Well hey there, Catherine Langman here, and welcome back to the Productpreneur Success Podcast.
This week’s podcast episode is another mini training session, and today I’m going to be sharing some details about one of my most favourite ways to communicate with your audience.
How would you like to add, potentially, another 20% to your revenue? And how would you like to do that at a potential 3800% ROI?
This, my friends, is entirely possible using Email Marketing.
In fact, as an eCommerce store, one of the highest-impact marketing strategies you can have in your toolkit is email marketing.
Yes, even now in mid-2020, this is still the case!
And believe me, when you master the art and science of using email to generate sales on your website, you will always be able to make money.
Before we get started, I want to let you know that I have something extra special for you to accompany this episode.
I’ll be hosting a FREE live Masterclass called “My 6-Figure Per Month Ecommerce Sales Formula”, on Wednesday 17th and Thursday 18th June, where I’ll be doing a deep dive training into the strategies that are working right now to drive successful eCommerce sales growth.
Join me live and you’ll have the opportunity to not just learn exactly what you need to have in place to build a profitable online store, but also ask me questions as well!
I’ll link to the booking form in the show notes if you’d like to join me live for this tutorial.
Alright, let’s dive into today’s episode.
So this episode will be your a ultimate guide to email marketing for eCommerce brands, where I go into detail about how you can learn and implement this highly effect sales-generating strategy in your business.
If you’re keen to grow your sales online working smarter, not harder, then this episode is for you…
There are three ways to grow sales online:
- Increase the number of customers,
- Increase the average transaction value, or
- Increase the number of transactions per customer.
And what is the one thing those three have in common? Customers.
In order to increase sales and grow your business you HAVE to have a customer-centric focus – and the best thing about a solid email marketing strategy is that it can focus on all three areas simultaneously!
Obviously to execute on an email marketing strategy you need to utilise some technology (my email marketing application of choice is Klaviyo, but there are plenty of options out there).
And whilst you’ll need to integrate your application of choice to your website shopping cart in order to make the most of these sales-generating email marketing strategies, at the end of the day your emails will only be as successful as the content you put into them.
Think of email marketing almost like sending your peeps a little ‘love note’
If you’re in business for the long haul then you can’t devote your entire email marketing schedule to asking and taking all the time. Only asking for the sale is the fastest way to burn out your list. You’ve also giving value to your audience as well.
So email marketing is about building relationships – showing not just how much you want to impress your customers (be like the date, telling their best stories and funniest jokes!), but also how well you understand them by delivering up content and offers that are perfect for your audience.
If you approach email marketing like this, you’ll be vastly more successful:
- You’ll create better promotions that sell more products.
- You’ll nurture your email subscribers more effectively, leading to increased sales over time.
- You will tailor your emails more precisely to the different needs of your customers (segments of your database), which also results in increased sales.
Email marketing is no longer about broadcasting the same special offers to your entire list all the time. This approach is just not as effective anymore – it’s the fastest track to training your list that your emails are largely irrelevant to them, making them feel spammed. Not cool.
OK let’s get on with some how-to’s then shall we?
Part 1: The Perfect eCommerce Email
The From Name
The ‘From’ name is the name that appears next to the email address.
Unless your personal name is your brand name then it’s better to go with your brand name. I know for me personally, I get so many promotional emails and half of them are from people whose names I don’t know, so I just don’t open them.
Secondly, if your recipients can easily identify the sender’s business or brand name, plus your subject line clearly describes the contents of the email, your open rates can improve by 50-70% compared to those that are vague, cute or otherwise unclear.
If I cast an eye through my own inbox today, I can see that all the big brands use this strategy, so you should too.
The From Email
A really, really BIG no-no is to send your marketing emails from a ‘no reply’ email address! Don’t make it harder for your customers to get in touch with you by forcing them to click through to your website contact us form.
All this serves to do is to make people feel unwanted and unwelcome, like you don’t want to talk to them. Nine times out of 10, people won’t bother – instead, they’ll go and shop elsewhere.
The Subject Line
Let me ask you – what is the point of having a huge list of email subscribers if no-one opens your emails?
As advertising guru David Ogilvy once said, “On average, five times as many people read the headline as the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
The same goes for emails – the subject line is your heading.
And it’s been proven over and over again – if there is ONE part of your marketing emails that you should spend the MOST time finessing – it’s your subject line.
In fact, a really great subject line will impact your results by more than 40% compared to any other factor, including the email design, the offer, the call to action, the day or time you send it, or anything else.
Bottom line is, don’t spend hours fussing over those other elements. Spend most of your time crafting a highly enticing subject line – you want it to grab people’s attention fast, and increase their desire to click through and find out more.
Avoid Sales-y Words
As much as we know that scarcity or fear of missing out is an incredibly powerful tool for generating sales, there are a couple of big problems in using words such as ‘Free’, ‘% off’ and so on.
Firstly, it’s highly likely words like these will be flagged by your recipients’ spam filter, causing your email to end up in their spam folder rather than inbox.
And secondly, it’s pretty hard to stand out from the crowd if you’re saying the same thing as everything else. Bear in mind that the average adult receives 147 emails PER DAY, so to cut through the noise you need to be different!
Mix it Up
As my clients and students have heard me bang on about until I am hoarse – people do not subscribe to email newsletters anymore. So please, please, do not have subject lines that are like a series – for example, ‘Newsletter update #58’ (and so on).
Similarly, don’t re-use subject lines or make them too similar to each other. Email programs and spam filters look out for things like this, so it can affect deliverability. Not to mention, being too same-same will not continue to capture the attention of your audience over time!
A few other things to remember with subject lines
- Shorter is better (50 characters or less)
- Have you tried asking questions?
- Use an emoji in your subject line
- Capitalise the first letter of every word
- Don’t be in a rush to promote something (no ALL CAPS, exaggerated promotional phrases, and go easy on the exclamation marks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
- No click-baiting – if you mislead your audience once, they probably won’t forgive you…
- And use urgency, but if you over-do this tactic (like being always on sale), then that will be the shortest road to training your audience to wait to buy until your next sale.
Pre-Header
Do you know what a pre-header is? This is the text that appears in your email inbox next to your subject line. Most people would read this immediately after reading your subject line, so it plays an important role in determining whether they’ll open the email, so you want to get it right.
Unfortunately, a HUGE proportion of business owners leave the words “View email in browser” as the only pre-header text! Not overly enticing, right?
Do yourself a massive favour – delete that line of text and replace it with something that makes sense to your audience.
Design
OK so coming from a branding and design agency background myself, I used to think it was incredibly important to get quite fancy with the design – you know, make the promotional email look like a gorgeous digital brochure or catalogue. And while once upon a time this would have totally improved conversion rates, it’s no longer the case.
These days, when it comes to the design of your eCommerce marketing emails, less is more.
Less images. Less fancy design templates. Don’t over-style it.
On the flip side of the coin – if you send your email as 100% text with no branding elements altogether, it’ll probably get marked as spam because people won’t know immediately who the email is from.
But if you go too heavy on the fancy design – gorgeous images, animated GIF’s, heavily styled layouts – your email is also likely to be picked up by email algorithms and sent to the promotions tab or folder.
Striking a balance may feel a little like walking a tight-rope, but aim to keep it simple enough so that it has a somewhat personal feel, and fancy enough to get attention without triggering the promotions tab (or worse, the SPAM folder!)
Images
What does your email look like when your email program settings set to NOT automatically download images – does your email make sense if the images are nothing but white space with a fine black lined border? What alt-text can you insert with your images so the email makes sense if that is all people can see?
Which brings me to…
Testing
We already spoke about testing subject lines, but it’s also incredibly important to test-send your email.
At the bare minimum send it to yourself – check which folder it goes to, try and be objective about how it looks in your inbox (subject line, pre-header text) as well as when you open the email up.
Plus, of course, as mentioned above, make sure you test how the email looks without the images downloaded!
The text
When it comes to the text – otherwise known as the copy – try and keep it simple, friendly and approachable. Think about how you might present your product in person if you were selling face to face, and talk like that.
Focus more on clearly communicating your product promise in a way that makes your audience understand implicitly that it’s the solution to their need or want.
Timing
Hmm I get asked this quite a bit from my clients, but the answer is always ‘it depends’. Honestly, you will need to try different times out to test and learn for yourself what works best for your audience.
For my last business I seem to recall mid-to-late mornings on weekdays were great (right around the time my customers were putting their baby to bed for a nap).
Most emails are read within 4 hours of being sent, so think carefully about what your audience are doing around the time you send it.
One clue might be to check what day and time most of your orders come through your website – if they’re online and shopping at a particular time of day, that would be a good time to hit them up with a marketing email!
Part #2: Growing your Email List
Have you heard the statement, “Always be list building”?
Email list, that is.
Now, obviously before you can hope to get more customers, you need people to actually visit your website.
But what happens if (like most first time visitors to your website) they don’t buy? Then what?
Only 2% of sales are made on the first contact. 3% on the second, 5% on the third, 10% on the fourth, while 80% of sales are made on the 5th to 12th contact.
What astounds me even more than these figures is that almost half of sales people – 48% – never bother to follow up with a potential customer!
FAR. OUT. BRUSSEL. SPROUT!
How much money are we all leaving on the table then, I wonder? Particularly if we are not capturing our website visitor’s contact details?
Now, before I get into any how-to’s or examples, I want you to wrap your head around something:
Just because someone did not buy on their first visit to your website does not necessarily mean you are too expensive.
The reason I say this is because the vast majority of email subscription incentives that I see for product-based businesses is a discount coupon.
Tell me – what sort of customer will you be attracting by starting with a discount?
Is there not some other desirable feature of your product that your customers find different, better, or more valuable than your competitors?
Don’t wait for your potential customers to figure that out all by themselves – use that as the draw-card rather than always opting for a discount.
If you start with a discount, in my mind all this achieves is to straight-out de-value your brand. It also tends to attract the bargain hunters who are comparing price rather than value.
Of course there are always good uses for discounts or free shipping coupons, for example end-of-season clearances. But as a way to ATTRACT quality customers to your website? I think you can come up with something better.
(If your ideal customers truly are motivated by a monetary offer try and frame it as a value-add rather than a discount. This will portray a more high-quality brand image, whereas a %-off portrays your brand as a lower-end ‘discount’ image.)
How do you grow a lucrative email list with the RIGHT punters on it?
Now, as the saying goes, ‘it’s not about the size, it’s how you use it’ – the number one goal for growing your email list is to get YOUR ideal customers on it. NOT to get as many people – any people – on it!
And the only way to get the RIGHT people onto your email list is to become a Pro at knowing what your customers need and want. That way you can make them a much more powerful and attractive opt-in offer that is more likely to result in your visitors signing up to your list.
Need a list-building recipe? Follow my three step list-building strategy:
1. Create a signature freebie / opt-in offer
Your Signature Freebie should be your most powerful or most popular offer, and it should be very specific to your core product offering.
Try and make it about the one thing that helps a customer to make a purchase decision (for example, Birdsnest’s personalised style-guide.) OR something that helps a customer to have a better experience using your products (for example, Cake to the Rescue’s free gift with purchase).
2. Promotional freebies >> this is something that you’d do ahead of a big promotion (ie a new product launch). I love to use a giveaway for this purpose – and you can check out the recent episode I did about how to run a successful giveaway on social media.
The idea with this strategy is to grow your email list with people who will be genuinely interested in the new product you’re about to launch. (Hence – growing a quality email list!)
In order to make each new product launch as successful as possible, you want as many new people on your list before that launch promotion begins.
That way you’ll get people who need or want your new product joining your email list, and hopefully they’ll be the ones who are most likely to want to buy your new product RIGHT NOW!
3. Product recommendation quiz >> This is a strategy that works exceptionally well for anyone selling products that are difficult to choose in an online environment. For example, skincare or makeup is difficult to select online, but using a quiz can help a customer to figure out exactly what products are suited to the the best. I like to tag team a quiz like this with a small incentive to encourage people to subscribe to your list in order to get the results of their quiz, like free shipping OR including a gift voucher with a trial pack purchase, so that you can follow up on a first purchase and encourage them to come back and buy the full size.
Where do you place the opt-in form for people to sign up?
Obviously you want to put your opt-in form in places that get the most traffic and you want to make it as easy as possible for people to sign-up to your email list.
Try and use the following positions:
- The website footer – this is a big form at the bottom of your website, on all pages.
- The pop-up opt-in form. Klaviyo’s popup opt-in form builder is great, there are many different designs to choose from. I like to set them to appear after about 30 seconds, or after the website visitor has scrolled about 60% of the way down the page, as well as show it on exiting the website.
- Bottom of the About Us page. Your Signature Freebie should most definitely be promoted at the bottom of your About Us page. The About Us page is the most highly visited page of pretty much all websites (which makes sense in the somewhat-anonymous realm of online shopping – people often want to know who they’re buying from before they make a purchase).
Embed an opt-in form here if you can, or place an image promoting your freebie that people click on to activate a pop-up opt-in form, which is what Happy Tummies do.
Having a QUALITY email list is absolutely key to making money and growing sales online.
In fact, I can say, hand on heart, 100% of my most successful clients have incorporated email marketing into their business, using both automated emails as well as regular email newsletters.
But, as always, the success of any marketing technology or application will come down to your content strategy. The greatest email marketing application in the world will never make up for a terrible subject line or no follow-up.
Which brings me to the third part of this mini training…
Part #3: Email Your List Regularly
So I think, by now, we can all agree that one of the most reliable and profitable methods of generating revenue through an eCommerce store is email marketing.
Getting email marketing right, though, may be challenging. There are so many things in an email campaign that can cause failure. These are probably questions you’ve struggled with yourself:
>> What should you put in your email newsletter?
>> Should you always include a discount?
>> Should you include lots of articles?
>> What if no one ever buys from your newsletters?
>> What if your newsletters always end up in people’s spam folder?
It can be easy to just lump it all in the ‘too hard basket’, or shove your next email newsletter waaaay down your to-do list and just never get around to it.
Yet, giving up would be a big mistake!
Email marketing accounts for approximately 23% of sales, not to mention the cost of sending emails is extremely low (other than your time in writing and setting it up), making it one of THE most effective marketing channels at your disposal.
2 biggest challenges with email newsletters
By far, the three biggest challenges that eCommerce business owners have when it comes to sending regular email newsletters are:
- Not knowing what to put in the newsletter
- Relying on discounts as the only offer that generates sales
- Not finding the time to write and send newsletters
This guide will answer your most common questions about newsletter marketing, plus …
How often should you send email newsletters?
Statistics show, that sending an email newsletter once every week leads to a good open and click rate, as well as high average orders per campaign.
Don’t stress! I’ll show you how to create a weekly email newsletter without it killing you!
Personalization increases conversions by up to 10%
At its most basic level, personalizing an email means addressing it to the contact’s first name. These days it’s easy to collect first names at the point of subscription, and it’s simple to include the first name in the subject line or the body of the email.
A more advanced way to personalize your emails is to segment your list according to buyer behaviour.
Segment your list to increase conversions
If you do segmentation properly, people will always find that your emails provide them with offers and content that are tailored to their needs. Our favourite email platform, Klaviyo, makes possible for you.
Many brands segment their customer base into these categories:
- High Average Order Value (AOV) Customers: Use promotional bundles to appeal to this segment – these customers generally like to buy all the items they need at once.
- Discount Customers: These are customers who typically buy with your brand only when an item is on sale. Send them updates on sale opportunities and additional ways to save money (i.e. loyalty programs, refer-a-friend, etc.).
- Face Value Customers: These are customers who often buy at face value. They aren’t driven by discounts. Many of them are likely driven instead by the newness or exclusivity of a product. Send these customers first access to new or “just in” products or lines.
- Lapsed Customers: These are customers who have been on your email list but not purchased for some time (or perhaps not at all).
You don’t HAVE to send an email every week to each segment!
Hopefully the list above has already got you thinking about different types of promotions or offers that you could send in your email newsletter that would appeal to the different types of customer segment.
If you are able to segment your email list into these different categories (which you should be able to do if using an email service provider like Mailchimp), then you can certainly send your weekly email just to the contacts on your list that you feel would respond to your offer.
Or, if you’re still new to email marketing and want to keep things simple, or don’t yet have the historical data about customer buying habits, then just send your weekly newsletter to everyone on your list.
Your newsletter content plan
Week 1: ‘What’s new’ or ‘Just in’. If you don’t have something new, feature your most popular product line.
Week 2: Some kind of discount offer, either a %-off old or slow-moving stock you’re trying to sell out, or a reminder to use loyalty points, or an incentive to refer a friend.
One idea that’s worked well for several clients of mine is to price old stock at below cost price, with the requirement that customers need to spend a minimum $ value on regular full-priced stock in order to qualify for buying the heavily discounted items.
Week 3: Put together a bundle, with either a selection of products from your own range, or team up with another brand that shares your audience and do a joint promotion with both your products.
The key here is to have quite a high price point – above your normal average order value.
Week 4: A ‘win back’ offer targeting lapsed customers. Typically this will be a really awesome price point on a specific product, or a gift voucher that can be used (make sure it’s not valid on sales items or in conjunction with other discounts or free shipping coupons).
You don’t have to use all 4 types of offer every month. Some months you may swap between ‘What’s new’ and some kind of discount or bundle offer every two weeks.
Plan your newsletters in advance
I recommend approaching your plan like this:
- Start by adding the big promotion themes and dates for the year into your calendar. This would include things like big new product launches (the ones you know about in advance), end of financial year sale (if you do one), Black Friday/Cyber Monday, Christmas and so on.
- Plan one month ahead in detail. This means, getting very specific about exactly what “just in” or most popular products you will feature, what discount offer you will run, what bundle you’ll put together etc. You want to know exactly what these offers will be for the month ahead.
- Content creation and email scheduling. Some people like to write, build, test and schedule the whole month’s worth of emails in one go. Personally, I like to set aside a few hours on the same day every week to create and schedule that week’s content.
TOP TIP: Send your weekly newsletter to your whole list on a Wednesday, and then re-send it on a Sunday to those who did not open it on the Wednesday.
Monitor, review and track your results
After sending your emails, you MUST review the performance of your email newsletter.
Review the following metrics each week:
- Open rate
- Click through rate
- Revenue
- Number of orders
- Average order value
Then, I encourage my clients to write these results down weekly, so that you can compare your results each week.
When recording your results, also make note of the email subject line and the offer.
Over time you will start to see trends around:
- What subject lines generate the best open rates, and
- What offers generate the best revenue results.
I’m sure it is obvious why you would want to know the answers to these two points!
Last comments
I know that all of the above may sound a little bit time consuming, BUT it’s worth it.
If you could increase your revenue over 20% by spending a few hours a week on an activity that doesn’t cost you any money, I’m sure you’d do it, right?
In my experience, all of my clients who are generating really fantastic sales revenue are doing regular weekly email newsletters. And, they’re using this system to create them.
Need some help?
I have a cool freebie to go with this podcast episode that’ll help you to implement some of this email marketing stuff in your business.
I invite you to head to download my guide called “How to double your customers”, which will walk you through creating your first automated email campaign designed to convert more new subscribers into paying customers.
Head over to the show notes to download your free copy today!
The other thing, if you’re looking for help with how to grow a profitable eCommerce business that regularly brings in 5-6 figures in sales per month, then I invite you to register for my upcoming Masterclasses.
I’ll be sharing my 6-Figure Ecommerce Sales Formula in my upcoming masterclasses, and will walk through some case studies of recent client success stories to illustrate what’s possible.
I’ll share the link to join in the shownotes for this episode as well!