Email marketing is the fastest way to accelerate your retail business. It is the best way to encourage sales, showcase your products, and build relationships with new and existing customers that pay off over time.
What is an Email Marketing Strategy?
An email marketing strategy refers to the action plan that businesses follow to reach potential customers and convert them into paying customers through email. An email marketing strategy includes customer acquisition and retention tactics to sell, educate, and build loyalty with a subscriber list.
Retailers can use email marketing to do the following:
- Stay in touch with customers
- Provide information about new products
- Send post-purchase messages, such as invoices
- Collect feedback from shoppers
Retailers can leverage email marketing and achieve real results through segmentation, personalization, interactive emails, and much more.
Email is also one of the most profitable channels for retailers. According to data from Emarsys, 81% of small businesses rely on email as a primary channel for customer acquisition, and 80% for customer retention.
There may be a lot of hype around social media, likes, and shares, but research shows that email outperforms channels like social media and organic search. Not because Instagram isn’t important for your business, but if you’re looking for an easy and direct way to reach people, email is your best strategy.
Benefits of Email Marketing for Retailers
There’s no doubt that email is effective for any type of business, but here are reasons why it benefits retailers:
- Increased sales and return on investment (ROI)
- Building stronger relationships with customers
- Owning your own marketing channel
- Connecting with customers via email
Increased sales and return on investment (ROI): The number of marketing emails is expected to reach 4.3 billion users in 2023, compared to 3.9 billion in 2019. This indicates that email marketing is an opportunity not to be missed. Due to email’s popularity, the return on investment (ROI) is very high. For every dollar spent on email marketing, email marketing generates an average of $42 in return on investment.
Building stronger relationships with customers: Social media networks and search engines can help customers find your business online, but email is the best way to nurture and enhance long-term relationships. Email gives you a direct communication channel with your customer base, open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The better the customer experience, the happier the customers.
Owning a marketing channel: Email is a digital marketing channel that you own. This means you control the content and distribution. There is no central entity that can alter an algorithm and disrupt your strategy. Organic reach on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram continues to decline, according to the latest statistics. Ranking in search is also getting harder, with an increase in searches without clicks and ads. Simply put, if your content isn’t backed by advertising dollars on those channels, fewer people will see it.
Connecting with customers via email: From templates to tracking, email provides you with the tools to build lasting relationships with customers. Without any need for expertise, you’ll look like a pro from the start. Try email on Shopify.
Types of Email Campaigns
Now that we know the benefits of email for retailers, let’s take a look at the types of email campaigns you can send:
Newsletters
Newsletters
Email newsletters are a type of campaign sent to a list of subscribers. They are graphical messages that people opt into from your brand. They are sent regularly, whether that is every two weeks, monthly, or quarterly.
These newsletters are great because they keep you top of mind. They contain content such as guides, blog articles, news, reviews, and recommendations. You can use them to entertain subscribers by sending great content or delight them by sending discounts for certain promotions.
Welcome Messages
A welcome message is the first message you send to a user after they join your subscriber list. A well-crafted welcome message is very important, as it is often the first impression consumers have of your brand.
But welcome messages also help increase return on investment: they generate up to 320% more revenue than other messages, according to Invesp. Even if you don’t sell online, this increased engagement with welcome messages means they are a perfect platform to expand the invitation to visit your store.
Product Announcements
A product announcement message is a message sent to inform subscribers about new or changing products in your store. Retailers send these messages to promote upcoming products or events.
A well-crafted announcement message can build awareness of new products and increase sales in your store. They are usually part of an automated email campaign. For example, you might send a series of announcement messages in the following order: a “sneak peek” message two weeks before the launch date, an announcement message two or three days before the launch, and an official release message on launch day.
Offers and Promotions
For our purposes, we will talk about offers, promotions, sales, and other store campaigns that you share with your audience using email. These offers can be promotional codes, free gifts, early access, discounts, or anything else you use to drive sales.
Overstock offers their customers expiring coupons. “You have a coupon for 24 hours! Use it before it disappears!” was the subject line of a recent campaign I received:
Post-Purchase Messages
Post-purchase messages are more than just email receipts. They can include effective drip email campaigns like helpful content to make the most of the purchase, recommendations for related products, or even requests for product feedback.
Joel Debus, Email Marketing Director at Knowledge to Practice, says retailers can use post-purchase drip email campaigns to highlight products that users expressed interest in, as well as complementary products.
Here’s how Amazon makes it easy for users to rate and review products:
It has a brick-and-mortar store that has effective drip email campaigns. Since it sells “expiring” products, it has learned when the average product’s lifespan ends and set up automated emails to remind customers to restock after a specified period.
Abandoned Cart
Think about all the times you’ve added items to your online shopping cart in your life. Did you purchase every product each time? If not, you probably received some emails from the brand to return to checkout. These messages, known as abandoned cart messages in eCommerce, are used to bring people back to the checkout to purchase items in their shopping cart. Since over 88% of online orders are abandoned, these messages are a great way to recover lost revenue for your online store. Klaviyo estimates that a single abandoned cart message can earn up to $5.81 per recipient, on average.
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The American giant clothing retailer American Giant uses creative abandoned cart emails to engage shoppers and complete sales. Recipients can see the items they’ve left behind and have the option to reach out to support if they have any questions. When someone clicks on the “Shop Now” button, they are taken to checkout to finalize their purchase.
Event Promotion
If you are hosting in-store events, registration and attendance give you two new events to plan email campaigns around. This can be beneficial not only to ensure that registered attendees show up for the event but also to strengthen the customer relationship with the brand.
Mike’s Camera uses Eventbrite to manage event registrations. The store uses the platform to send a reminder email campaign to users about the event, providing details like date, time, and location.
You can take this a step further by creating an automated email outside of Eventbrite. You can include your branding and high-quality images of your store and/or product recommendations. In this case, Mike’s Camera might include a link to an article on essential camera accessories for beginner photographers, which will enhance their products. This is one way to improve your event-related email campaigns.
Seasonal Campaigns
Seasonal email campaigns are a fun way to engage with customers during national events. If your first thought is Christmas or Black Friday, you are correct. These are the times when you are most likely to see an increase in sales. But you can also send these messages for other events and seasons throughout the year.
Let’s take the example of the sportswear retailer Protest. The following message showcases new fall products to subscribers. It uses high-quality images, with real people using Protest products in context, encouraging readers to shop for the new items.
Birthdays/Special Occasions
Customer special events provide great reasons to offer discounts to your customers. Additionally, they are personal in that they acknowledge their birthday or strengthen your relationship by celebrating their anniversary of being a customer. This is how Nike uses drip email campaigns to personalize birthday messages:
Instead of sending a simple email wishing customers a happy birthday, Nike gifts customers with a unique code for a 25% discount on a product. Remember to provide value to your customers; don’t just wish them a happy birthday for the sake of it.
Email Marketing Tips for Retailers
In summary, what is the goal of email marketing for retailers? If you said building customer relationships and driving sales, you are correct. If you want to run the above email campaigns, keep the following tips in mind:
Run Automated Campaigns
Email automation allows you to send targeted messages at specific times or based on certain actions, such as signing up or making a purchase. Retailers use these drip email campaigns to build personal relationships with existing and new customers.
It is the most efficient way to do email marketing because you can “set it and forget it” while keeping your brand top of mind. Every time a drip email campaign is sent, it comes from a set of pre-written emails. You will never need to manually write or send a message. You can even customize it with your subscribers’ names and relevant messages and tailored deals for each subscriber, making each email more meaningful.
Some drip email campaigns you should include are:
- Welcome messages, which introduce new subscribers to the brand
- Lead nurturing messages, which showcase top sales for specific customer segments
- …
- The discount, which sends deals to people who haven’t made a purchase decision yet
- Cart abandonment messages, which send friendly reminders to shoppers who have left items in their shopping cart
- Transactional messages like order confirmation and shipping updates to give customers reassurance and set expectations for delivery
- Customer recovery messages, which target subscribers who have not been active with your brand
Email automation marketing may seem complicated, but with the right tools in place, you can schedule campaigns in no time and see more revenue for your business. Shopify Email provides ready-made templates for your campaigns – you can send beautiful, professional emails that get results.
Creating Customer Segments
Many merchants treat their email list as a single general group. It’s a large list that receives the same content from the brand. For this reason, a lot of these emails end up in the trash.
Segmentation refers to dividing email subscribers into smaller groups based on specific criteria. It is often used as a personalization tactic to send more relevant messages. You can segment subscribers based on geographic location, interests, purchase history, customer status, and more.
Here are some key segments you can create:
- Demographics. This includes traits like age, gender, location, and more. For example, if you sell body care products, you would benefit from knowing your subscriber’s gender. This can help you send relevant soap or cream recommendations.
- Sign-up source. This refers to segmenting subscribers based on how they were added to your email list. If someone joined in-store or at an event, you might want to send a follow-up discount for online shopping.
- Interests and preferences. This is a powerful segmentation strategy. You will need to ask customers what their interests are related to your products. Then, you can send highly targeted campaigns based on their answers.
- Purchase history. Looks at the customer’s previous purchases. You can send different messages to this group, such as discounts, product recommendations, or replenishment. Keeping your campaigns fresh and relevant leads to lower unsubscribe rates and increased purchase rates.
- Inactivity. This segment targets people who have not interacted with your brand. If repeat customers haven’t bought anything for a period, you can automatically follow up with them to encourage a sale.
Creating these segments requires good tracking of customers throughout your business. The Shopify POS system syncs with your in-store orders and online customer profiles. You can use this data to build detailed customer segments and send relevant campaigns to people, regardless of where they interact with your business.
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Source: https://www.shopify.com/retail/email-marketing-retail
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