Email Marketing forE-commerce Businesses

How to use Email Marketing to win “Customers for Life”

Scenarios where Email will come handy in E-commerce Businesses

● Welcome Emails

● Customer Retention

● Complaints Handling

● Cart abandonment

● Customer feedback

Welcome Emails:

First impression stays forever. Welcome Emails can be the first impression of your business, as it is the first conversation of your brand with the customer, so you better make it impressive! Send them a heart whelming welcome email as soon as they subscribe or get connected with your business.

Whom to send Welcome Emails:● Email to Newsletter Subscribers:

Send a welcome letter to your site visitors who shows interest in your product or services & subscribe themselves for your monthly or weekly newsletter to get your latest updates.

● Email to new Sign-ups:

Get connected with your site visitor in no time who made his/her account by signing-up on your website. Send them a welcome email with thanksgiving message for their successful sign-up.

● Email to First Time Purchaser:

Acknowledge and thanks your customer for their first successful purchase. This will make them feel special. Encourage them to make the next purchase with some sales promotion or brand loyalty offer.

Contd..

Things to be taken care of before writing welcome emails:

● Build trust with transparency.● Use clear subject line.● Use personalization.● Use clear call to action.● Try to bring the engagement on social media.● Provide option to unsubscription.

Customer Retention Emails:

Customers, undoubtedly are the greatest assets to any brand.Customer retention refers to all those efforts by a brand to retain customers and ensure their loyalty.

How Email helps in Customer retention:● Email to stay in contact with customers personally:

Send emails to your customers to stay in contact with them personally. This can be a birthday wishing emails, anniversary emails or a reminder emails.

● Email to customers who are dormant:

Pitch your customers with new products/features. You can leverage the use of images and video in email here. Discounts and offer emails are also effective in bringing back some old customers who left you for good.

Contd...● Customer delight Emails:

Competition Pushes brands a step ahead of the satisfactory level of customer experience, if they are not delighted with your service then it is an opportunity for competitors to pitch.Customer delight can be achieved by giving some extra benefits to customers which they don’t expect, thereby enhancing loyalty. Credit vouchers, extra discounts,free gifts are some examples.

Tips for making awesome customer retention emails:

● Always focus on relevancy.● Try new formats with high quality.● Polished content.● Think about mobile users.● Surprise & Delight Your Customers.● Offer a Discount or Credit to Return.● Implement Right Place, Right Product, Right Time Emails.

Handling complaints:Whenever a consumer or a customer complaints; it’s an expression of dissatisfaction with the product or service a particular organization offers. Handling your customer’s complaint is a process to be followed not to lose your customer & make them feel special as well a valuable.

How to handle complaints via Email:● Complaint acknowledgement emails:

These emails should communicate that you are listening to them and they are important to your business.

● Apology emails:

The primary purpose of these emails should be to placate the pain of the customer and to assuage them. Assurance about taking care of their issue should be given,if possible with a deadline or time frame.

Contd..● Complaint resolution Email:

These ones are not easy to send because you need to actually resolve the issue before sending these emails. These emails should summarise the whole issue and should inform the resolution worked out by the brand.

It would be a cherry on top if you could give out some extra benefit to compensate the bad experience.

How to handle Customer complaints via email ?● Read the customer’s email in its entirety.● Thank them for their complaint / Open your email with “Thank you.”● Apologize for the happening.● Explain your customer why or how the problem happened.● Offer compensation like discount, credit return etc. (if applicable).● Respond as quickly as possible.● Always maintain the politeness throughout the conversation.

Cart Abandonment:

Cart abandonment or Shopping cart abandonment generally refers to the site visitors who add the product or items to their online shopping cart but exit without making any purchase.

How Email helps in reducing Cart Abandonment ?● Reminder Emails:

Reminder email should remind your customer about their cart. The product or service abandoned by the customer should be highlighted because it had somehow managed to interest the customer though it lost halfway being sold.

● Special offer emails:

Special offer emails should come ideally after some reminder emails. It is the next marketing step by the brand to push its abandoned product. A sense of urgency should be created using these emails

Contd...● Product promotion:

These emails should promote similar products or variants which the customer abandoned.

How to create great cart abandonment emails ?● Timing is essential so develop your email schedule.● Get your subject line right - make it obvious in the subject line what the email

is about.● Include Images of Abandoned Items - Remind them of what they’ve left

behind.● Tempt them back with related items, Offer a Discount or Include Guarantee.● Include customer reviews.

Customer Feedback:A customer feedback or review is a review directly from the customer about the satisfaction or dissatisfaction they feel for the product or service they purchased. Customer feedback is the most important for any organization to understand their customers needs & preferences & to improve themselves to meet customers expectations.

How Email helps to collect Customer’s Feedback ?● Survey Emails:

These emails will extract the data from market which would be analysed by the firm. It’s quite obvious that not many of your customers would consider investing time in surveys unless there is some great motivation. So the motivation factor should be in email.

● Feedback Emails / Review Emails:

These emails have two purposes to serve. First of all the customer would be happy about the fact that the company is prompt in knowing their experience. Another purpose is that it is vital for the brands to get customer feedback and work on that.

Contd..

● Social Listening:

Social listening takes it a step ahead where the email prompts the customer to engage with the brand on social media. You can ask the customer to take part in contests or polls you are running on social media pages or at least follow you. This is a very risky endeavor as when it comes to reviews on social media, it is public and brands have no control over it. So you better ask a happy customer for a social media review.

How to create Customer Feedback Email ?● Stick to a simple & focused design.● Use personalization.● Explain them why you want their input.● Include a clear call to action.

Recommended Email Marketing Tools:Email marketing domain is a red ocean nowadays. Choosing the right service provider may be an onerous task. Best tools which can be used for email marketing are:

● Benchmark Email● Aweber● Constant Contact

Benchmark EmailBenchmark email is our first recommendation and it has a clear edge in the competition because of its following factors:

● Free plan with pro plan features;● Easy to use platform;● Hundreds of pro-designed email templates;● Salient features like Drag & Drop editor;● Customizable email surveys and Web polls;

Contd...● Google analytics-enhanced customer tracking;● World maps of subscribers;● On-the-nose email campaign reports;● Apps & Integrations;● Customer support.

Aweber

Aweber is the second email marketing service provider we are going to talk about. Here are the factors because of which we count Aweber in this list of ESP’s:

● Autoresponder;● Sign-up Forms;● Email Newsletters;● Email Deliverability Rates;● RSS to Email;● Email Marketing Tracking.

Constant ContactConstant contact is one of the famous brand among the email marketing service providers. The reason why we recommend Constant Contact to use is because of the following factors:

● Customizable Templates● Easy Autoresponder● Contact Management● Email Tracking● Customer Support