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eCommerce, Email Marketing

It’s easy to assume that social media is the most effective space for communication with customers. After all, people spend a ton of time on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

The truth is that 74% of people still prefer email communication, particularly with businesses. Emails are convenient to receive and provide a level of security and authority that other methods can’t match.

If you’re looking for a way to improve your email marketing, it’s time to consider email automation. This is an especially important choice for eCommerce businesses that rely on online sales to thrive.

Want to know more about email automation and how it can benefit eCommerce businesses? Read on to learn everything you should know about automated emails.

An Early Start

Adopting email automation works best when you pair it with a focused effort to grow your email list. By prompting new customers to sign up for your emails, you can get an early start building that important relationship. In addition to pop-up prompts on your website, you can also request that customers provide their email addresses upon checkout.

With automated emails, you can create a welcome series that will arrive in your new customers’ inboxes right away. With the right email marketing technology, you can track whether or not that initial message was opened. The goal of a welcome series is to determine whether or not your new customer is interested in email communication—and you can also throw in a few incentives to encourage a first (or second) purchase.

Easy Drip Campaigns 

One of the most common uses of automated email marketing is the effective drip campaign. A drip campaign is a series of emails sent at opportune times to keep consumers engaged and encourage purchases.

Drip campaigns include:

  • abandoned cart reminders
  • post-purchase follow-ups
  • re-engagement initiatives

You can also use drip campaigns to provide customers with discount codes or upsell opportunities. By automating your drip campaign, you can ensure that the right email reaches each customer when they’re most poised to follow your calls to action.

Brand Consistency

When you’re putting together marketing materials, consistency is key. When your tone and voice remain the same, consumers know what to expect from your eCommerce business. If your tone and voice change, it can create confusion and distrust. 

When you opt for email automation, you can put together the vast majority of your emails at the same time. That means using the same writer or team that can stay focused on the same goals to create a drip campaign that feels unified. This will also give you more time to focus on your newsletters and updates and a portfolio to reference so that your consistency never wavers.

Brand Awareness

While eCommerce is thriving in the digital age, it does present some unique obstacles. The biggest one is that without a brick-and-mortar store, you can’t rely on local foot traffic to build brand awareness. Instead, all of your brand awareness has to come from online marketing efforts. 

As we’ve already mentioned, email is one of the most effective ways to communicate with consumers. By automating your email campaign, you can ensure that emails reach inboxes even when you’re preoccupied with other important things like creating great products and fulfilling orders. Each time one of your emails hits a consumer’s inbox, you’re building the brand awareness needed to earn their trust and their purchases.

Tracking Important Metrics

Email marketing statistics paint a clear picture: some email campaigns are more successful than others. On average, email marketing yields a $36 ROI for every dollar invested. However, the top performers are seeing a $70 ROI for every dollar invested.

Automated emails allow you to track important metrics and make adjustments over time. When your entire email list is receiving variations of the same emails, you will get a clear sense of what’s working and what isn’t. If, for example, your abandoned cart reminder is yielding a lower conversion rate than your re-engagement initiative, you can tweak or replace your abandoned cart reminder until it’s bringing in the ROI you deserve.

Personalization

Many business owners worry that automated emails are impersonal. After all, isn’t everyone receiving the same email? How can you ensure that consumers feel directly catered to when they receive an automated email?

With today’s marketing technology, you can personalize automated emails with ease.

You can still divide your email list into different demographics. That way, each recipient is receiving emails relevant to their needs and desires. You can also personalize and customize your automated emails based on buying habits and more. 

Outsourcing Your Email Automation

Do you feel overwhelmed by the idea of taking on a new marketing strategy? After all, you’re already managing a website, social media pages, and product fulfillment.

The good news is that you can outsource your automated email campaign. We can do everything from creating your email content to setting up the automated schedule to tracking key metrics. We’re Klaviyio Partners, after all! With our help, you can stay focused on the day-to-day while reaping the rewards of a strong email campaign.

Let Us Tackle Your Email Automation

There’s one thing your eCommerce business is missing in 2023: email automation. As you can see, there are a ton of ways to use automated emails and the benefits speak for themselves. Now, we want to offer our eCommerce services that will boost your business.

Ready to find out more about how we can help? Contact us and let us know what services you’re interested in so that we can create a customized marketing strategy that will help you to meet all of your goals.

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eCommerce, Email Marketing

Did you know that email marketing boasts an impressive ROI of $36 for every $1 spent?

You want to start 2023 with a bang, but you’re not sure how.

It’s tough to know where to start when it comes to email marketing. There are so many different options and strategies that it can be hard to know where to begin.

But don’t worry. Keep reading this email marketing guide because these five email marketing automation will help you get started on the right foot and boost your business in the process.

What Is Email Marketing Automation?

Email marketing automation is a powerful tool that enables you to send automated emails to your customers and prospects. It takes the manual effort out of email marketing and allows you to manage your campaigns more efficiently.

By automating repetitive tasks like lead nurturing, welcome emails, follow-ups, order confirmations, and upselling messages – you can save time and focus on other areas of your business.

With email marketing automation, you can create personalized emails that are triggered by user actions or behavior within your sales funnel. This allows you to target specific users with relevant messages at the right time – increasing the chances of conversion.

You can also segment contacts based on their interests or preferences so that they receive more relevant content tailored specifically for them. Furthermore, you can access analytics and insights to help you measure the performance of your campaigns, and make adjustments accordingly.

Benefits of Email Marketing Automation for Ecommerce

Now that you understand the basics, let’s look at some of the benefits email marketing automation can offer eCommerce businesses.

1. Create Better Relationships With Customers

Automated emails can be used to nurture existing relationships and build new ones. You can reach out to inactive customers with personalized messages, thank loyal customers for their purchases, send special offers or promotions to reward them, and ask for feedback to improve your products and services.

2. Optimize Your Sales Funnel

With email automation, you can set up automated workflows or sequences that will help you identify where prospects are dropping off in the buying process – allowing you to adjust accordingly. This can help you optimize your sales funnel and get more people through it successfully.

3. Low Maintenance & Cost-Effective

Automating manual tasks is a huge time saver, as well as a money saver. You can use email automation to send personalized emails to customers without the time commitment or cost of manual labor. This allows you to focus on other areas of your business and ensure that customer relationship are taken care of.

4. Increase Sales

By targeting customers with personalized and relevant content, you can increase the chances of conversion. Automated emails can be used to upsell related products, drive repeat purchases and boost overall revenue.

5 Types of Email Marketing Automation for eCommerce

Now that you know why email automation is useful for e-commerce, let’s look at the various types of emails you can automate.

1. Welcome Emails

Welcome emails are a great way to create a warm and inviting first impression with new subscribers or customers. Not only do they provide an introduction to your brand, but they also set expectations for what’s to come!

By customizing each welcome email based on the individual, you can ensure that their experience is unique, personal, and most of all memorable.

It’s important to start establishing relationships early on that will not only keep people coming back but convince them this was a worthwhile addition to their lives!

2. Abandoned Cart Emails

Abandoned cart emails can provide an effective boost to sales, so they’re worth exploring if you run an online store. When a customer adds items to their cart but fails to finish the checkout process, these automated messages serve as a reminder that encourages them to return and complete the process.

In addition, you can drive conversions even further by providing incentives with your abandoned cart emails. For example, offering a small discount or free shipping may be just the thing customers need to go back and finish their purchase.

Adding abandoned cart emails to your arsenal of sales tools is a no-brainer, and could wind up making a big difference in your overall conversions and profits.

3. Win-Back Emails

Win-back emails are an incredibly powerful way to revive relationships with your inactive customers and make sure they don’t get away! Everyone loves the feeling of a bargain or the convenience of free shipping.

Incorporate these techniques with your win-back emails when you reach out to past customers and you’ll be sure to lure them back into your store.

Creating a good win-back email is a craft in itself, so make sure you take time to consider what kind of incentives you’re offering and how best to communicate them. With well-crafted win-back strategies, past customers can become future patrons once again.

4. Upsell & Cross-Sell Emails

Upsell and Cross-sell emails are excellent marketing tools. They allow businesses to up the value of each purchase by promoting related or complementary items which may help the customer fulfill their needs and wants.

These emails build on what customers have already purchased and help business owners overcome any objections the customer may have with extra incentives, such as discounts or even free offers.

By utilizing these strategies, businesses can increase their sales and develop a loyal customer base. Customers also benefit from getting additional products that further enhance their shopping experience.

5. Newsletter and Promotional Emails

Crafting effective newsletters and promotional emails is important for any business looking to expand its reach. Not only do they keep customers informed, but they also help build brand loyalty.

The purpose of a newsletter is to communicate the benefits of your service or product in concise language that makes your subscribers feel special and valued. On the other hand, promotional emails are used to drive sales by presenting direct offers.

A clear call to action should be included so that potential customers have an easy time claiming discounts or learning more about products they may find appealing.

No matter which type of automated message you send out, it is integral that you personalize your content so that every customer feels heard and connected to your business.

Need Help With Your Email Marketing?

As you can see, there are many fantastic email marketing campaigns that you can use in 2023 to increase your business. Master the above tactics, and you’re on your way to success.

For more information on email marketing, contact us today.

Ecommerce email marketing-agency

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eCommerce, Email Marketing

Introduction – What is Retention Marketing?

Retention marketing is also known as customer retention. It’s a strategy that helps businesses to keep their current customers and increase the lifetime profitability (also known as lifetime value, or LTV) of each customer. Put simply, it’s the way of thinking about your business’s marketing scheme, how it works, and how it can work better for your customers.

Why is Retention Marketing Important for Your Business

Retention marketing is a relatively new concept that is gaining popularity in the business sector, specifically with the meteoric rise of ecommerce business due to the various economic shutdowns, forcing customers to shop online. It is an approach to customer retention that focuses on the customer experience, as opposed to acquisition. It aims to create a positive and memorable experience for customers so they will want to stay loyal and continue doing business with you.

The goal of retention marketing is not just to keep your current customers but also make them happy so they will want to come back again and again. With retention marketing, you are focusing your efforts on making sure that your customers have a good time each time they interact with your company, rather than just trying to get them in the door for the first time.

Retention marketing is important because it’s a lot cheaper to retain a customer than acquire them. Acquiring a new customer is typically 5x to 25x more expensive than the cost to retain one.

If you’ve established a solid foundation of customers, you should aim to split your time 70% on Acquisition and 30% on Retention. If that sounds like you, read on to learn ways to begin working on marketing retention tactics.

What are the Best Ways to Improve Customer Retention and Loyalty

Retaining customers is one of the most important aspects of a business. Customer retention strategies are a great way to increase customer loyalty and help businesses grow. In this article, we will discuss some strategies that you can use to retain your customers.

Customer Service

The first strategy is to ensure that your customer service is on point and that you are providing the best possible experience for your customers. This starts with having an efficient customer service team that knows how to solve any problem and provide fast responses in order to satisfy the needs of your customers. You can leverage site chat if you have a support team or email support at minimum. You should also have a comprehensive FAQ page with all the answers for the most common questions so that customers do not need to wait for a response from a member of staff.

If you have a live chat you can turn questions into sales or resolved complaints into a smooth resolution and preserving that experience. At FORGE, we love Hubspot’s built in chat feature but you can also leverage plugins for Facebook Messenger or Customer Specific Support like Tawk.To which even offers the ability to hire remote chat staff to support you as you grow.

Gifting

If you have the margin to do so, consider adding free gifts at checkout or within your packaging to encourage the “law of reciprocity”. When people get something from you without asking or expecting it, they will be delighted and often times want to give back. This can encourage referrals or return business.

Another simple way to delight your customers is handwritten thank you notes. You’d be surprised; a little goes a long way.

Customer Loyalty Program

Part of effective marketing retention strategies is consumer psychology. You want to help each customer achieve what they set out to when they first opted in to try your product or service. One way to help

Email Marketing

This is the #1 Retention Marketing tactic. Specifically, we’re talking about Email Marketing Automation.

Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing tools for companies. However, it can be time-consuming for marketers to manually send personalized emails to their customers. This is where email automation comes in.

It allows marketers to automate and schedule the sending of personalized emails so they don’t have to worry about sending a message at the right time. It also saves them time by automating repetitive tasks like creating a welcome email and following up with people who haven’t opened an email in a while.

Email automation is one of the best ways for marketers to save time, money, and energy when trying to create customer engagement campaigns.

If you’re an ecommerce brand looking to increase your retention and improve your conversions, you will be hardpressed to find a better all-in-one solution than Klaviyo, our preferred Email Marketing and retention platform.

Klaviyo is a comprehensive retention marketing tool that provides a number of templates for high impact email automations, or as they call them, Flows.

Here are just a few of the Flows we recommend at Forge to get you started on your retention strategy:

Welcome Series: Get your subscribers to close the first deal by teaching them about your brand and services while increasing trust and building the foundations of a long-lasting relationship.

Post-Purchase: Will increase customers retention and lifetime value turning them into loyal buyers.

Re-engagement: Save money and stop sending emails to people who don’t want it. Using the re-engagement tactic will improve your email deliverability and make sure that you keep your list clean.

Abandoned Cart: 73% of shopping carts are abandoned. Recover them at the right time, while they are still considering your product.

Browse Abandonment: They can help remind your subscribers of their early interest and potentially bring them back to your online store, softening the sting of your initial disappointment that they didn’t buy on their first visit.

SMS Marketing

Text marketing is a type of marketing that uses text messages to promote and sell products or services. It is also called SMS marketing, short message service (SMS), mobile marketing, or by the abbreviation “texting.” Text messages are delivered to a cell phone via an SMS message.

Klaviyo doubles as a SMS marketing tool allowing you to reach your customers where they are constantly looking: their phones. You can also send MMS messages, or text promotions with images included. Check out Klaviyo for SMS here.

Loyalty Programs & Referrals

If you’ve been able to retain a loyal customer for a long time, this will feed acquisition naturally through referrals. Make sure to encourage referrals from your loyal customers by rewarding them for referrals.

Measure your Retention Strategy

Your Repeat Customer Rate is the number 1 thing to monitor to see if your retention strategies are being effective. Shopify will calculate this for you in your dashboard, but if you’re using Woocommerce or another CMS, use this quick equation to establish your Customer Retention Rate:

# of Customers Who Purchased More than 1x

————————————————————————————————————

# of Unique Customers

 

Next, you’ll want to manage your AOV, or average order value. Calculate it thusly:

 

Yearly Revenue

————————————————————————————————————

# of Orders Your Store Processed

 

Lastly, calculate your Customer Value:

Purchase Frequency x Average Order Value = Customer Value

 

If you’re in need of assistance setting up a high converting retention marketing strategy, please feel free to reach out. Forge Digital Marketing is your go-to partner to establish your ecommerce retention strategies and grow bigger than you ever thought possible!

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