Generic Newsletter Vs. Targeted Emails — What’s best for eCommerce?

Published in

J2Store

10 min readApr 11, 2018

Hey, eCommie! Are you doing your email marketing through newsletters? Great. But, the real question is this — What results do you expect from the newsletters you send out? If you’re expecting immediate sales, you may be doing it wrong.

Newsletters are for sharing valuable information to your readers and is part of building brand trust among the readers. The word newsletter itself says “News” in the form of a letter, and so it is informational in nature, and generally sent to all the recipients in your mailing list.

But if you are more leaned towards generating sales and ROI (eCommerce is exactly that, duh!), it’s time to re-strategize.

What you actually need to send is the targeted emails, and not generic newsletters. However, neglecting newsletters altogether is not a great idea either. I will get to that later in the post. For now, let’s understand in depth what the newsletters and targeted emails actually mean.

Newsletter Vs. Targeted Email

For an average reader, every email that arrives in their inbox is just an email. They do not care if it’s called a newsletter or a promotional email or a transactional email or retention email. However, if you want your email to reach their inbox and give some results, you’d better know the difference.

So, if you are having questions like “What is the fuss about having two different terms for an email?” or “Is it all about what we call it?”, then shake them off right now and take a look at a few contrasts between a newsletter and a targeted sales email.

Informational in nature
Needs creative content based on your industry / market
Aims at brand building and reader engagement
Indirect marketing and does not result in immediate sales
Mass target, less conversion, hence lower revenue

Targeted Email

Pretty direct and precise
Content is mostly promotional and focuses on product / service
Aims at striking a deal
Direct marketing for sales
Niche target, more conversion, hence higher revenue

Examples of Newsletters and Promotional Emails

Here’s an example of how a newsletter generally looks:

The above image is of a newsletter from the Better Humans publication on Medium delivered to my inbox. It’s a compilation of some of the latest posts from the publication. Medium calls it a letter, and honestly, that is what actually a newsletter is.

A letter with information.

Given that Medium itself is a knowledge sharing platform, one obviously cannot expect a sales email from Medium. So, here is a newsletter I receive from a tech platform called TechGig.

This newsletter is a sum of useful content about technology from around the web. News again, isn’t it?

And here’s a promotional email from the same TechGig guys asking me to participate in one of their technical contests.

Note: The email addresses of the two mails are different too — news and promotions. This is an indicator that they do not mix up newsletters and promotional emails. Hence there is a high chance that they track the metrics of the promotional emails.

Though we don’t know if it is a targeted email sent to a specific group (or just me) or if it is a non-targeted promotional email, it’s clear that their newsletters are different from their promotional emails. And that is the point that drives home here.

Newsletter focuses on news, and direct targeted sales email focuses on sales.
(I just read that out loud and found it ridiculously obvious. We always miss the obvious, don’t we?)

Now you know how a newsletter differs from a targeted email technically. At this point, if you are wondering what this inference has to do with eCommerce, that’s what we are going to talk about next.

Key Takeaway:
1. Newsletters and promotional emails are two different things.
2. Newsletters are not for making sales, targeted emails are.
3. Expecting revenue from newsletters is unrealistic.

Why Generic Newsletters Are Not Enough For eCommerce?

As I mentioned in the beginning of the post, if you are looking to improve sales and are expecting that your investment pays off, you must have understood by now that newsletters are not the way to go. They are generic mails.

Newsletters are generic mails and generic mails don’t produce revenue. They are… just not specific enough.

Imagine this scenario. Let’s say Dana wants to sell her car and decides to advertise it on a national newspaper. It looks like this:

I am a good person. I am good at driving. Did you know that I also graduated with 95%? I have a car to sell.

With this ad, there’s no way she is selling that car. At least, not any time soon.

There’s no price, no details about the car, not even a brand name. Details about her personality is not necessary. And the advert is on a national newspaper. What are the odds that people near her locality will notice it? Maybe a mere percentage of the entire readers of the newspaper. Basically, all of it is just wasted resource because it is “generic”.

What if the ad looked like this in a local newspaper?

Used car for sale. Price negotiable. No defect. Ran 800 km.
Brand: Hyundai Elantra
Price: $13,000 USD
Contact: 1234567890 / dana@g.com

This looks more like an ad, doesn’t it? It focuses on the product, its price and her contact details. There are also important phrases like “No defect” and “Price negotiable”. The local newspaper is a good choice because it will not drive a potential buyer away because the seller is in a different state. Now, she has a good chance of selling her car off because her ad is more “specific”.

This is exactly how you bring in sales to your eCommerce store as well.

You’ve got to be specific, and that’s what a targeted email offers.

Generic newsletters are not targeted at people who are actually looking for your product, but it is like taking a hit in the dark. It’s either a hit or a miss, 50–50. Actually, 80–20. Let me give you an example from a real survey.

The below is an infographic from Oracle Responsys survey that states 34% adults from US broke up (stopped being a loyal customer) of their favourite brands because of irrelevant marketing messages. And 33% of the surveyed people said they broke up with their brand because they sent “generic” newsletters.

So, if a newsletter is what you have been sending all these days, you are losing out on the probability of making sales.

You can change that. Here’s how.

Why Targeted Emails Can Give Better Results Than Newsletters?

Targeted emails are usually run as a whole campaign with an objective or goal. That is, you start a campaign with an email, see how it does, and then further send emails based on the previous success or failure. When you reach the objective, you will know from the data you have.

Here are the chief reasons why targeted emails give better results than newsletters:

Targeted emails start off with a little to no data, but through the campaign, you can collect significant data from your readers.
There’s no One-Size-Fits-All BS. You tailor-make offers for the leads based on their preference, and can certainly generate a revenue from a good percentage of your leads.
When a lead is converted to a customer, you now have their trust and know their preference, which puts you on a beneficial edge.
You can encourage a converted customer to buy again with your next campaigns and increase the existing customer’s value, rather than spending resources on acquiring new customers.
They are Data Driven.

I cannot emphasize the last point more. Let me brief it a little for you.

Targeted Emails & The Data

With targeted email campaigns, you can actually eliminate the guess game and play the marketing out like a pro because you would have data.

Data is the key for any email campaign.

You need an email marketing tool and some basic data (say a mailing list and a little bit of perspective about what the leads would like to buy) to start a campaign. The campaign will help you to further cleanse your data and vice versa.

You will come to know who opens your email and who doesn’t. From there, the campaign shall pick up its pace. Once you run the first set of emails, you will get more data based on real preference of the recipients. There are so many metrics you can use to understand the lead’s preferences and interests, such as:

Open rate — How many people opened your email.
Click through rate — How many people clicked on one / more of the links in your email.
Unsubscribe rate — How many people unsubscribed from your mailing list.
Spam rate — How many people marked your emails as spam.
Conversion rate — How many people actually bought something after reading the email.

There are many other metrics like hard bounce, soft bounce, churn rate, etc. But, the above are the 5 major ones. Tailor making the campaign will now be more fun since you now know what interests them, or what doesn’t.

You may lose some leads who unsubscribe or report your emails as spam. Nevertheless, it is almost inevitable. When your churn rate (percentage of lost leads) is increasing, you would at least know that you are doing something wrong, further analyse what’s causing the situation and come back on the right track.

With such control over your content and the data, you can ace your email marketing and see a significant increase in your sales and revenue.

How To Run Targeted Email Campaigns?

Can you filter your recipients based on where they are or what they like or how they purchase from your normal mailing platform? Doing it manually can take forever to even get the filtered list. And you have to analyse your campaign’s performance, right? That’s where the tool comes in.

With a good tool, you can:

Start a campaign to know your customers,
Understand what they need (or want) from you,
________ and
Sell!

Can you guess what the blank line refers to? Yes! Convince them to buy!

Convincing the customer that your product is what they are looking for is the prime task in marketing. Email campaigning tools like WooCampaigns can help you with the same. You can set up your mailing list from your online store, and let you automate your marketing campaign with data driven analytics. (There’s also a Free 14-Day Trial). So, sign up to an email campaigning tool and measure your email metrics we discussed above.

However, generally running an email campaign once you find your ideal tool involves the following steps:

Step 1: Import your mailing list.

Step 2: Filter the leads according to your campaign. For example, if you are running a campaign to sell to the customers who haven’t bought anything in a while, you would filter out only those customers using their last purchased date. Similarly, you can filter out your leads based on whatever data you have. You get the idea.

Step 3: Write a neat content without using spam words like “Buy now” or “Spend your money”, etc.

Step 4: Include call to action buttons and links.

Step 5: Create rules for what to do when the reader opens an email, or what to do when a reader hits the Unsubscribe button, and so on. For example, you can define that when a lead clicks on a link in the email and makes a purchase, the next campaign to sell another related item to be triggered.

Step 5: Hit Send and watch the analytics.

Wear The Reader’s Shoes

Content of a targeted promotional email does not have to be elaborate. In fact, it has to be precise, yet well thought. Everyone loves a great tailor-made email. Such personalization and customization makes them feel special.

However, based on how your customer reacts to your emails, and based on their shopping behaviour, you should alter your own selling behaviour. From the infographic shared above, you can see that customization based on user reaction adds up to your value.

For example, if a customer is happy with your marketing and makes a purchase, do not leave them just there. Encourage them to buy more “based on what they seem to like”. Craft emails with better offers to increase the chances of making the customer loyal to your brand.

On the other hand, if the customer seems to be unhappy with your marketing, don’t just jump in and give more offers on irrelevant products. Send different emails about different products and offers and see what they are interested in.

Isn’t this what we call being in the other person’s shoes? That stuff works in email marketing.

Key Takeaway:
1. Data is powerful.
2. Use the data sensibly to understand your customers’ shopping behaviour.
3. Embrace customization.

Don’t End Up In The Spam Folder

As important as a targeted email may sound, so is not being in the spam folder. While sending out your emails, be careful not to use pushy words like “Buy now”, “Shop now”, “Discounts”, “Free”, etc., too much because you could end up in the Spam folder of the recipients, which is even more dangerous.

Google detects messages with such words that are intent on making the recipient spend their money as Spam. Also try to follow the Bulk senders guidelines when you are sending bulk emails.

Afterthoughts

Isn’t it amazing how emails can do such wonders to your eCommerce business? And think of what you could be missing out when you are sending the simple newsletters to everyone, without any particular objective. Not pleasant, is it?

Try targeted email marketing and see the difference for yourself.