It takes more than just offering quality and stylish apparel to earn a customer’s lifetime devotion. You have to put in a little extra effort if you want your customers (and their money) to keep coming back. You’ve got plenty of options when it comes to marketing your ecommerce business online, like content marketing and social media. But if there’s one online channel that continues to be at the top of its game for having personalized sales conversations and driving transactions, it’s email marketing for ecommerce websites. And I’m not just saying that. I’ll let the facts speak for themselves.
- The return on investment of email is approximately 4,300%!
- 80% of consumers say they daily get marketing messages alongside their personal email messages.
- The customer lifetime value (CLV) of shoppers obtained through email is 12% higher than average.
Customer Acquisition or Customer Retention
Many ecommerce businesses spend the majority of their time and resources on new customer acquisition. In fact, 44% of companies have a greater focus on customer acquisition compared to only 18% that focus on customer retention. Don’t let your ecommerce apparel store fall into the first group. Customer retention is the smarter and more cost-effective marketing approach. New customer acquisition costs 5 times more than customer retention, and selling to a new prospect gives you a slim probability of 5-20% while your probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%. And increasing your customer retention rates by just 5% can increase your profits anywhere from 25-95%. It’s clear there’s massive opportunity in nurturing and growing engagement with your current customers rather than focusing all your efforts on acquiring new ones. Doing so also helps ensure that when you’ve got a new product or service, you can sell or upsell them with ease.5 Triggered Email Ideas
Triggered emails are simply automated online marketing messages sent based on a customer’s behavior, and their impact comes from their relevance and timeliness. Hubspot takes it a step further, saying you need relevance plus timeliness plus value to send a powerful email. Triggered emails give you the first two—it’s up to you to add the value. The following are 5 ecommerce email marketing strategies, incorporating relevance, timeliness and value, that are guaranteed to help grow the lifetime value of your customers. 1. Welcome Email
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- Order confirmation email—This email should be sent right after their order was placed confirming that your store received their order.
- Shipping notification email—Notify your customer that their item has shipped, and provide an estimated delivery date and tracking number.
- Delivery notification email—Let the shopper know their item has been delivered by the carrier. If they’re like me and don’t check their mailbox every day or always answer the doorbell when it rings, they may not know they have a package waiting for them. This email is also your best chance to ask the customer to review the product they ordered.
- Upsell email—Thank the shopper again for their purchase (and product review if they gave one) and then sneak in a related item they might want to purchase, like a trendy watch that matches that new belt they just bought. And if you want to help get the upsell, try offering a small discount or free shipping if they buy within a certain timeframe.
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Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
Greg Shuey
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.