Before passing to why Email Marketing is one of the biggest channels for E-commerce, let’s get this out of the way first:
The topic for one of the most exciting roundtables in the E-commerce Experience Event last week was: Does Email Marketing Works or Not? Basically, is Email Marketing Dead?
Yeap. You’ve read it right. It’s still around. And it will keep being used for many years to come, I’m sure.
Nuno Almeida (business consultant) moderated the roundtable with Paulo Vivas (digital director of Delta Cafés), Alexandre Correia (CEO at Dinamize) and Pedro Pinto (E-commerce Business Director at Sonae MC) around this topic.
And what have they said about Email Marketing as a channel for their E-commerce goals?
What we would expect, if not more. Email Marketing has evolved into not only a mass emailing direct marketing channel but also as an Automation machine.
The speakers were all in line with the concept that Email Marketing is a crucial channel to be as personal as a brand can be when dealing with a mass audience, yet individually engaged.
From an E-commerce perspective, getting new clients can be very expensive. Because you need to bring traffic into your site using a myriad of channels and ads, and very rarely you can have a purchase on that first visit. So, alongside other strategies like re-targeting campaigns, Email Marketing can be the perfect instrument to nurture these visitors into future buyers.
Another concept that they elevated in the discussion was a metric that most e-commerce brands don’t consider while investing in getting an audience. That metric is the LTV (Lifetime Value of the Customer).
Focus on the Lifetime Value of your E-commerce Customer
The math is simple. If you have helpful analytics of all the activity on your e-commerce site, you might already know the percentage of new email subscribers that have made a purchase. Then, it would help if you made a sum of the average time a customer keeps buying from your brand. With those values at hand, you can define an acceptable cost to have a subscriber because you’re going to have profit in the medium-long term.
Most marketers fail because they only focus on the immediate return, which is very difficult for a first-time buyer. Unless the brand is already very well recognized and has an excellent reputation behind it, the chances to revert into an immediate buy-in E-commerce are very slim.
That’s why you must focus on increasing your audience in all channels, and email marketing is a perfect way to pass the brand’s values, product launches, promotions, etc.
One piece of advice they also wanted to share, and it’s never enough to stress out, is that email is multi-device compatible. It means that you should think of every email as a responsive HTML that will render in several screen resolutions. Email is the ultimate app. Every device on the planet has an email application or support for checking emails. So use it for your E-commerce.
Subject lines, people. It’s a continuous discussion that subject lines should represent 60 to 80% of your time designing a campaign. However, how many of us really pay attention to this significant part of the message? In E-commerce, the subject lines are even more critical to create a decisive influence for people to engage with the products displayed.
For last, it’s important to point out that we live in an age where the necessary technology to connect the different access points of a customer is accessible to anyone. With just a small tutorial or indications, you can start automatizing your email marketing activities in a way that lets the machine do all the work for you while you sleep.
Or, you can also make an intelligent move like hiring a team of experts to run it for you. 😉
Summarizing the roundtable conclusion was that Email Marketing is far from its death. It’s alive and kicking the results in E-commerce and all the other sectors.
Tell us, what strategies have you implemented on your e-commerce store using email marketing?