5 Email Marketing Strategies You Haven’t Heard Before

Featured article by Nikita Ufimcev, Freelance copywriter for Omnisend 

Ecommerce is a lucrative industry to be in, especially if you know how to play the game right. On the other hand, it’s a highly competitive area too. Giants like Amazon and Ebay have pretty much occupied the whole of the market, while newer small, but efficient players are emerging on a daily basis.

You might wonder – how can I get through all of this competition and reach the client?

Don’t worry, there is enough cake for everyone, as long as you have a few aces in your pocket. Below we present you our list of top 5 email marketing automation strategies necessary to succeed in today’s ecommerce business.

1.   Customer Segmentation

So we’ve mentioned that it’s extremely difficult to stand out from the competition these days. Customers are bombarded with dozens of ads through all possible touchpoints every single day. It seems that the only logical solution for companies to stand out is to treat their customers somewhat uniquely, i.e. to personalize the service provided.

The key strategy for email marketing is no different – segmenting your audience based on the data collected and sending them personalized promotional material. It’s also known as Target Marketing, and it simply means sending the right information for the right audience.

How does segmentation work? Very simple. Your audience differs based on various things, such as age, gender, preferences, location, values, etc., which is exactly how you should segment your customers. You can take it to another level and segment your customers based on their behavior, such as level of inactivity and cart abandonment.

2.   Web Tracking

What else would you possibly want to know about your audience to better understand it and personalize your email marketing for it? Yes, that’s exactly what you are thinking – to track their actions while browsing through your ecommerce store!

You can incorporate Google Analytics tool into your store to track where your visitors are coming from, which pages they visit most often, and which of them ultimately become your customers. Live tracking provides its users with the real-time view of what visitors are doing on your website.

These tools make it extremely easy for you to identify your winning products, and the ones, which are less popular. Also, they will help you collect additional data for your already segmented audience, and make it even more precise, i.e. you will know exactly a person of which sex and age prefers your newly designed pink coat. Can it getter any more useful?

3.   A/B Testing

You’ve probably heard how A/B testing is completed once some new application is rolled out and marketing gurus are breaking their heads as to where to place the ‘Purchase’ button to make it look more intuitive. You would be surprised, but the same applies for email marketing.

A header, a greeting message, an image included, its color, emojis, buttons, etc., all of this makes a tremendous impact on the reader’s subconscious decisions, so all of this should be continuously tested until the golden equilibrium is found.

An illustration below shows us a standard A/B testing undertaken on 2 exactly same emails, but including different call to action buttons.

4.   Integrate Multiple Channels

Even though we mentioned in the beginning that clients are being bombarded with dozens of messages on a daily basis through all possible channels, it doesn’t mean that we have to stop doing it – we simply need to do it in a much more efficient, user-friendly, and value-adding way. We have to create an all-around intuitive journey for the user we target.

All of the available tools – FB messenger, SMS, text messages, automated emails, chatbots, landing page pop-ups, etc., all of these must be integrated into one smooth, never-ending user experience. Communication with the client is the key. Client don’t buy ‘what’ you sell, they buy ‘why’ you sell. They buy the story behind the product, its history, its values, its idea, its cause, its vision, and all of this must be coherently communicated via all available means.

5.   Customer Journey

As it has already been mentioned, users buy the story behind the product, which means they are interested in a long-term relationship with the brand. For you as a seller this must mean only 1 thing – focus on creating an unforgettable user journey, from the second he/she steps the foot onto your website and ending with him/her becoming your loyal customer.

While building a perfect customer journey, little things can help along the way, and email marketing workflows provide one of the quickest ways to deliver those goodies to your targeted audience. Here are some examples:

– Welcome series of emails as an introduction to your brand
– Birthday email or SMS on a special day
– Remind them about their purchases left behind with cart recovery emails
– Use shipping confirmation emails to keep them coming back
– Stay on top of their mind by using follow-up emails
– Nudge them if they’ve gone quiet using customer reactivation emails

These are little things, which will surely be appreciated by your loyal customer base. They will help you create a smooth customer journey, add value to your brand’s image, and beat the competition in a long-run.

Nikita Ufimcev

Freelance copywriter for Omnisend with Banking & Finance background. Currently building two start-up projects within Fintech space. Core business values – Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Life Motto – a healthy mind in a healthy body. Add me on Linkedin.