The ecommerce industry is intense, fast-paced, and certainly competitive. All of the players in the field, regardless of niche, share one goal – to earn money.
There are plenty of tools nowadays on the market which might help you stand out from the competition and boost your revenue. But one, which helps for sure is email marketing automation.
It sounds smart and promising, but it’s nothing without a solid strategy in a beginner’s hands. In today’s article, I’ll outline five must-have marketing automation strategies to help you earn more revenue for your online store.
1. Build a subscriber database
First of all, let’s make it clear: ecommerce is all about customers and their traffic to your ecommerce store.
The most important thing to do when diving into the ocean of ecommerce is to build a database of your potential customers.
You may be wondering how you can build an amazing database of customers from scratch. The answer is very straightforward: collect their emails, and use them later on for your email automation strategies to drive those subscribers to your ecommerce store.
The easiest and the most widely used way of collecting visitors’ emails is to create a pop-up form on your website, asking for the visitor’s name and email address.
Once the visitor clicks that ‘subscribe’ button, the email is captured into your database and the job here is done.
2. Welcome your newly subscribed visitors
Imagine you’ve just arrived at your holiday’s destination, you enter your hotel room, and the first thing you see is a bottle of champagne with a welcoming card waiting for you. What’s your reaction?
Obviously, you are more than happy with this welcoming gesture! You will probably be surprised, but the exactly same thing applies for ecommerce. Once you’ve captured your newly subscribed visitor’s email, the next best thing to do is to send him/her a welcome email with some gift in it.
You don’t have to do it manually obviously, since that’s the whole point of email marketing automation. You simply need to set up a trigger in your email automation tool, which will send a welcome email a few minutes after the visitor has subscribed.
A welcome email is more than just an email, it’s the beginning of your brand’s communication with your potential client. It’s the beginning of their customer journey, so make sure this beginning is as pleasant and smooth as possible.
A welcome gift or sign up incentive, such as a special discount or a ‘free delivery’ coupon, is simply a must these days. Don’t forget to include a ‘call to action’ button in the email, so that the subscriber comes back to your website for another browsing session.
3. Make them reopen their abandoned basket
One of the biggest issues most of the ecommerce stores experience is that visitors abandon their shopping carts. At this point, it’s common knowledge that over 70% of all shopping carts are abandoned for a variety of reasons.
Whatever the reason behind this, marketing gurus across the globe are doing their best to adjust their CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) strategy to pull the customer back to their shopping carts and proceed with shopping.
One of the most popular ways is to send an automated email with a reminder. A recent study showed that an open and click through rates for automated abandoned cart emails are a whopping 46.8% and 10.46% respectively, as well as a 2.35% purchase rate.
While that doesn’t sound like a lot on paper, 2.35% of 70% of potentially lost sales isn’t insignificant.
It doesn’t require any action from the client, and you don’t want to over complicate things at this point – all you want is your client’s peace of mind.
4. Send purchase confirmation
Continuing with the importance of a smooth customer journey, purchase confirmation emails are almost as important as welcoming emails.
Once you’ve taken a customer through the whole purchase journey, beginning with the customer subscribing to your website, browsing through your products, abandoning their cart, returning back to it again, and finally making a purchase.
After all that you definitely want to thank your customer, as well as send them a personalized email with a recap of the purchase details and a confirmation that the item has been dispatched.
5. Collect feedback
The last, but definitely not the least pit stop in the user journey is to collect feedback and ask for publicly available reviews.
Nothing is worse than developing a product or delivering a service based only on your ideas and your imagined user needs. The only way to progress with your business is to listen to the people who actually buy from you and make adjustments according to their feedback.
Another thing is always ask buyers to leave reviews of the products they’ve purchased on your website – reassurance from existing customers is one of the most powerful influencers for new potential clients.
Most often, satisfied customers are more than happy to leave a review, but they might forget, and it’s super simple to send them an automated reminder via email in the post-purchase stage.
Two take-away points? Listen to what feedback people give and always ask them to leave product reviews on your publicly available pages.
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Being able to accompany your customer along their customer journey is just one of the many benefits that email marketing automation can provide. Sending them manually and making sure that your customer receives personalized and timely messages when they need them most is impossible.
But with email marketing automation, you can set these must-have workflows up in advance and merely adjust them as you go, making sure that a customer never slips through the cracks.
Nikita Ufimcev
Freelance copywriter for Omnisend with Banking & Finance background. Business Developer at two emerging start-ups. Core business values – Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Life Motto – a healthy mind in a healthy body. Add me on Linkedin.
