Email marketing is a relatively cheap and effective way to boost traffic to your website and also increase sales. While there are many ways to market your ecommerce website, email marketing affords you the ability to build a relationship with your customer base as well as present opportunities for them to buy the products you’re sell.
Below I would like to show you how to maximize the power of this form of marketing and use it to ultimately boost sales on your website.
1. Capture Names and Emails
There is a popular saying the internet market community that says ‘the money is in the list.’ This rings so true I believe for any business with its main source of sales coming from a website. There are 2 popular services that allow you to capture the name and email of every visitor to your website: aweber and icontact. Do your research on these companies and select the one that suits your budget and needs. While every customer that visits your website today may not buy from you, if you have their name and email, then it presents an opportunity to present your company and its products/services to them in at a later date.
2. Frequency of Emails
Some online entrepreneurs abuse the power they have with people’s emails by sending them unnecessary and selfish messages without any free or actionable benefit presented to their subscriber. Please don’t join that crowd. The other side of this coin are those who have the good sense to capture people’s names and emails but never bother to stay in touch with their subscribers with emails. Balance and consistency is the key. I would advise sending emails on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. During peak periods like the holiday season, you can increase this to 2 emails a week.
3. Focus on a Specific Message
As much as possible, try and focus on one message in your emails so your subscribers know exactly what you want them to do. You could choose one week to highlight products in a particular range you do. Or maybe you’ve added a new product to your catalogue and you want to introduce this to your list. Refrain from confusing them with a totally different message that might distract them from checking out your new product and coming back to you with feedback.
4. Pepper your Email Messages with Links
The main purpose of your emails to your customers is to convince them to read and then visit your website after you’ve presold them on a particular product or service. To this end, add links evenly across your email and instruct readers to click on the links to see more of what you’re trying to draw their attention to.
5. Review your Stats
Most email marketing software programs allow you to check out the stats on your email like how many people opened your email, how many links where clicked, what specific links where clicked etc. Reviewing your stats will allow you to continue and model your emails on past winners and learn from emails that had low responses.
I hope you can see the importance of adding email marketing to your marketing arsenal. Don’t be so surprised if you see a surge of traffic after you send them out. Endeavour to provide useful information and tips plus special discount to members of your list. Email marketing is powerful and a tool that I would like to show you how to use even more effectively.