collapses, a ban is put on messenger, people stop tweeting, and if that happens how do you continue to communicate with your customers?

People will always be checking their email, and you will always have ownership of your mailing list.  Even if you have 2 people or 20,000 people on your list. When customers sign up – they are telling you they want to hear from you. But here’s the thing – People don’t just want to hear from you. They want and need to have content that is valuable to them. Email marketing is not dead. Emails that have no value are dead. People simply do not have time to be loyal anymore  E-Commerce Newsletters enjoy a high level of customer acceptance.  Collecting your customer’s emails is essential – even if you’re using bots. Get your customers email addresses any way you can. You own your email list.

There are a few things you need :

• The first thing you need is an email marketing platform. You also need to add sign up forms on your website, so that your visitors can opt in for your newsletter.  I highly recommend Active Campaign but it is a little advanced. Next, Mailchimp has come a long way in the last few years and does integrate with Shopify easily. But Active Campaign is still my pick of choice
• The next step is an email marketing strategy: once you’ve got all those email addresses, what are you going to do with it?
• Start building your contact list immediately, and be diligent over time to continue growing it.
• Make it clear up front how often you’ll send emails and what will be in the emails. You may want to test frequency and see if sending emails more frequently or less frequently has an impact on ROI.
• Protect and respect your list by not sending emails too frequently, and never spam!
• When asking for an email address, remember that you are asking for permission. You have to give people a reason to give you their address.
• Make it clear before they sign-up how often you send your emails (i.e. weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, etc and stick to it.)

SOME QUICK FACTS AROUND SENDING NEWSLETTERS

• 65% of users prefer emails to contain mostly images, compared to 35% who prefer text. (Source: HubSpot)
• Adding video to an email can increase click rates by 300%.
• 58% of adults check their email first thing in the morning. (Source: Customer Intelli-gence)

Newsletters provide plenty of new opportunities to increase customer engagement and click thru rate per email. Here are some ideas to try and increase your email marketing conversions during what is traditionally a slow period in commerce.