For any ecommerce business, attracting potential buyers to visit your website is a tough challenge. However, converting visitors into paying customers is even a lot tougher. People come and go, so are your online visitors. Visitors wander in and out each day without buying anything. If you’re one of the many online retailers that suffer from this predicament, then you need to steal this strategy right away.
This won’t come as a shock to you but we are going back to an old-fashioned friend: email marketing. It is one of the strongest and most established enablers to a successful online selling. In fact, email marketing’s ROI is to the roof with its 4300% amazingly cost-effective ROI. Email marketing helps you establish customer relationships, expand your business, and ultimately increase sales.
But how do you convert visits into sales with email marketing? What are the recommended practices that you need to employ? Well, just leave that to us. We’ve got the valuable checklist of best email marketing campaigns for you to successfully catch those elusive sales.
1 – Welcome Emails: Make your new shoppers special
Imagine how an online visitor who recently registered to your online store would feel if he or she received an email from you?
Establishing long-term relationship starts with simple gestures that would make them feel valued and in the future, would get them back to your online store and start buying.
But you worry that you don’t have enough time to send welcome email to every new visitor to your store personally? No, this is an era where everything can be automated. This is a free welcome email builder – Happy Email – that helps you set up a template and automatically sends out email to new visitors from your private email address:
Reminder checklist from the above strategy:
- Your target: Newly-registered email subscribers or first-time buyers
- Your timing: 30 minutes after email subscription or first purchase (The 30-minute delay is critical: it makes customers feel the email is personal written by a real person, not an automated follow-up email)
- Your content:
– Visitors who became email subscribers should feel the warm love and joy with your “Welcome Email”
– Send from the store founder’s personal email address, not the general sales or support emails.
2 – Milestone Emails: Celebrate significant events like birthdays and anniversaries
Celebrations are almost synonymous to gift giving and buying. And shoppers who are in celebratory mood are the perfect target for a “milestone email”. A milestone email is simply sending a promotional email to remind and rejoice special occasions like birthdays and anniversaries like membership subscription date.
Like real birthday or anniversary celebrations, typically a gift is always required. So, follow this to your milestone email by offering your shoppers a gift that they can’t pass up like discounted items or a free merchandise with their next purchase. This way you are adding sales while celebrating an important milestone with your shoppers.
Try for example Dorothy Perkin’s birthday email to entice shoppers to celebrate their birthday by treating themselves with new items they’ll love:
Reminder checklist from the above strategy:
- Your target: Birthday celebrants and membership anniversaries
- Your timing: Consider sending the following sequence:
– A pre-email, few days before the event
– The day of the event itself
– A post-email, few days after the event
- Your content:
– Be sincere and in a celebratory mood
– Include a compelling call-to-action like “Treat Yourself” or “Pamper Yourself”
c) Create sense of urgency by offering discounts and freebies
3 – Cart Abandonment Emails: Remind your visitors that they have left something in their cart
Visitors place products in their shopping cart, but during the process they did not push through and abandon it. It is critical that you can set up a cart abandonment email flow, that automatically reaches out to your customers to remind them of the items they left in their cart, and entice them to come back to site and finish checkout.
This is an example cart abandonment email created by Mailbot tool:
Reminder checklist from the above strategy:
- Your target: Visitors who abandoned products in their cart
- Your timing: 6 hours – 24 hours – 48 hours after customers abandon their cart
- Your content:
– Tell your visitors that they forgot to complete their order
– Write down all the items that they have abandoned during their visit
– Include a button that could easily re-direct them to complete their order
– Recommend other related products that could stir their interests
– Offer a discount in the last email in the flow to convert customers who might be looking for less priced items
4 – Browse Abandonment Emails: Bring browsers back to buy
Similar to cart abandonment emails, browse abandonment emails are designed to remind customers about the products that they are interested in (based on their browsing, viewing and searching behavior on store).
Though these shoppers haven’t gone through the shopping cart process, they are shoppers who browse deeper to your site and show considerable interest in your offerings
During shoppers’ visit, they may have viewed different products that stirred their interests but have left your site without purchasing them. This is where browse abandonment email will work smartly for you. By sending them the products that they have browsed during their visit, you are pulling your shoppers to come back to your website and buy the items they have not completed to buy.
Reminder checklist from the above strategy:
- Your target: people who browse products but leave site without actually buying
- Your timing: 6 hours – 24 hours – 48 hours after customers leave the site (don’t wait too long, they might forget ever visiting your brand’s website)
- Your content:
– Make sure your copy is relevant to their behavior and enticing enough to catch their attention
– Create a sense of scarcity (such as: these items are selling out quickly, get yours before none is left) to make them come right back to your site
– Recommend alternative items to give customers more options in case they didn’t like what they saw on your website
5 – Personalized Recommendation Emails: Sell what your shoppers really want
Not everyone is created equal, that is why you need to start a smarter selling strategy based on shoppers’ needs and preferences – execute personalized recommendation campaign on a regular basis.
It works similarly to browse abandonment emails by sending what products your shoppers are interested in, based on their behavior on stores. However, the different is, personalised recommendation emails focus on customers who already make purchases, with an aim to retain and sell more to buying customers.
Take for example Uncommon Goods’ email strategy of sending product recommendations based on shoppers’ interests:
Reminder checklist from the above strategy:
- Your target: Customers who already made purchased in the past
- Your timing: Send weekly or monthly, depending on the variety of offerings on your store
- Your content:
– Tell your visitors that you have the right products based on their interests
– Include the products that they have browsed and recommend similar ones
– Make sure your recommendation is relevant and personalized based on their behavior – this can only be achieved by machine learning and big data. (Consider testing Mailbot tool to implement this strategy)
6 – Review Request Emails: Solicit what your shoppers love about the products they bought
An overwhelming 90% of online shoppers say that their purchase decisions are heavily influenced by online reviews. If you don’t have enough positive reviews or none at all, this could pose a serious challenge for you to close sale. And so, you need to start building your reviews by sending an email to your customers about their recent product purchases. In turn, reward their reviews with generous gifts, discounts or freebies to get them coming back to your site and purchase even more.
Employ this similar strategy from Crate & Barrel where it sends an email to its purchasers asking about their opinion on their recent purchase and rewards them with a chance to win a shopping spree.
Reminder checklist from the above strategy:
- Your target: Recent purchasers
- Your timing: Send two emails with this chronology:
– An email right after their product purchase
– A month after their purchase but ask for their overall shopping experience
- Your content:
– Be genuine when asking for reviews
– Incentivize your reviews by rewarding them with discounts or a raffle games
7 – Gamification Emails: Instill fun and drive engagement for more sales
Gamification emails are simple, you turn a process into a game where in every action has a corresponding value, may it be points or rewards. Thus, gamifying your emails can impact more shoppers to open their emails because they look forward to something in return. Plus, it could potentially turn behavior into habit. And the habit that you’re aiming for is the habit of buying more from your online store.
Get inspiration from Gwynnie Bee’s gamified email where in a shopper has a chance to win a prize by playing the game. The prize could be redeemed on their next purchase.
Reminder checklist from the above strategy:
- Your target: Unengaged or dormant shoppers
- Your timing: Send emails to shoppers who haven’t respond or opened your emails in a month
- Your content:
– Make your game fun and easy without any complicated steps or process
– Reward them immediately so they can purchase instantly as well
8 – Gift-sender Emails: A convenient way to send some love
Gift-sender emails have commonalities to milestone emails but with a different purpose. Instead of celebrating an important occasion for the shoppers themselves, encourage them to organize a gift-sender email which lets them schedule and then send gifts right to their loved ones’ special event.
Amazon’s email strategy to ask their shoppers schedule a gift-sender email to their loved ones’ birthday
Reminder checklist from the above strategy:
- Your target: All your shoppers
- Your timing: This can be placed as a year-round strategy which can be fractionated two or four times
- Your content:
– Ask for their loved ones’ special day to be scheduled in your calendar
– Ask them to buy the gift that they want to include in their email greeting
– Ask them to invite other people who might be interested to chip in
Catch More Sales Today
Even if your online store has mounting visitors, this won’t necessarily correlate to sales. Without an effective strategy, it is like fishing in the sea with a rod but without a bait. Nevertheless, email marketing does the trick for you to catch those elusive sales. Email is still one of the core channels in successful online selling.
Email marketing has a wide spectrum of usage and sophistication that ensures effectiveness in your sales targets. Whether you want to welcome new shoppers, offer them enticing deals and discounts, remind them about the products they’ve abandoned or any of our innovative strategies above, email marketing is an easy but a very powerful tool to convert a visitor into a paying customer in an instant.
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