Email Marketing Melbourne

Why E-commerce Websites Can’t Ignore Email Marketing?

According to latest figures, the good old email marketing boasts an impressive conversion rate of 7 to 12% for e-commerce firms. An analysis of over 500 million shopping transactions (all industries combined) reveals that when it comes to conversions, email marketing blows search and social straight out of the water.

Image Source With an open rate of 16.78%, email marketing also rocks at driving traffic and delivering information to your customers. It has been termed the best medium for pitching special offers, coupons, and discounts, as the open rates are much higher than those on social media.

Email gets your brand and products into a more exclusive and personal space than Facebook, Twitter, or search. Hence it has been hailed as an excellent brand awareness tool as well. The bottom-line is, there’s no way you can afford to ignore email marketing if you want your maximize your e-commerce traffic, conversions, and sales.

Selecting the Right Email Marketing Software

If you’re about to stick your toe in the email marketing water, you should be aware that it’s going to take more than your Outlook Express or Gmail. There’s no shortage of email management software that can help you manage your contacts, messages, targeting, and tracking. In fact, there are so many of them that it may become confusing to select the right one.

The first thing you should consider is your present and future requirements. The number of your contacts, how often you want to reach them, do you need value-added features such as event management or CRM integration? Different email marketing software offers different plans. Most of them have free plans up to a certain limit of contacts/messages, beyond which you are required to pay your way. Some of them come with prebuilt templates and/or drag-n-drop elements to help you create attractive emails. You should take the time to compare multiple software for their benefits and cost before you decide.

Our Recommendation

For most of the people, Mailchimp is just the right software to start their email marketing journey. Simple, time-tested, and “free forever,” MailChimp has everything that a small e-commerce retailer requires. The free plan allows you to send up to12000 emails a month to a mailing list containing up to 2,000 contacts. That’s more than a startup or small business may need. As the business grows, you can subscribe to one of the paid plans.

MailChimp also helps you build your email marketing skills with a vast repertory of knowledge in the shape of video tutorials, eBooks, and guides. You can easily design emails, target different customer groups, schedule autoresponder, manage mobile email campaigns, and track your performance through in-depth analytics depicting your open rates, click rates, open by location, bounces, unsubscribes, etc. The only downside of MailChimp may be that it costs you $30 per month when your mailing list grows beyond 2000 contacts. That’s a bit higher than what some other email management software offer for compatible plans.

Of course, there are other programs that may be as good or even better. Mad Mimi, for instance, allows you to spice up your emails by using some unique and fun design elements. Aweber stands out for its CRM integration features. Vertical Response is strong in survey creation and analysis. And Constant Contact is great at integrating and managing mailing lists. So, once again, you should know your needs and select the software that best fulfills them.

Tips for Effective Email Marketing

After you’ve configured your email marketing program, the next thing you need to do is design great email campaigns. Here are a few tips to help you do that.

  • Always send emails only to the people who have opted-in to receive them. Do not spam.
  • Write compelling subject lines that get clicked. Remember that your subject line is the only part of your message that the recipients are going to see. Unless they click it, the rest of your message will be lost on them.
  • Keep the layout width of your email at 600 to 650 pixels. Anything beyond 650 pixels will not display correctly in most email clients.
  • Include a single, clear call to action in the form of a link or button. Make it super easy for your readers to find out where they need to click in order to avail your deal.
  • Keep your emails short, preferably no longer than a couple of small paragraphs.
  • Avoid spam words such as sale, buy, cash, money, free, etc; because they can cause your email to get stuck in spam filters.

Monitoring The Results

All email management software offers detailed insights into the performance of your emails. Some of them may figure better than the others in terms of opens, click-thru, and conversions. You should keep a constant eye on the results of your emails and keep improving your future campaigns based on the response of your customers.

Conclusion

With the kind of jaw-dropping conversion rates that email marketing drives for e-commerce businesses, there’s no way you can afford to ignore it. In fact, you should place email before social media in your online marketing strategy. Let us know if we can help!