A couple of weeks ago, I covered the basics of getting started with email marketing. This week I will touch on the basic types of emails and recommending ways to use them.
I will cover 3 of the main types of emails that are effective in retail:
Promotional
Informational
Transaction Based
Promotional Emails
Promotional emails featuring new products, special pricing, seasonal sales, etc. tend to clutter our inboxes. However, there IS a reason why retailers inundate us with them: They Work!
As much as we all despise pure spam (emails we never signed up for touting things we don’t care about), getting contacted by retailers offering products we are interested in doesn’t generally irritate us as a customer. I do try to keep it manageable so I will unsubscribe from retailers that send more than 1 email a week if they don’t offer me the option to limit the number of emails I receive from them. With that in mind, let’s talk about some promotional email best practices.
Frequency
I personally don’t want more than one email a week at most from a retailer unless there is truly something interesting that they couldn’t tell me in the first email I got that week. Many retailers do send one or more emails a day to keep themselves front and center in your world. For me and many other customers, that is too many and if you don’t allow them to opt to receive fewer emails, they (I) will unsubscribe completely. For most small retailers, there aren’t the resources to create that much content so too many emails is generally a non-issue. Much more likely the problem will be not enough emails. If you aren’t sending at least one email a month, you are missing sales that your more active or higher search ranked competitors are going to poach as you won’t be the first place your customer looks for your products. I really prefer once a week if you have the resources to create new and interesting content each week.Content
For promotional emails, subject lines that convey value, excitement, and/or urgency will help with opens. Promotional emails generally have a banner graphic to announce the promotion with details in the body. If the promotion is product oriented, images and direct links to product pages on your ecommerce site for ease of purchase is a must. If the promotion is more general in nature (like 20% off a category or even site-wide), have images and links to landing pages created on your site to emphasis the promotion and to quickly go to featured products. A consistent format/layout is helpful for your team in creating the emails but not necessary from a marketing standpoint.
Informational Emails
Informational emails are used to position you and your company as experts in your field and as a resource for answers about the products/services you provide. The most common form of informational email is the newsletter. Newsletters are emails your customers subscribe to in order to learn more about some type of products or the activities related to a set of products depending on your vertical.
Frequency
Informational emails such as newsletters are generally sent weekly or monthly. You can also send out special bulletins when something important happens in relation to your industry. The resources you have to generate interesting content will help you determine how often to send your informational emails. It is better to send informational emails less frequently if it will give you time to create better content.Content
News that your customers will value and relates to your product line and your customer’s interests is the key to successful informational email campaigns. With an outdoor sporting goods store for example, you might have an article about the pros and cons of popular local campsites or mountain bike trails. Product can also be a focus if you are offering unbiased reviews of new products on the market, etc. but the thrust needs to be informational, not promotional. Another effective way to get a product into the mix is to express how it works in the situation you are writing about. If I were writing about the popular local campsites I mentioned above, I could say something like, “Our XYZ tent is our go to tent for this trip because…” and have a link to the page on my ecommerce site that is offering that tent. Keeping your informational emails separate from your promotional emails is a good way help keep your customers from unsubscribing.
Transaction Based Emails
Transaction based emails are the emails you send as a result of a customer’s interaction with you. Order confirmations, order completion emails, tracking number emails, out of stock emails, abandoned cart (a special case), rate your product or experience emails, etc. are all opportunities to tighten your connection with your customers.
Frequency
Transaction based emails are initiated by a customer action such as adding an item to a cart or actually making a purchase on your ecommerce site. These emails tend to be automatically sent by the ecommerce system you are using (although some types of these emails may require add-ons to your platform in order to be sent). Most systems worth using will send an order confirmation and an order shipped email with tracking number. Many will also let you send order received and order processed emails between the confirmation and shipped emails to keep your customer informed of where their order is in your process. In any case, these emails are typically one shot emails relating only to a particular order and, as such, frequency isn’t determined by you. The exceptions are the abandoned cart email and the rating email. Abandoned cart emails are generally sent 24 hours after a customer adds one or more products to the basket while logged into their ecommerce account with you. Most systems will let you set additional follow ups if the items are still in the basket for set periods of time after the first email is sent. Similarly, emails requesting customers to rate a product after purchase are generally sent 1 week after the product should have arrived, with follow on emails possible if they don’t respond initially.Content
Since transaction based emails a generally automated, they will be template based which may limit your ability to modify them. At the least, these emails should be branded for your store with your logo, contact information, a link to your main site as well as helpful links to places like customer service info. More sophisticated systems will allow you to include product suggestions based on the customer’s current purchase or just feature products that you choose. Offering coupons for the customer’s next purchase from your site is also a popular option to encourage repeat business or offer them for completion of the product rating email requests.
Most successful retailers make use of at least 2 of the 3 main types with many using all 3. Coordinated with the email marketing schedule I discussed in my previous article, your email marketing strategy can be the rocket boost you really need to succeed online.