You probably have heard the term ‘email marketing’ many a time since you set up your ecommerce site on Shopify, right? But you have had to admit you don’t really know what it means. Don’t worry you are just experiencing what many new online store business owners go through. Let us reassure you that after you do a quick read of this blog you’ll get the gist of it and you’ll be on to a plan before you finish reading the last para.

What is email marketing?

It is a campaign that is written in an email format that can be sent out automatically to your customer list or database to let your customers know about your latest business news or to  simply sell a new product or inform about a group of merchandise.

How does email marketing make you money?
Some may say if you don’t add email marketing campaigns to your ecommerce sales strategy you may as well throw your online store out the window. Other digital marketing experts go as far as to say email marketing is one of your best assets when it comes to selling your wares over the net. Also, because email marketing has been around a lot longer than social media platforms, the sales you get from the traditional email out to your customers is proven to be more lucrative than the modern ad campaigns that can run on say Facebook and Google, and it doesn’t cost you a dime.

Known as a good way to educate the minds of your customers with knowledge about your business and products, email marketing campaigns can therefore encourage your newly informed customers to linger longer on your website, choose and then buy what they need. Additionally, email marketing can also aid return buyers and bring in some of their friends and family as referred customers.

So, what are the top tips for successful email marketing?

It is all about gathering your customer contact details and putting together a well-researched database. This list or database is literally ‘gold’ and well worth your time, budget allocation and all the effort to build up, maintain and store.

Where short promotional emails or medium-length e-newsletters used to be the way to garner sales from your customers, nowadays, like with everything that is evolving with tech and the internet, there are all sorts of ways of emailing to entice sales and return sales which can be pre-programmed and automatically sent out , so you don’t have to do any of the thinking. 

Another hot tip is to make sure to not over send badly written emails with useless information to your customer database. It’ll only annoy people and get them to unsubscribe and not buy from your online store. And if your customers start complaining about your SPAM emails then your business will get a bad rating on powerful search engines like Google and Gmail will opt to not let your customers receive your emails. Eek!

Klaviyo email marketing platform
One of the well-known email marketing automation platforms that buddies up perfectly to an ecommerce business that uses popular online store platform Shopify (or WooCommerce and Magento etc.), is Klaviyo.

Klaviyo is known to have high-level tools to cultivate clever email marketing campaigns that will not only target and increase your online sales but will also foster and keep your customers loyal to your brand. This superior platform has been developed to integrate effortlessly with your Shopify online store and go full steam ahead without much human effort.

With so many features in place, Klaviyo is able to read data trends from your customers built around their shopping habits and will pick out the right products to sell in your campaigns, which will then convert into sales and expand your business accordingly.

How can you get the most out of Klaviyo?

While you can figure out how to do some of things on Kalviyo yourself, your developer / email marketing expert will also be able to assist you to create and use the best possible email campaigns that will fit your business like a glove and enable you to attract the right customers, keep them appropriately engaged in a timely manner and to keep them on board well into the future.

Your Kalviyo expert can assist you with:

Improving your sales conversion rate

By using Klaviyo’s excellent analytical tools together with analysing data your expert will make the best use of the platform’s email marketing automation functions to increase your stores’ sales conversion rate.

Appropriate content flow
Your expert will help you make use of the ‘flow’ features on Klaviyo that produce targeted content that flows in a sequence that makes sense and keeps your customers informed appropriately and knowingly for when they want to purchase. These are staggered and in sequence automated campaigns which assist in sale increases.

Targeted email marketing campaigns
By analysing the data around your business and applying the findings around how your customers are purchasing on your online store, your expert can produce pertinent campaigns to better online sales.

Looking at your customers’ buying behaviours
Expertly optimising the way your customers engage with your online store by applying   behavioural marketing methods, your expert will be able to send out campaigns containing targeted information featuring the perfect products at the perfect time to the relevant customer.

Building a robust customer database
Your expert will use Klaviyo’s special features and email marketing know how to find and secure the best customers for your ecommerce business.

Producing the best content
By developing the mother of all content strategies, your expert can promote your business in the best possible way so that your online store can rank well with the search engines and hail you an expert on what your are selling to your market.

…and now a few more general email marketing tips

More on well-written content
Try not to use cliched phrases such as ‘Welcome, I’m XX from XX and I am offering you XX’, ‘Look forward to hearing from you soon’ and ‘Thanks for subscribing …XX’. Instead your email campaigns must make sense, flow on from one another and contain interesting information for people to want to read them. Content should include interesting snippets that you write that makes you sound like an expert that is well-researched on your business topic.

Connect with buyers that don’t checkout fully
You’ll certainly boost your sales by setting up an email campaign (or a few) to direct to your ‘nearly’ customers is a clever and targeted way to get them back to clinch the purchase.

Connect with buyers who have been browsing but not buying
Set-up individual emails to visitors who have clicked through to certain products on your website but that haven’t quite click through to make a purchase. Make sure to target the content to be about the product/s they were looking at.

Customer care emails
Develop an email campaign to engage with customers and show your business cares for them. In these you can talk a bit about yourself in relation to your business and life-style, cross-sell and upsell products, insert an intro to an interesting blog, you can ask customers to review your product selection which may increase your sales if they are good ones.

Systematically collect your customers’ contact details
Build up your customer email list by setting up email campaigns to include things like special offers and popovers. These kinds of things entice people to sign up to your email offers and list.

Follow-up campaigns
Make sure you follow up with potential customers you garnered through analysing data etc. There will be come conversions from this old-school sales technique.

Analyse, analyse and analyse all email marketing data
You may need help with this one from your tech expert as it can get a bit scientific.
Send test emails out to a selected demographic group and then track what happened if, for example if they opted in to various prompts. Look at what timings work as well as which structures and headings engage the most produce click-throughs and of course sealed sales at checkout. Make sure you test all sorts of different things and use your developer’s knowledge for more ideas.

The more research you do and the more scientific you can get with your email marketing campaigns in terms of strategy, timeliness, design, data driving and so forth it will totally pay off in an increase in sales and the growth in your ecommerce business.