5 Best Practices For Keeping eCommerce Email Marketing Relevant

Email marketing has the potential to be a powerful tool, but you have to get people to actually open your emails. Otherwise, your carefully crafted missives will end up in junk or trash folders faster than you can say “click-through rates.” Does the meteoric rise of social media mean emails are a medium of the past? Actually, the opposite is true. A diversified marketing strategy is the best way to engage with shoppers at different points in their buying journey based on their habits and relationship with your brand.

Here are five best practices for keeping eCommerce email marketing relevant in this day and age. After all, Facebook may have two billion active monthly users, but Gmail has over one billion. If you play your cards right, you’ll be able to tap into a portion of that figure to develop customer relationships and drive traffic to your website.

Refine Your Email Lists

At first glance, bigger looks better when it comes to email lists. But if your recipients are failing to actually engage with your content, you’re just hurting your domain reputation and alienating consumers. It’s a better practice to send emails to those who actually want to receive them.

First, only send to shoppers who actively signed up for your email list. “Cold emailing” or buying email lists is a great way to earn a one-way ticket to the “spam” folder and tarnish your reputation. Secondly, take time every few months to unsubscribe non-engaged users from your list. This way, you’ll diminish the graymail you’re sending (also known as the email shoppers technically signed up for but have ignored since). When in doubt, favor quality over quantity. Your email metrics are more important than your ego.

Switch Up Calls To Action

Although all your emails have the same overarching goals aimed at driving sales and branding, each will take a different approach. It all depends on the call to action (CTA) you choose. One week you could be asking shoppers to redeem a 10 percent off coupon on your website; the next you may try driving them to your blog for engaging long form content via email. Take a CTA inventory for more effective goal setting, and keep track of what works over time.

Analyze Open Rate

When you’re deciding how to make an ecommerce website, user experience wins out above all. If it fails to do so, customers leave (or refuse to engage in the first place). When you’re looking at how to craft emails, the same principle applies. One of the best ways to analyze the success of your efforts is to look at open rates. What benchmark should you aim for? According to MailChimp, the average open rate for eCommerce emails is 16.75 percent. The Click-Through Rate (CTR) is much lower, around 2.3 percent. If your numbers are lower than these benchmarks, consider the quality of your emails. This includes subject lines, body copy, CTAs and links.

Personalize Subject Lines

Your first CTA is actually your subject line. After all, an interested party can only act after they open an email. Even the simple practice of including someone’s name in the subject line can increase open rates by 42 percent. Just make sure you collect shoppers’ first names when they sign up for your email list. Greet them again by name in your opening salutation and voila, you’ve personalized your electronic communications.

Find Your Primetime

Email timing can be approached from many points of view. Traditionally, Tuesdays and Thursdays yield the best results for email opens. You may want to send out your informational emails on Monday, as people getting back in the swing of their workflows may be looking at their inbox with fresh eyes during this time. Ultimately, your timing depends on your industry and past successes.

With these five best practices for keeping ecommerce email marketing relevant, you’ll be able to tap into an inexpensive way to brand build and drive conversions.