How would you receive an email that looks good, reads well and offers informative and beneficial content? Of course, the email will be well received. That is why email marketing is able to get more opens, clicks, and subsequently conversions.

Social media is playing a big role in today’s ecommerce industry, but email marketing too hasn’t lost its touch in engaging the attention of prospects and customers. Interestingly enough, the stats tell us that emails prompt purchases is estimated at least to be three times that of the entire social media, with email marketing acquiring nearly 40 times more customers than Facebook and Twitter combined.

Although email has been around for the past two decades, the technology and opportunity we have today to segment and personalize email marketing was never possible at the present scale. According to a study by Custora in 2013, within a period of 4 years customer acquisition via email quadrupled. Furthermore, the percentage of customers acquired through email marketing was nearly 7 % which made it secure the third position led by organic search (16%) and Cost-per-click (10%).

Now you know why you always find your inbox so flooded with campaigns. If email marketing is so effective and thriving, it is a necessity that we learn the best strategies to perfect ecommerce email marketing. Here are the top 10 tips to engage your prospects and enhance sales:

1. Incentivize buyers to review your product: Okay, so your customer bought a product after countless marketing efforts and that’s the end of the journey, right? Wrong. Numerous case studies point out that product reviews have a wonderful impact on prospects, therefore make your buyers review the products they buy.

Argos found that products with reviews had a 10% higher conversion rate compared to the products without reviews. It also found that customers are happy to review products and also tend to rate them highly.  Similar results were obtained by figleaves when they concluded that products with reviews had a 12.5% higher conversion rate than those without. In addition, they found out that products with more than 20 reviews had a phenomenal 83% higher conversion than those without reviews.

Incentivizing via email can be best done using an automated personalized email that schedules the mail within a few days after the product is received.

2. A/B Testing for click-through rates: Simply put, A/B testing in email marketing is testing two or more versions of the same email to determine the one with highest conversion rate or engagement. Speaking about emails, we are well aware that there can be numerous possibilities for the subject line and the body content. So testing and finding out the version that is most engaging and having the greatest impact and using that version for your email marketing can be highly beneficial.

Barak Obama’s staff did extensive A/B testing on the subject lines for fundraising emails and they found that while one version generated $403, 603 in donations, another generated a whopping $2, 540, 866.

In ecommerce, experimenting with different upsells and cross-sells in the transactional emails provide scope for A/B testing.

3. Set-up Cart Abandonment Emails: Setting up cart and checkout abandonment is greatly helpful in conversion rate optimization as it helps the ecommerce company identify the presence of any bugs hindering their conversion rate. Ecommerce sites can make use of automation software that lets them know how many people abandoned their cart. One way of determining this is by identifying the number of people who visited the card or checkout page, but did not receive confirmation or visit the thank you page. Once these people are identified, a mail can be sent to each asking what caused them to abandon their cart and seeking information regarding technical errors and other bugs they encountered.
4. Reward the most loyal customers: Applying the 80/20 principle, you will find out that a large proportion of revenue is usually attained through a small number of faithful customers and that is why rewarding them with gift cards and similar incentives can pay off.
5. Reactivate your dormant customers: Segmenting your customers by loyalty and targeting each group with a campaign that suits their level of activeness can enhance the active customer base as well as the revenue of the company. An example would be using an automating software that sends an email to every customer who remained without purchasing for 12 months to incentivize them to make a purchase.
6. Create and Maintain a Newsletter Calendar: You need to prepare yourself for retail holidays as well as product seasonality so that you can send a timely campaign to maximize purchases during these special occasions. Maintaining a newsletter calendar can help you to know in advance about the upcoming events and special occasions so that you have time to work on campaigns and stay ahead in market competition.
7. Free Store Credit Surprises: Offering free store credit that lasts only about 24 hours or so to the customers can create a loss aversion scenario that will act as a powerful motivator forcing them to make purchases.
8. Experiment on Your Transactional Email: Instead of making your transactional email a mere statement of the status of their order, make it count. Use this email as an opportunity to engage customers through techniques like upselling.
9. Targeting Birthdays and Anniversaries: You can target your customers at a personal level by setting up milestone campaigns for birthdays and anniversaries that are important to them.
10. Taking Email Marketing Beyond the Inbox: You need not confine your email marketing to the inbox of your customers. Email marketing offers numerous possibilities and combining email marketing campaigns with social marketing can be a good start.

What we have now discussed is only the tip the iceberg as regards the ecommerce email marketing. If you have interesting views and additional information to share, kindly post it as a comment below.