Email marketing is routinely overlooked by clients, a common reason being that businesses simply don’t know what to do with the customer data they have collected and are short on ideas.
I’m going to cut to the chase in this article and as such am making the assumption that you already have a customer email database, privacy policy in place and email marketing service set up. If this isn’t the case, don’t worry, i’ll be covering the basics of getting started with email marketing very soon, and i’ve also included some links further on in this article to a handful of the best email marketing service providers i’ve used. In another forthcoming article I will also be covering the things you need to take into account when planning and designing an email marketing campaign.
7 Email Marketing Ideas You Can Use Right Now!
Email marketing can be highly effective no matter what sector you are in, and can work just as well for B2B companies as it does for B2C companies. For consumer focused eCommerce websites, there are few more effective marketing activities and regular email marketing sales promotions and campaigns can help you to increase sales revenue. In my experience, regular weekly email campaigns have the potential to generate many thousands of pounds in sales revenue and what company doesn’t want to achieve that?
“Every eCommerce business should be regularly using email marketing!”
So let’s look at some of the benefits to be had from email marketing, followed by 7 practical ‘do-right-now’ ideas that you can use.
Some of the benefits of email marketing
- Connect directly with your customers allowing you to Inform them about new products, services or news
- It can bring froward a planned purchase
- Email marketing can help to positively influence a buying decision
- It can help to reinforce positive brand perception
- Puts you at the forefront of the customers mind
- By segmenting your email data you can closely target customers with highly relevant content
- Using sales and voucher promotion you can drive sales
As a word of caution, I would say beware of buying in data; I always urge clients to grow their mailing list organically whenever possible. Doing it this way will provide you with a higher success rate; you’ll get fewer unsubscribes and higher open and click through rates. Also, please make sure you are using a reputable service. Don’t whatever you do, attempt to bulk email all of your clients using your regular email account. Not only does a massive CC list look highly unprofessional, but your email service provider will take a very dim view of this, leading to penalties like a total ban.
A few email providers I can recommend are: www.sureshotemail.co.uk, www.constantcontact.com, www.mailchimp.com and www.icontact.com. Whilst there are countless other providers, these 4 are services I’ve used in the past and have been happy with. Ok, on with the good stuff, here are 7 things that you can do right now!
7 email marketing ideas
- Tell your customers about your blog, highlight a recent article and encourage them to follow you on social media
- Send an automatically scheduled courtesy email. Schedule delivery to a customer a few days after they order or make an enquiry, and give them your customer service details and ask if they need any further assistance
- Round up of all of your latest or hottest products and present them in an email. For service companies, tell them about new services you offer
- Send an email to your customers to tell them about your latest reviews or customer testimonials and encourage them to leave a review
- Send out a ‘great reasons to shop with/use us’ email, highlighting your USPs and outlining your excellent customer service
- Send out a voucher that gives free P&P for a limited period, gives a % discount off an order of a certain value or a limited time discount on one of your services
- Weekly or monthly special offers – a selected group of products all reduced in price for a short period of time (eg. a week, or a flash sale for 48 hours)
Remember, whatever you do, make sure you act strategically and understand what it is you want to achieve first before you do anything. Keep your email focused (don’t bombard with too many messages) and ensure you have clear calls to action. Now, go forth and be epic!
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