10 E-Commerce Email Marketing Tips to Boost Your Online Sales
Let’s have a look at how email marketing can help your e-commerce business, how to get subscribers on your list and what to keep in mind for success.
Why Bother with Email Marketing?
Did you know, you have a far higher likelihood of having people see, open, and click on your email newsletter than you do, having them see your posts on social media.
Think about it, how many emails do you get every day? Around 50 or even 100? That’s still lower than the hundreds of posts you’ve likely seen, interacted with or just scrolled past in one day.
Plus, with social media, you have no real ownership of your followers, which means the platform could change its policies and the reach your posts have at any time.
Having people on your email list allows you more control, and the level of communication is entirely up to you.
Let’s get started with the 10 tips to follow to ensure you’re on the right track with your email marketing.
1. Get Subscribers to Join Your List
The first step is to think of at least one main offering that will encourage your website visitors to sign up to your list.
For e-commerce businesses with is typically a percentage or fixed coupon discount. It could be a discount off your bestseller, a particular shop category or sitewide.
However, sometimes offering a discount won’t be enticing enough. For example, if you sell low priced products such as knitting patterns or nursery wall art printables. In which case, a free guide, workbook, ebook or sample digital product could work much better for you.
Whatever you would like to offer them, make sure it is something you think your audience would really love or need. If it isn’t then you will see very few people signing up. You have to know your target audience and offer them something very valuable.
2. Make Sign-up Forms Easy to Find
You can include your forms in several different areas on your website. Here are where I recommend you include them:
- Featured in the middle of your homepage.
- On the sidebars or footer of your website.
- On a separate landing page for easy sharing on social media.
- Via a small form within your blog posts.
Clean and simple forms are better than long, messy forms with too much info.
Use catchy titles and encouraging and welcoming language in the description. Make them feel excited to sign up!
3. Regularly Promote Your Newsletter
Remember to regularly post and promote your newsletter on social media inviting people to sign up.
You can post the sign-up link to Facebook and on Instagram on your stories using the link feature and your bio links page or Linktree page for example.
You can also add a further call to action at the bottom of posts. For example, you could say something like, “join my email list for 15% off (product name) today!”
4. Follow All Necessary Laws
Even though you’re emailing subscribers, you still need to watch out for CAN-SPAM laws, rules and regulations. Make sure you have a clear “unsubscribe” button that provides people with an easy way to opt-out.
5. Give Subscribers a Proper Welcome
Now that you’ve got people signing up – don’t just leave them hanging!
At this stage, it’s so important to properly welcome your subscribers to your online community, introduce them to the various aspects of your brand, yourself and the products you sell.
To do this you will have to set up an automated sequence of emails that are delivered to your new subscribers over a few days from after they’ve signed up.
If you’d like to learn more have a read of these email welcome sequence ideas which will give you some great tips on what to include and how to structure your welcome sequence emails.
6. Subject Lines
It’s recommended you should spend more time on your subject line than the actual content of your email! this is because ultimately it doesn’t matter what you put in your emails if nobody opens them.
Use this free tool to check your subject lines before sending your broadcast! Visit: Email Subject Line Tester. You’ll be amazed at how quickly you get better at writing them!
Want some inspiration? Download my Subject Lines That Get Your Emails Opened free guide.
7. Give Value
When you write your emails about your products, it’s important to focus on the main benefits or transformations that your products provide.
The transformation is what they really care about and not so much the product features. For example, if you sell natural soap you could talk about how its properties can help clear up bad skin allowing your customers to look and feel so much better.
Another way to give value is with educational content. You can include how-to guides or links to tutorials and helpful videos.
Sometimes this doesn’t even need to be your own content. For example, if you sell pet accessories, maybe you could share a video made by a pet food company about nutrition or a dog trainers blog post about 3 games to play indoors in bad weather.
The last way to ensure you’re giving real value is to actually ask your subscribers what they want to hear from you. You could ask them to simply reply to the email or fill out a quick online poll.
If you keep these tips in mind you’ll be able to provide a steady stream of value to your subscribers to keep them engaged and thinking about your business on a regular basis.
8. Reward with Exclusive Offers
After your first few emails, you should be sharing a mixture of promotional emails and helpful value giving information.
However, you can also mix up the kinds of promotions you offer too. Here are some examples:
- 15% off site wide
- 70% off clearance items
- Free shipping on all products
- Get $15 off every $60 spent
- Order a ____ and get a free gift
- Buy 2 get a 3rd free
- Today only – get 50% off
- Save with our special bundles
Promotional emails can be your easiest method of generating revenue, encouraging repeat buyers and boosting your income in periods of slow sales.
9. Have a Call to Action
Have a clear and concise call to action for each email. Tell the people directly what they need to do and how fast they need to do it.
Most of the time you might use ‘shop now’ or ‘buy now’ and sometimes for blog posts and event updates you would use something like ‘learn more.’
10. Check and Test Each Email
Check the links work! How many times have you seen one of those “oops here’s the right link” emails? Sometimes used as a spammy marketing tactic (please don’t do this) but a lot of the time it’s a genuine mistake. So send it to yourself, and click on every link before you send it out to your subscribers.
The Key to Email Marketing Success
Building your email list can be hard at first but like any investment, well worth the time and work. It will help you build a loyal audience that buys from you again and again. The key to success here is consistency, reviewing your data, improving where possible and ultimately passion for your business!
