A marketer’s overall marketing strategy should include email marketing as part of the strategies. Once the strategy for email marketing for building email list is in place, you should start with prioritizing email marketing.
Email marketing campaigns in action
Take the following actions.
Roll out one or more standard email (or newsletter) campaigns. In these email campaigns, the main objective is to encourage users to opt-in. i.e. You should aim to collect their email addresses and any other information that will be useful. Sometimes you need to collect their email addresses along with their first names.
Next is to apply and experiment with email drip campaigns. Start with one email drip campaign. The goal behind is to have these email drip campaigns built up trust with users who have subscribed. Eventually, it is going to drive the subscribers (who have not previously bought anything) into buying for the first time.
The email drip campaigns may even go one step further to engage existing customers, who have already made their first purchases, into buying for the second time, third time, and more.
Review results in the meantime
You should continue the standard email newsletter campaigns and the drip campaigns for a few months. By then you will review the results.
Under normal circumstances, if you have implemented everything correctly according to plan, you should be seeing some positive results. The growth would mostly be gradual.
What to do next?
The next step is to go for advanced email marketing. With the advanced email marketing strategy, you should build targeted campaigns by applying customer behavioral based segmentation. Behavioral-based data may include:
- Some customers may be just more attracted to some specific products.
- A group of specific buyers may always buy items from the same category.
Manually shooting emails in this stage where customer or behavior based segmentation would be too difficult to execute. In this stage, all email marketing should be automated.
Improvement of sales
When the email marketing strategy is executed exactly according to plan, over time you should see improvement in sales i.e. Sales conversion rate.
Most marketers may stop at this point. But this isn’t the end of the conversion funnel. You should go one step further by doing “Follow up”. Follow-up is a simple “touch base” action with your existing customers.
For example, in your database, you would know which customers have previously bought which items. When you dig deeper, some of these customers may be “big buyers”. They have big potential that you should find time to discover. Touching base with them would be a great way to find out about the potential behind these customers. Also, they would be more satisfied with your eCommerce store.