Evolving Technology by Ash Young
Email marketing provides the opportunity to build trust with customers – especially your most loyal ones. As an SME, you are more than likely to have a fairly small marketing budget, meaning you choose wisely where it’s spent.
Email marketing is a simple, cost-effective way to drive revenue for you. However, manually sending emails is a labour intensive task. So firstly, it’s best to get all your emails automated – saving you a lot of valuable time.
Here are some techniques I’d recommend actioning:
Abandoned shopping cart
Abandoned shopping cart emails remind a customer that they have something left in their basket. Research shows the shopping cart abandonment rate sits at around 70 per cent, so that’s plenty of otherwise lost revenue that you could recover and win back. These emails can typically reclaim around 10 per cent of those potential lost sales.
Some companies add an incentive to finish checking out or text with a sense of urgency about the product selling out quickly. At a minimum, there should be a clear CTA that links back to the cart and your copy should be encouraging.
Here are a few of my favourite strategies to help you beat the competition:
- Limited time discount codes.
- Cart expiry warnings to remind them the products aren’t reserved and could sell out.
- Free delivery offer.
- Offer to reserve their items a little longer.
Personalised emails
According to Oclero, “email subject lines that are personalised generate open rates that come in at an average of 50 per cent higher”. Personalisation brings both engagement and profit. And dynamic content is the ideal way to personalise emails to each individual – with minimal effort.
You can use data such as their name, past purchases, past responses and interests to avoid a one-size-fits-all message in your emails.
Here are just a few ways to personalise your emails:
- Subject line
- From name
- Product recommendations
- Custom discounts
- Custom pricing
Reviews
BrightLocal found that 82 per cent of consumers read online reviews for local businesses and the average consumer reads 10 reviews before feeling able to trust a business. After a specified number of purchases, it’s a great idea to send an automatic email asking for their feedback and secure plenty of positive reviews. Plus, this also provides the opportunity to segment any negative reviewers and attempt to build back their trust.
Emails don’t just need to be for collecting reviews – why not send your current customers a round-up of your best reviews? Helping to build even stronger relationships with your consumers and increasing their lifetime value can be really valuable.
For help building an email strategy and setting up automation, contact the Evoluted team.
Ash Young, Evoluted
