We all have received emails that contain mainly marketing materials. Some are important but most of them go right into trash. Automated email marketing is the process where a business automatically sends promotional or reminder emails for their customers. This type of marketing is vital to make a brand or product capture receivers attention and eventually lead them to make a purchase. Automated email marketing is fairly inexpensive to implement and hence more businesses are doing the same.
The Benefits of Automated Email Marketing for Ecommerce
There are plenty of benefits for opting automated email marketing for your business, especially if you are running an ecommerce store. In the web of the internet, your ecommerce store might never be visible to customers and hence the only way to let people know about your existence is by utilizing email marketing. Beyond just that, here are some more reasons why you should opt for automated email marketing.
Personalized Email Marketing
Every business owner knows that no two customers are the same, then why should you be sending the same email to them? With automated email marketing, you can segment your customers on the basis of varying factors like their interests, gender, average spending and more. This allows you to create marketing emails attuned to a focussed demographics of your customers in order to receive a higher click through rate and in turn purchases. From a customer’s perspective, they feel appreciated and valued knowing that they are taken care of on a personal basis.
Increase Customer Engagement
People have been seeing advertisements and promotions night and day. The last thing they need is a mass automated email marketing in their inbox. Most of your probable customers won’t be even opening the emails unless it actually reflects on their personal interests. Having a personalized email sent to your customers increases their chances of opening the email and checking your websites.
Save Money on Marketing
Automated email marketing is considered one of the most affordable ways of marketing. It is relatively easier to create, doesn’t always require too much flashy graphics and is highly focussed on your target audience. All you need is your target audience’s email address. If you don’t have a huge marketing budget, then automated email marketing is your solution.
Analytics
Unlike other forms of marketing techniques, automated email marketing gives you instant feedback on the performance of the campaign. A/B testing is often used in email marketing where two types of email are sent to the same demographic. Based on the results of their performance, the best version is selected for a wider campaign. There are many free and paid automated email marketing softwares to choose from.
Increased Customer Retention
A business thrives with new customers, but a business is only successful if they can retain customers as well. Reminding your existing customers about exclusive offers and new merchandise via automated email marketing helps retain them and will make them visit your store or website more often.
Setting Up Automated Email Campaigns for Your Ecommerce Business
Setting up automated email campaigns might seem like a complicated process, but in reality it is fairly simple. There are many email marketing platforms available for free and paid versions if you want more in depth analytics. But you can always start off with the free versions to see which one suits you best. Some of the popular ones are Mailchimp and Constant Contact. Once you set up your account, you can customize the emails to be sent based on various actions. For example, set an automated email to be sent when a new customer signs up or creates an account, send reminder emails if a customer forgot to checkout after adding things on the cart, remind customers of price drops on products they have shown interest in the past etc.
Addressing Customers
Automated email campaign softwares helps you to create a template that can be edited to reflect customer details. Including customer details on emails gives it a more personalized feeling as the email is exclusively addressed for him/her. Some of the common details that can be edited into a template are the customer’s name, purchase history or any other information you have about them. This enhances customer connection with brand or product.
As mentioned earlier, segmenting customers based on various demographics will help you tailor a better email template to reflect on their interests. You can create templates for customers who made recent purchases or make templates for customers who haven’t made purchases in a while. One email template can talk about products that will go well with recent purchases whereas the other can showcase some of the great offers that are in store.
Time Your Emails
Lets say your probable customers do a 9-5 job and don’t always get time to check their emails during the day. There is no point in sending your marketing email during those hours. Knowing when your customers have a higher chance of opening and interacting with your email is key to conversion rate. With the help of automated email marketing software, you can schedule your email to be sent at a certain time or day. Most businesses schedule emails months ahead for a streamlined marketing process.
Tracking and Analytics
The whole world is changing, so does your customer base. What might have worked last week might not work this week. It is imperative that you keep track of your email marketing’s performance if you want to stay ahead of the competition. With the help of analytical tools, you can see which part of the email most people clicked, for example, if you are a furniture store and you notice that there are more interactions on affordable desks, craft your next email that showcases more affordable desks you have to offer. Similarly, always run an A/B test email with a small group before you send bulk email.
Tips for Creating Effective Automated Emails
Now that you have a glimpse of why automated email marketing is essential for your business, don’t jump right into sending bulk emails. It is highly recommended you do thorough research on crafting the email. Even though automated email marketing is an efficient way to advertise your business, annoying your customers with too many emails will drive them away.
Here are some tips for automated email marketing;
- Always customize and personalize marketing emails before you send them. There is a higher chance a ‘Hi, Jack’ will read the email than ‘buy this’.
- The tone of the email is something you have to keep a check on. Emails originated for more business conversation and still a lot of business conversations happen via emails. Unlike texting, email still uses a good balance of professional and funny tone. Make sure to strike the right balance in order to resonate with your customers.
- Don’t ever forget to include a call to action button or statement with your email. As much as it is evident that your email is intended to be clicked on, your customers won’t click unless you ask them to.
- What you might think is the perfect email might not reflect with your customers. It’s highly recommended that you test two versions of email before you finalize on sending them in bulk.
- Once you have completed the automated email marketing, monitor the performance. See how many people open the email and interact. You will have a better understanding of your customer behaviors.
Conclusion
Automated email marketing is a powerful tool for every business in this day and age. We at RapidCents online payment solutions know that and hence we offer a unique feature for businesses who choose us as their payment processing solution.
RapidCents automatically send reminder emails for your customers in cases where there is missed payment when they sign up for recurring payment with your business. Keeping a tab on all your recurring payments automatically saves you time and headache. Besides recurring payment, we also ensure that the payment method used by the customer stays always updated with our automatic credit card updater. With credit card updater, both the customer and the business owner will be notified about expiring credit cards while also updating new credit card information automatically.
These features barely scratch the surface of our all-in-one payment processing solution. Sign up with us and learn more about how RapidCents can help your business grow exponentially.