eCommerce, Email Marketing, Marketing, SMS Marketing
How to Increase Your Bottom Line With E-commerce Email Automation
When surveyed, business owners said that email promotions accounted for 40% of their company sales.
That’s a figure that’s hard to ignore. Email marketing is an exceptionally effective way of selling to your most valued audience: those with enough interest in your products to sign up as subscribers.
But did you know that there are lots of newer strategies that some companies now use to help boost those revenue figures? That is down to email automation, and it’s helping to transform how businesses use email to sell.
If automation is new to you, read on. We’ll explain what it means to your company and the specific automation strategies you can use to help your e-commerce business achieve record growth.
Email Automation: A Brief Introduction
Savvy marketers and technical innovators have helped make significant strides in email marketing. One of those areas is automation. It’s a basic form of AI.
Automation allows your email platform to market to customers on your behalf using rules and conditions that you set up in advance. For example, you might set up a new automation rule as follows:
When a customer clicks on this product link in an email, add that person to a list of warm leads.
Using automation helps you create a more personalized experience for your audience. Your subscribers get more of the content they want. And less the content that doesn’t pique their interest.
And when you set up the right automation strategies, it’s one of the most effective ways to optimize your email marketing. You should see better sales and leads conversions without having to expand your email list’s size dramatically.
Strategies to Boost Your Revenue
Let’s explore some of the most popular email automation strategies. By putting these in place, you’ll increase conversions and help boost your revenue and profits!
Email Your Abandoned Cart Visitors
You might have already seen this feature if you regularly buy products online. It happens when you browse products and start adding items to your basket.
Suppose you’ve got far enough through the checkout process to supply your email address but didn’t complete the purchase. In that case, you might get an email from the business that looks something like this:
“Oops, did you forget something?”.
That is known as abandoned cart automation, and it’s a great way of scooping up extra sales.
There are lots of reasons why people don’t complete a purchase. They might have got distracted by a knock on the door or their favorite program starting on TV.
This little nudge will encourage some people to return and complete their purchases. The result? More sales for your business.
A Thank You and Surprise
When you’ve made a purchase or signed up for a free offer, you want to make sure everything went through as it should.
That’s where a short thank you email comes in handy. It provides reassurance and helps bridge trust between the business and the customer. You did what you promised.
This small automation also has another significant benefit.
The subscriber will recognize your brand by seeing that first thank you email in their inbox. They won’t act surprised when you send a promotional email in a week because they forgot they signed up.
Another way to improve this automation sequence is to include a surprise gift in the thank you message. That could be a discount code or a free ebook, for example.
But it will show the value of your business emails and make your subscribers more likely to open subsequent email promotions that you send through. That’s another helpful way of improving your sales conversions.
Win Back Cold Subscribers
All email lists contain a percentage of subscribers you can classify as “cold subscribers.” These people might have signed up to your list but never opened an email. Or haven’t opened an email recently (within two to three months).
A high number of cold subscribers can hurt your email marketing because you’ll see a drop in your email open rate and a more frequent amount of bounced emails. So you’ll need to tackle this.
Part of that is regularly cleaning your subscriber list and removing cold emails.
But you can also use automation to win back some of these subscribers, those who signed up with good intentions but forgot to check in on your emails because of other life demands.
You can set up a simple automation rule to email those who haven’t engaged for a while. Use a carefully crafted subject line to get the reader’s attention (“are you still interested in receiving our emails?”).
Some will reengage, so it will help improve your overall email performance and possibly boost your sales figures.
Personalized Special Offers
You can use email automation technology to discover more about your audience when sending content out via email.
For example, suppose you sell gifts.
Someone on your list frequently clicks on links related to one category of gifts, say, children’s soft toys. You can create a bespoke automation rule to send a discounted, time-limited offer on a top-selling soft toy.
Send that email advertising to all those who showed a recent interest in the topic “toys” in your emails.
These are your high probability buyers, and personalized offers are the best way to maximize your conversions when sending sales promotions to your list.
The personalized nature will also make your subscriber feel valued and listened to and help you become a more trusted brand in their eyes.
Email Automation: Getting Smart With Your Marketing
Don’t despair if your email isn’t performing as you’d hoped. By setting up some intelligent email automation, you can find multiple ways to improve your open and conversion rates and directly impact your sales revenue.
There’s a lot to do to get these rules set up and working smoothly, and that’s where we come in. We can help fast-track your marketing success by using our industry expertise and technical know-how for your business.
If you’d like to know what we can do to support your email marketing, get in touch today to have an informal chat with our team.
