The e-Commerce industry is growing like never before over the past year. Shopify has recently established that the e-Commerce industry has grown the equivalent of 10 years in no more than three months. This is indeed a massive growth. However, will this growth persist?
The answer is a straightforward yes, but only if with the right marketing tool. Email is the most popular marketing tool that is not simply a channel for delivering automated messages. If treated as a ‘nucleus’ or core component of your e-Commerce brand marketing, it can revolutionize your business. Following are ways to treat email as a nucleus for all e-commerce brand marketing.
1. Get started with email
While email marketing has proven effective to achieve desired business growth, you must consider initiating work with various Email Service Providers (ESP) to get started with the email. Establishing your core email flows setup is the first step in that direction. You can exploit the ‘Email Marketing Nucleus’ approach for your marketing strategy in the following 8 kind of flows:
a) Welcome flow
This flow helps you guide your customers towards purchasing process once they sign up to your mailing list. As customers have chosen to sign up to your mailing list, it implies they are interested in your brand or services you offer. Thus, now it’s your turn to start building a good relationship with them. Welcome flow help you with that by-
- Welcoming new subscribers
- Guiding subscribers towards a lead generation activity
- Getting subscribers to purchase once they complete a lead generation activity
b) Post-purchase follow up/Thank you flow
This flow is crucial, as, by this time, you have turned a subscriber into a customer. Now is a great chance to make modifications in your messaging to retain your customers. This flow can be segmented based on how many orders have been placed. Therefore, you can pursue your customers for repeat purchase and gather reviews from other customers. This flow has the following objectives:
- Building relationship with new customers
- Creating user-generated content with the help of customer reviews
- Guiding them towards a repeat purchase.
c) Browse abandonment
Browse abandonment flow helps you offer a personalized experience to your subscribers. It presents you with an opportunity to approach your customers at the decision-making mode. It has the following objectives:
- Assisting subscribers to purchase when their interest is high
- Helping subscribers understand the benefits of your product
- Offering a personalized online shopping experience
d) Cart abandonment
Cart abandonment has the following objectives:
- Recovering an abandoned cart
- Helping customers with purchase at their peak interest point
- Increasing revenue
As subscribers have already shown interest, this flow further helps you achieve high conversion rates. You must consider giving a personalized touch to your message at this point.
e) Customer win-back
This flow is aimed at:
- Re-engaging subscribers
- Segmenting customers by their purchase history and behaviour
- Getting additional information
This helps you improve deliverability by letting you reduce unsubscribe and spam rate through manual suppressions.
f) Prospect conversions
This flow is designed for engaging new subscribers who haven’t yet made any purchase or those subscribers who haven’t yet purchased. It is for building a relationship and pursuing your prospective customers.
h) Identify unengaged subscribers
This is important for automating the list cleansing process. It is evoked if the customer winback flow does not work out.
With this well-defined baseline, you are now ready to assess your tech stack.
2. Assess your tech stack
If you are using an e-commerce platform for marketing and customer engagement solutions, you must assess each app you are using on that platform. You can consider asking the following questions for the assessment:
- What direct revenue has been ascribed to a particular app over the last six months?
- How much time and monetary resources you could have saved in the last six months using this app?
After evaluating these key aspects, you can now work on filling the gaps you may have in your stack.
3. Fill the gaps in the tech stack
The ultimate goal of your email marketing strategy is to develop a long-lasting relationship with your customers, thereby maximize your long-term revenue. For that to happen, you must avail enjoyable and effortless relationship with your customers. However, you must map out your customer journey to know if you are meeting customer expectations.
There might be some issues like; customers are not receiving well-designed and on-brand emailing style as they were receiving when they first became your subscribers.
Or they might not be able to easily find how many points they have earned and how many of them are not used in their loyalty program.
Whatever maybe the issue, you must identify and resolve it on time to fill the gap in the tech stack.
Concluding Thoughts
Email is yet to dissolve its significance as an effective marketing tool. It can be a game-changer in defining and sustaining your relationship with customers. However, to use email as a nucleus of your e-Commerce brand marketing, you must develop a structure of your email marketing strategy. If you follow a well-defined structure, you ensure improved lead generation and higher conversions. Thus, give a boost to your business with email marketing and take a flight to desired business growth and expansion.
