Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to communicate directly with your customers and prospects. It offers a wealth of personalization options and allows you to boost your brand and improve your customer relationships. But take care, as there are also a few potential pitfalls to avoid along the way.
So, what are some of the most common eCommerce email marketing mistakes and how can you avoid them? Let’s take a look.
Common Mistakes In Email Marketing
Failing to make them mobile-friendly
If you’re waiting for the train and have a few minutes spare, what do you do? Most people whip out their smartphones to scroll their social media feeds, read a news story or check their emails. And that right there is why your eCommerce emails need to look just as beautiful on mobile devices as they do on desktops.
These days, four out of ten emails are opened through mobile applications and if your emails don’t load properly on a smartphone, it’s very unlikely that your customers will give them a second look. For that reason, you should always beta test your campaigns across a variety of devices to give your emails the best chance to convert.
Not segmenting your customers
If you carry a relatively small product line or sell niche products, you might get away with sending out a single email to all of your customers. However, most eCommerce stores will have far more success by segmenting their customers by demographics such as gender, age, interests, and previous purchase history.
Marketing automation for ecommerce can make the process of segmenting your customers much easier. You can automate communication with your customers based on their individual behavior and data to make sure you always send the right message at the perfect time.
Not keeping subject lines authentic
Since the advent of the internet, most online shoppers have developed an attuned sense of what is and isn’t spam. While spelling mistakes and poor grammar make spam immediately obvious, other warning signs are often less overt but can still trigger those alarm bells.
Emails with subject lines that promise too much, open with an unwanted sales pitch or include hyperbole are likely to receive a mass deletion. Instead, eCommerce retailers should keep their subject lines honest, to the point, and avoid fluff and filler.
Subject lines that prompt customers to open emails and take action typically share a few characteristics:
- They’re short and to the point
- They explain the value the reader can get by opening them
- They’re personalized and friendly
Failing to include a call to action button
When sending an eCommerce email to your customers, it should have a clearly defined purpose (i.e. introduce your spring collection) and include a call-to-action (CTA) button that makes it as easy as possible for them to act (browse and buy your spring collection).
However, CTA buttons are an art form unto themselves and require experience and testing to get right. A few simple guidelines include:
- Include one CTA for each action you want the customer to perform
- Make sure your CTA buttons stand out from the rest of the text
- Check that the desired action can be taken as quickly as possible (no lengthy forms to fill out)
Selling too hard
An important part of selling is to build a two-way relationship that provides genuine value to your customers, which you can’t do by sending them a ‘BUY NOW!’ email every Tuesday.
Instead, you should think about the ways that you can help your customers. For example, are there questions they commonly ask over the phone? Or do customers need help when sizing your products? Producing genuinely useful content that makes their lives easier can help you gain trust and build a relationship with your customers and make you the first seller they turn to when they have a question.
Not tracking your campaigns
How do you know if your email campaigns are successful if you’re not keeping track of their performance? You might think that once you shoot an email off into the ether, your job is done. However, that’s really just the start of an email marketer’s work. Now, you have to turn from a designer and copywriter into a data analyst, crunching the figures to see exactly how your emails are performing.
Key metrics to measure include:
- Open rate
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Conversion rate
- Bounce rate
- Number of unsubscribes
So there you have it — six email marketing mistakes to avoid if you want to improve your marketing campaigns and increase customer retention. And here are a few other online marketing strategies that can help you grow your eCommerce business.
