With a multitude of marketing ideas at your disposal, email continues to be the most valuable tool in your arsenal.
The good news is that with a little extra effort, you can acquire qualified subscribers and engage them with relevant messaging content to populate your email lists with qualified shoppers, and most importantly, win loyalty and sales.
One way to get more mileage out of your email outreach is to improve event-based email marketing. As with personalization and segmentation, even if your resources are limited you can start with a handful of triggers including:
Email list signup – the honeymoon series
To fully engage new subscribers, during the first six weeks post-signup, send a series of emails that make a compelling offer and follow up, reinforce brand identity, and invite social participation. You can set a time limit and use the deadline to encourage new subscribers to act soon.
Abandoned cart recovery
Act fast and follow up. If a buyer has made it all the way to the cart, they are a high-priority audience to re-engage. On average, abandoned cart messages recover more than 20% of sales and generate a whopping $17.90 per email sent — much higher than typical non-targeted email promotions.
But 54% of abandoners who end up purchasing do so in the first 24 hours after leaving the site. To capture and convert these shoppers, go beyond simply defaulting to a discount. Stress service and convenience, offering customer service assistance options (such as email, phone, and live chat) as well as payment alternatives such as PayPal to win sales.
Give shoppers product alternatives. Since many cart abandoners are “window shopping,” give them a sampling of alternative products that might better suit their needs. Add a banner across the bottom stating that returns and exchanges are always free to help boost trust in your brand.
Stimulate inactives
Even though it may seem counterintuitive to cull subscribers from your list, the fact is that shoppers who’ve failed to click for months are unlikely to convert into paying customers any time soon. Large segments of your list that fail to click on links in email messages could lead to spam identification by ISPs.
But before removing inactives from your list, engage passive subscribers one final time with an enticing discount offer and a final request for confirmation.
Ken Burke is founder and chairman of ecommerce software and solutions provider MarketLive.