Email marketing for E-commerce, Part 2. Email Types And Sales Automation
In the previous article, we gave detailed information on how online stores can properly build their subscriber base and segment it. However, this article will elaborate and focus on emails: types and methods of automation.
Bear with us. This is a long read, but it’s worth it :)
What Emails You Can Send?
Welcome Emails
A welcome email is the second email the subscriber receives (after the confirmation of subscription email). Subscribers open welcome emails more often than any other email campaign. Don’t miss such a chance to get more clicks and tell the audience about your company!
Listed below are the contents of a good welcome email:
- Acquaintance with the new subscriber. This is usually done by including a short story about the online store in the email.
- The contact details of the person who sent the newsletter.
- Login and password. This is attached in cases in which the online store has or requires its subscribers to have a personal account.
- Links to social networks or mobile apps.
- Gifts: a discount, samplers, or items in a kit for another purchase.
Regular promotional emails
Email marketers send these emails manually. This type of email is sent regularly: once a week, twice a month or every day. A/B testing will help you to decide how often to send emails.
Listed below are the important constituents of promotion emails:
- Discounts and promotions offered by the store.
- New arrivals (new products in the store). Segmenting subscribers by preferences is very valuable when it comes to sending emails containing new products.
- How-to emails. These emails instruct subscribers on how to choose the right products, what to look for or how to group up goods into thematic collections.
Abandoned Cart Emails
Abandoned carts are a nightmare for online store owners. At Baymard Institute, it’s estimated that 69.57% of shoppers leave items in a basket and don’t return. This is a huge loss for online stores.
Automatic emails about abandoned carts can solve this problem. They are triggered when the user does not complete the purchasing of an item. Usually, these letters contain a reminder about an unfinished order, a photo of the product and its price. Incentives in form of free delivery, discount or additional goods as a gift could also help encourage buyers to complete their purchases. For example, an electronics store once offered me a partner price level on all products (an eternal discount of 5–10% on all products). I found it very profitable and I finished processing my orders.
Congratulatory Emails
These are emails that are devoted to holidays like Christmas, New Year or Valentine’s Day. You can also choose narrower events, such as World Quality Day or Pet Day. Each business area will be able to find an occasion to congratulate subscribers and offer a discount.
Transactional Emails
Transactional emails are service messages about registration, confirmation of an order, payment or delivery notifications. It’s hard to imagine an online store without these messages.
There are three ways to send transactional letters:
- Through the website’s engine.
- Through email marketing platform.
- Through transactional email services (such as UniOne).
Now we are done with single emails, furthermore, this article will elaborate on how they can be combined to form an effective automatic series of emails.
How automatically sell products using series of emails
Email-marketers often assemble several single letters into automatic series. These automatic series of emails are useful for the following reasons:
- The emails are sent with a frequency that is convenient for the subscriber.
- It can replace the marketer. Everything happens automatically — we only need to set up a series once.
- The robot takes over the routine work. It’s easy for it to send out different letters to thousands of segments.
- Each client gradually comes to the target action. We do not impose with sales and clients are smoothly immersed in the company’s business.
Furthermore, we will focus on how to combine separate letters into effective email-trains 🚂
Welcome Series
Welcome-series can at least double the additional sales. Its goal is to delicately lead a person to purchase, as well as prevent a hot customer from escaping. Welcome series enables us to not just sell products, but to build the loyalty, trust of subscribers and turn them into regular customers.
The welcome chain performs the following tasks at once:
- Confirms that registration/subscription took place (technically).
- Provides stable delivery of emails to the inbox of subscribers as long as the they add your address to the list of safe senders.
- Shows that you are glad to get acquainted and in unity «one blood» with the subscriber. Tell something about the author of the email: in my experience, emails from a person are opened and read more often than emails from a company.
- Shows what benefits the subscriber will receive. At the same time, the letter can introduce the assortment, services, products and sections of the website.
- Collects subscriber data in order to send personalized offers in the future.
Here’s an example of a welcome series for an online store.
Re-Engagement Series
The working principle of this series will be elucidated, using a situation that often happens in online stores:
Situation: An online store takes a long time to put its base together and carries out no email campaigns after that. This leaves the contacts in an Excel table for several months (or years!), gathering dust.
In this situation, it is dangerous to send emails based on such a base because of the following reasons:
- Subscribers are forgetful. Subscribers forget who you are and how their email addresses got into your hands. Starting the email campaign as if nothing had happened will not work. The first emails they receive will simply get into spam.
- Broken addresses. The database may have broken email addresses. If someone initially indicated an incorrect email or someone changed three mailboxes in the last year. Email marketing with low deliverability doesn’t last long: email-services reduce the sender’s rating, and all letters are sent to spam.
- Spam traps. Abandoned addresses in a year or a bit more become the property of the mail provider. Some of the mailboxes become spam traps. If you send an email to this address, the provider will lower your domain reputation. It increases the risk of sent emails getting into the spam.
- Interests change. Users are no longer interested in the content. Example: a year ago, a subscriber needed toys for his son, and now the child has grown up and wants a new Ed Sheeran album.
We advise you to conduct resuscitation through a series of emails. Firstly, it’s easier to segment the base. Secondly, subscribers who do not want to receive the newsletter will be more likely to unsubscribe.
You can reanimate the base in three steps:
Step 1. Clean the base. Remove the errors in the domains, eliminate the role addresses and duplicates in the database.
Step 2. Write the first email. In order to weed out uninterested users, send a suggestion to everyone to re-subscribe to the newsletter.
Step 3. Start the newsletter. You need to warm up the database. Start by sending to a small number of contacts and gradually increase the quantity of recipients.
Collect Feedback About The Online Store
The purpose of the script: Collect feedback about the store for external resources.
Why is it important?
A high rating of a store in social networks reduces the cost of attracting customers. Good reviews increase the CTR of advertising campaigns in Google and other searching systems. Potential buyers see that they can trust the store.
A scenario for receiving feedback consists of 3 steps.
Step 1. The buyer has purchased the goods.
Step 2. We send an email in order to collect feedback about the store. In the email, we include questions to which we want to get answers. You need to understand that we are asking for a service, so it’s advisable to make the evaluation process as simple as possible.
Step 3. After the person has clicked one of the icons, we divide the script into two branches:
- 🙁 To those who answered “bad” and “normal”, we will send an email through which we will try to find out what went wrong. We can also add a link to the survey and offer a link to the manager or director. This way, a subscriber will be able to speak out and will not convey negative reviews about the store to external platforms that we cannot control.
- 🙂 To those who answered “good” or “excellent”, we send an email in which we request that they share their experience with other users. We can also lead the client to external resources (for example, store pages in social networks).
Abandoned Carts
The easiest way to make a customer return to placing an order is to use a series of emails.
Why a series of emails?
- More information for the subscriber. It is necessary to tell a lot. Just one email will not be enough.
- More chances of being read. The client may be distracted so he will not open the email. When we send a series of emails, their chances of being read increases.
- Increasing benefits. Each new email offers more favourable conditions for the client. One email is not so effective.
The ideal email series consists of three emails. They go one after the other. Sometimes it all ends in 1–2 emails — the client can complete the order without waiting for the end of the chain.
The first email: The purpose of this email is to remind the customer that the order isn’t completed.
The first email must be sent immediately the client leaves the site. It’s perfect to send this email within the hour. The buyer still has a need. Most likely, the buyer is looking for different versions of the product and its characteristics.
The first email reminds and pushes the client to return to complete the order. Don’t offer other models or additional services in the first email. This email is just a reminder about forgotten items in the cart.
Second email. The purpose of this email is to offer free shipping or product analogues.
We send the second email of the series within 24 hours from the moment of the failed purchase. If the client does not open the first email for a long time, send the second one. If the client has viewed the email and even performed any actions, immediately send the second one. This way, you will stay at the top of the client’s mailbox.
Customers often refuse the goods due to the cost of delivery. Offer to deliver the order for free. If it’s not possible in your case, add positive reviews, analogues of the selected product and related models. This will raise the average purchase check and increase sales.
The third email: The purpose of this email is to offer discounts or gifts.
When there is no positive reaction after the second email, it’s time to send the third (last) email.
Try to reduce the price of goods from an abandoned cart, offer good discounts to other categories or give gifts. Perhaps this will be an incentive for the client. He/she will finally cross the line and place an order.
Another way is to add urgency. Set a promotion time or time limit for discounts. The client will understand that it’s impossible to postpone the purchase. To prevent the deadline from going unnoticed, place it in the subject line or preheader.
Reactivation
Each client has their own life cycle. Subscribers are most active immediately after a subscription. With time, their interest may gradually subside. Reactivation helps to revive such subscribers. This makes it possible for dormant subscribers to start opening and clicking emails again.
Reactivation works in 3 directions:
- Returns “asleep” subscribers. They begin to open emails, click on links and purchase products again.
- Helps to clear the base. If we haven’t reactivated a subscriber, the contact of that subscriber should be removed from the list. So our base will contain only active subscribers.
- Saves the budget. As we remove inactive subscribers, we reduce the size of the database. Thanks to this, we can switch to a cheaper mailing service rate.
Reactivation is carried out in 3 stages.
1. Base segmentation. Create segments of “asleep” subscribers. Then select users who have not opened emails and have not clicked on links for more than 3–6 months.
2. Make up a reactivation strategy. Usually, these are 2–3 emails in which we convey one or more of the following:
- An email saying that we are going to unsubscribe the subscriber because there has been no news from him/her for a long time;
- An offer of a promotional code or discount, intended to push subscriber to the target action.
- An offer or supply of valuable and useful content for subscribers.
These emails are only sent to subscribers who we regard as “asleep” subscribers.
3. Analysis. The task of the reactivation series is to make the subscriber visit the website. How do we work with the base after reactivation? Listed below are two ways:
- Remove all the subscribers who didn’t open and didn’t follow the links from the email.
- Leave the users who went to the website or made a purchase.
Yay! That’s all. You have re-activated the base
This is only the second article in our email marketing for e-commerce series. In the next part of this series, we will be focusing and providing valuable information on the main stats and metrics of email marketing. Stay tuned!
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