In the digital sphere, a decade is a very long time. Something revolutionary today will most likely become obsolete in 10 years. So, suggesting using email marketing for your Shopify store might seem grossly counterintuitive. After all, email has been around for close to a half-century – Ray Tomlinson sent the first electronic mail in 1971. However, email is still going strong today, morphing from just a form of peer-to-peer communication to extensive business-to-customer interaction. Despite the several advancements in digital marketing, email still maintains a strong influence in the industry. If you want to promote your store, you shouldn’t exclude email from your Shopify marketing strategy. Read on to find out just how you can leverage this time-honored medium to promote your Shopify store. How Can You Use Email To Boost Your Shopify Marketing Strategy? In the U.S alone, about a third of people who are part of a retailer’s email list make purchases from that brand when they receive emails. Furthermore, for every dollar directed towards email marketing, the average expected returns amount to $42. With such an attractive outlook, you should place email marketing at the forefront of your Shopify store promotion. Spotify hosts over a million merchants. A sizable percentage of those likely operate in the same general field or niche as your store. You, therefore, need to develop an email marketing strategy that trumps theirs. This is how you can get one up on them by using this long-established medium of communication. Build Your Email List
The initial stage of email marketing for your Shopify store involves building your mailing list. These are the current and prospective clients with whom you want to build a connection. Building this list involves using lead magnets. These are incentives or offers that you present to your online store’s visitors. For example, you can collect leads through welcome or exit popups. Additionally, you can offer discounts, special offers, or free downloadable content in exchange for email addresses. With this collection of email addresses from interested clientele, you’ll be able to market to them and stand a higher chance of converting those leads into sales. Ensure That Your Email Leads Back To A Quality Store Before you hit send and dispatch thousands of virtual envelopes fluttering to your customer base, you need to ensure that your Shopify store is in tip-top condition. Why is this important? Remember you’re competing with several other merchants for a slice of the market share. If your email leads prospective clients back to an unappealing site, you could lose them to your competitors forever. You, therefore, need to ensure that everything is in place. Ensure that you have comprehensive product details. Your product images should be high definition sharp and the page copy should be clear. When visitors from email land on your product pages, they should follow your meticulously crafted sales funnel. In short, optimizing your site is essential to your success before you send out emails. Craft The Substance Of Your Email Carefully
The substance of your emails is highly representative of your brand. Your customers and potential clients draw their first impression of you as a business from this. You, therefore, have to be very particular about the content and voice that you use in your emails. So, create buyer personas for the individuals in the market that you’re targeting. When crafting the copy to go into the emails, address these personas directly in a voice that you believe they relate to. If you’re targeting a young and fun-loving age group, your email copy should be jolly and utilize the colloquial language that your audience relates with and understands. The opposite applies if you’re marketing your product to business-type folks. It’s also prudent to keep the substance of your emails short and sweet. Concise copy presents your message in a manner that doesn’t let the audience lose interest and turn their attention elsewhere. Remember, they have other unread emails that they want to go through. Yours shouldn’t be the one holding up that process. The content of the emails should be free of fluff. Add only beneficial information like product features, specifics of the special offers, or other interesting tidbits. Design Your Email To Appeal To Your Readers Plain text is a no-no; it just won’t do in this instance. An email that has only text characters doesn’t appeal to readers and they will quickly close it and move on to the next item in their inbox. You, therefore, have to come up with a design to go along with your copy. A great design will hold the audience’s attention longer, enabling them to read through your persuasive copy. This increases your chances of converting as many leads as possible. Add some color to your emails. They do a good job of drawing the readers’ attention. The wisest choice is your brand colors. 4 colors or less should do the trick. Exceeding this number can overwhelm the eye and take away from your well-crafted copy. Go for colors that mesh well with the images that you’ve embedded in the email. Furthermore, colors play an important role in highlighting the more important parts of the email. For example, if you have a call-to-action button, it’s prudent to encase it in a color that contrasts it against the general background of the email. Split Test The Various Email Designs Now that you have the email copy and the designs of your choice, you should test them. Split testing – also known as A/B testing – is a great way to determine which designs and copy do a better job of converting leads to sales. Change different elements of the email – subject lines, images, fonts, colors – and compare the success of that email with the original email. If an element works well, add it to the email template. If it doesn’t fare well, strike it from the template and add a different iteration which you also have to test. The advantage of testing your various elements is that you can arrive at the final template early. This means that you will have an email format where all the elements lead to your goal of converting leads.
Welcome Your Customers It’s important to understand that a lot of your success with email marketing depends on choosing the best email marketing services as they are responsible for making sure that your emails actually get delivered to your customers. When you get leads, it’s prudent to welcome your new subscribers via email. As soon as customers subscribe or submit their email addresses, your system should automatically send them a welcome email. This kind of email makes them feel valued and more open to doing business with your Shopify store. When crafting this kind of email, ensure that your welcome message comes first and is prominent. The marketing content can then follow and shouldn’t be aggressive. The customer expects that you’re just welcoming them to the brand family and not pushing products onto them. This is also a great opportunity to introduce the customer to your brand’s voice and personality, connecting with them on another level. Offer Discounts
After you’ve welcomed your customers, a good number of them won’t return to your site for a while due to one reason or the other. You need to remind them that you exist. What better way to accomplish than show them a few promotional offers and discounts. These offers drive traffic to your website. The visitors also have a chance to browse through your product range, landing on items they didn’t even intend to buy but now find interesting. Send promotional emails so that the customers can see some of the great deals they can get if they get into your online store and add items to their carts.
Send Emails When Customers Abandon Carts For every 100 carts, 65 aren’t cleared. Keeping in mind that the average online order is worth around $116, this high rate of cart abandonment means there’s a lot of money being left on the table. You can try to rectify this situation by crafting and sending cart abandonment emails. Your Shopify store analytics will show you who didn’t clear their carts and can also give some insight into why they didn’t do so. Abandonment emails are usually successful if you offer a discount if the customer clears the cart as soon as possible. This incentive will increase the number of cleared abandoned carts, improving your sales. Personalize Your Emails Make every single client feel valued by personalizing each email they receive. They want to feel like your brand cares about them personally and not as part of a large group of customers. Address them by their first name when you’re starting off each email; it can be the welcome, promotional, or even abandonment email. Send promotional emails on the customer’s noteworthy days. If you know their birthdays or anniversaries, you can endear your brand to them by offering discounts or other offers on your products. This small gesture goes a long way in fostering brand loyalty as well as brand advocacy. In Conclusion The email should be a big part of your Shopify marketing strategy. It drives traffic to your site and also increases conversions and sales. Start off by building your list and then develop your brand voice to include in the emails. Design the different elements of the email to capture the attention of your recipients. A/B test these elements to determine which version works best. Personalize the content of your emails to connect with your customers. Send them emails to welcome them to the brand, offer promotions and discounts, and remind them when they have uncleared carts. All this works towards your goal of increasing traffic to your Shopify store and, consequently, increasing sales.