Email Marketing Made Easy: Part 1, Acquisition

Simple ways to reach customers who are ready to buy

Our recent webinar with the email marketing experts at Bronto yielded some great advice on how to drive e-commerce revenue through email marketing campaigns. In fact, it was so comprehensive, we’re doing a three-part blog series series to review each of the key phases within best practice strategies of email marketing — acquisition, conversion, and retention.

Acquisition
In email marketing, acquisition refers to people opting in, or letting you know that they would like to receive email marketing messages from your company. When it comes to valuable marketing, there’s a big difference between someone who knowingly volunteers their email and contact information versus someone who is unwittingly being blasted with messages. That difference lies both in the cost and effort to communicate with them as well as the potential value of converting this visitor into a buyer.

First, to get better perspective, it helps to think about where your traffic is coming from. Ask yourself some strategic questions: “What percent conversion am I seeing when people visit my site? On which pages is the traffic highest? How long are people staying there? What does the email sign-up look like?” And then move specifically into email marketing: “What does our email marketing sign-up look like? In how many places is it present? Is the call to action clear? What is the visibility of our sign-up and is it persistent throughout the site? Should we consider other forms of acquisition like affiliate programs and contests? Should we leverage paid advertising and social media channels for acquisition?”

One of the most effective ways for etailers to acquire new email subscribers is at checkout. This is a fantastic opportunity to leverage checkout emails to grow your list, because post-purchase is when your customers are highly invested in a recent purchase and very motivated to continue to engage with your brand. You can do this through a few different methods.

• Personalized order confirmation email: This shows that the order is complete and includes the specific shipping and tracking number. This is a really good spot to engage customers because they’re interested in knowing that their order is being handled properly. It also represents a smooth jumping off point to migrate customers into being more engaged with your brand. This is a great place to offer guidance and support and build loyalty with your customers from the very beginning. Leveraging your check-out email as a sign-up location is also efficient, because you’re already sending the tracking information so there is little additional implementation time required by you.
• Social media: Growing your mailing list through social media is also effective because — much like a checkout or an order confirmation email — customers are comfortable engaging this way and the migration to email can be smooth and easy. Social media is also a great place to build that trust by offering added value guidance and support. What’s more, social media marketing can be downright inexpensive, if not totally free. Yes, social media can be time consuming, but if you have a focused social media campaign that underscores your other marketing programs, the returns can be significant.
• Pop-ups: Pop-ups, otherwise known as lightboxes, are one of the most powerful acquisition tools out there. While folks can find these graphics somewhat annoying, if this method right for your brand, it’s worth pursuing to grow your email list.
• Incentives: Another very popular acquisition strategy is to include an incentive such as free shipping, a discount, or a giveaway contest for customers who sign up for your email list.

When done with consistency, a solid acquisition program can as much as double your list in a year’s time. When you consider the quality of these sales leads, meaning they want to hear from you and they are already customers, it’s well worth it to spend some time focusing your efforts on finding folks who want to buy.

Up next? Conversion: Getting to that magical moment when a contact becomes a customer.