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Email Marketing? It Works.
Did you know that in 2014, 27.3% of all online Black Friday sales were generated through email marketing? Your email marketing campaign can either make or break your yearly sales goals. It’s a big deal! But writing a catchy email isn’t enough to drive eCommerce success: it takes a combination of lead generation, cultivation and smart marketing to do the job.
Interested in supercharging your email marketing campaigns? Let’s dive right in!
1. You Reap What You Sow
Having a clean, engaged list is just as important as writing an engaging email. Building a good email list is a year-long project, and properly branding yourself in your customer’s eyes could take even longer. Even if you have a mind-blowing sale and an awesome email, you can’t expect an amazing response unless you’ve already put effort into marketing during the off-season.
If you want people to buy your products, you start building the relationship way before the selling season begins.
This is where branding comes into play. You want to build a list of leads during the off-season and connect with them so that they come back to you when it’s time to sell. Think of how easy it would be to sell $20 worth of cookies to your friends. Now think of how much harder it would be to sell $20 worth of cookies to strangers on the street. The same logic applies to selling during the holiday season: if they don’t know you, they’re not buying from you. Keep in touch with your customers through social media to build a strong following!
2. Optimize For Sales, Not Views
What are you aiming for with your marketing campaign?
There’s a common misconception that “more is better” when it comes to advertising. Not so. In sales, quality beats quantity when it comes to lead generation. Would you rather have 1,000 leads where 10% convert to a sale, or 3,000 leads where only 2% convert to a sale?
Obviously you’d rather have 100 sales from 1,000 leads, especially if it took you 3x more effort to drive 60 sales from 3,000 leads! Think of this logic when you’re building your marketing campaigns. There are 2 common metrics that marketers use in their digital marketing campaigns:
- CPM – Cost Per Mile – “You pay for every thousand “views” on the ad”
- CPC – Cost Per Click – “You pay for each individual “click” on the ad.”
You should always optimize for clicks because it indicates interest. Let me tell you a (not-so-secret) secret. Views are overrated. There may have been a time when impressions were important, but not in this day and age when you see an ad literally everywhere you look. So why would you want to promote your product to half-hearted individuals who are numb to your marketing?
Here’s a better idea. Stop selling products and start making fans (and I don’t mean the ones that keep you cool during the summer). Keep your fans interested all year long, and convert them to customers when the selling season begins.
3. Don’t “Promote.” Cultivate Instead.
Your marketing budget goes a long way when you’re using it to cultivate. The “Pareto Principle” indicates that 20% of your fans make up 80% of your revenue. So stop trying to “build your list” during the selling season, and work on converting fans instead! Here are 2 ways to do just that:
- Remarketing – Using a tracking pixel on your website, you can “retarget” prior visitors to your website. Since it takes several points of contact to lead to a sale, a solid remarketing campaign can work wonders in increasing your conversion rate.
- Upsells – You already have a customer in front of you, ready and willing to purchase. Why not entice them to buy another item? Find services and products that “match” enough other and promote them alongside each other whenever you can. You’re selling winter jackets? Promote scarves on the same page? Or better yet, target them with remarketing ads!
- Loyalty Rewards – Ideally, you want a customer to purchase not only once, but many times from your store. How do you do that? By offering rewards! Issue gift certificates and loyalty discounts to entice customers to purchase from you again and again.
A word of caution going into December: you’re not simply competing with your competitors during the holiday season. We’re entering the busiest retail season of the year, and you’re competing with everyone that’s sending an email to your customer’s inbox.
Now, more than ever, you need to #ThinkFresh. A simple email isn’t enough. You need to stay in contact with your fans, keep them engaged and promote to them in witty and interesting ways in order to stay relevant during the holiday season.
We hope you found some golden nuggets of information while reading this post! If you like what you’ve read, drop us a comment on Facebook or visit us at our marketing agency in downtown Vancouver! We always have chocolate.