Business Benefits
Engage your mailing list.
Confirm that your email service provider is connected to your CRM.
This step is crucial to incorporating product recommendations and personalization into your email marketing strategy. Most major platforms support this. If your email service provider doesn’t integrate to your CRM directly, you may be able to use a third-party integration like Zapier.
Outline the purpose of your email marketing strategy and the types of messages you will be sending.
Specify whether this email marketing campaign will focus on things like abandoned cart recovery, repeat purchase, brand or product awareness, lead nurturement, or increased order value.
Establish KPIs to measure the success of your email marketing strategy.
For example, to measure the success of an abandoned cart recovery campaign, you might establish KPIs related to:
- Email open rate.
- Email click-to-open rate.
- Post-email transaction volume.
- Post-email average order value.
Use the SMART framework by making your KPIs specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.
Analyze customer or prospect data to identify common purchasing behavior, products that are popular at specific times or dates, or products that tend to be bought together.
Refer to your web analytics or store platform’s reporting tools and look for data like:
- The related products certain customers purchase.
- The time of week these customers are most active.
- How often customers purchase discounted items.
- Which seasonal events have the highest activity.
This analysis is critical to discovering email marketing opportunities and executing a successful email marketing strategy.
Identify seasonal events that are important to your ecommerce business. Look for events that are aligned with your industry, match your audience’s behavior and seasonal needs, and feel like a natural fit.
Common examples include:
- Valentines Day
- Mothers Day
- Back-to-school
- Black Friday
- Christmas
- Easter
For instance, the back-to-school season can be a popular seasonal event if you sell books, electronics, and office supplies. But it may feel forced if you’re marketing an enterprise CRM.
Decide how many emails you plan on sending and how frequently you will send them.
It can be helpful to create an email marketing calendar. Outline which dates you plan on sending these email messages. Tools like Airtable and Monday can also help manage this information.
When determining email frequency, start by reviewing email open and click-rates. If you are sending more than three emails a week, you may identify engagement drop-off with each email that is sent.
Determine whether you’d like your emails to be rich, visually oriented messages or raw, plain text communications.
Rich emails tend to be more effective for product recommendations, while plain text emails are best for emails that only have a single call to action.
If you plan to send a visually oriented message, make sure to outline which graphics or email templates you will need to execute your strategy.
Write subject lines that contain fewer than 9 words and 60 characters, and contain elements of curiosity, urgency, relevance, value, or emotion. Add a preheader to support each subject line.
For example:
- Curiosity: Skillshare: See what’s launching this Sunday.
- Urgency: Investing Webinar: Only 5 Spots Left! or Last chance to get 50% off.
- Relevance: Hey Pittsburgh: BIG savings on flights this week.
- Value: Joe, your May product recommendations are here.
- Emotion: 4 Dangers to Your Pet You Don’t Know About.
There are several tools you can use to evaluate the effectiveness of your subject line, including:
- Net Atlantic’s Subject Line Grader
- Test Subject by Zurb
- Subjectline.com.
Outline the topics you’d like discussed in the email body or provide sample copy as a reference.
Once you have finalized your strategy, use your brief as a guide to help relevant teams write, build, test, and execute your email marketing strategy.
Monitor your metrics and A/B test your email variables to find tactics that have the most positive effect on your KPIs.
A/B test variables like:
- Two different subject lines
- Longer emails versus shorter emails
- Sender names
- The placement of CTAs to your ecommerce store
Metrics that may indicate if your ecommerce marketing strategy is working include:
- Open rates
- Click-through rates
- Conversion rates
- Generated revenue.
The winner of the A/B test depends on your objectives. For example, if your main goal is to have people read the information in the email, then the higher open rate is the winning metric. Although A/B test wait time depends on your deciding metric, waiting 12 hours to a day before deciding the winner is generally recommended, especially for revenue results.
Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T11:25:19Z