How to use Email Marketing to Boost Online Sales
Are you sending out email newsletters to your customers but not seeing results? Follow this guide on the best types of automated email campaigns to boost your online conversion.
The primary objective of most businesses is to attract customers and sell them products or services. With this in mind, the marketing funnel explains the conversion journey of a customer, from a prospect to a sale and can be applied to all types of marketing - especially email marketing!
We have created a break down of email campaigns you should use to attract, convert, engage, sell and connect with customers. And the best part is, they can all be automated. So once you design and set-up the email, just sit back and watch it perform (but make sure you keep an eye on performance metrics to improve future campaigns).
1. Awareness
At the top of the funnel, you want to attract new prospects and raise brand awareness through your email marketing. Since potential customers don’t know how valuable your product or service is, this is your chance to tell them.
Statistics show that these types of emails work better than normal emails: welcome emails have a 91.43% open rate; read rates are 42% higher than the average email; welcome emails on average have 4x the open rate and 5x the click-through-rate of a standard email campaign.
The best way to achieve this is to send an automated welcome message as soon as you receive a new email address, whether from your website or other sign-up methods. Recently, John Lewis gave out expensive chocolates in their stores in return for email addresses and they followed up with a welcome message. It not only increased my interest in the brand with it’s key messages but also the ‘start shopping’ call-to-action gave me a subtle push to have a look at the store online.
By building a sense of trust with the subscriber, you have more chance of conversion. You certainly don’t want to lose customers by trying to sell to them straight away.
You may already be doing this step but this is where many brands stop and thus don’t reap the benefits of the rest of the funnel.
2. Consideration
After you have established interest, it’s time to introduce potential customers to your products/services that they may like. You can send automatic emails to your customer base and leads that make subtle suggestions. You can use the data that your website collects on your audience, such as age and gender as well as personality, values, lifestyle and interests.
Netflix is a very good example! Anyone who is subscribed to Netflix receive regular ‘you might like’ emails. These are always tailored to your individual interests and contain up to 8 programmes and films that are chosen for you.
Make sure not to send irrelevant content though, as you may experience high levels of unsubcribers if they feel unvalued.
3. Purchase
Your prospect customers now understand the value of your product or service and are ready to make a purchase. However, with 70% of online shoppers reportedly abandoning their carts at checkout, raising awareness and boosting consideration isn’t enough.
Abandoned cart emails are really useful to remind customers that they have high-rated products in their carts, giving them the final push to purchase. You can even entice them with a special discount code, like CGD London or also show more product they may be interested in.
4. Retention
Many believe that the marketing funnel ends with conversion - if the main goal is to increase sales, why continue with the journey after a customer has made a purchase?
While attracting new customers can increase business growth, the key is to retain customers and entice them to come back and make more purchases.
The good news is that there are several types of automated emails that can help boost retention, from product recommendations related to a previous purchase, feedback and review emails - the possibilities are endless, as long as it reminds the customer why they should buy your products or service.
Use this opportunity to reward loyal customers with discounts for future purchases like Glasses Direct.
5. Advocacy
Customers are great - but loyal customers who recommend others are even better!
People trust their friends’ opinions. By encouraging your customers to become fans, who refer friends and share positive reviews on social media, your sales will skyrocket.
Considering that 92% of people trust recommendations from peers over advertisers, it is understandable that word-of-mouth marketing is one of the most powerful marketing methods you can use.
Increase your referrals with specific emails, offering rewards to the loyal customers, such as MOO.
If you are interested in finding out more about email campaigns or would like to discuss our marketing services, get in touch with a member of our team today.
