How To use email marketing to increase sales

Can we use email marketing to increase sales? Lets find out the answer of this question.

There are approx 3x more email accounts than Facebook & Twitter accounts combined. This means most of the people uses email and checks their emails at least once a day.

In fact email marketing is 40x more effective than social media marketing like Facebook and Twitter when it comes to gaining new customers and if its done in right manner.

This makes email marketing a great tool for generating sales to your stores, if used right. But there’s a problem most people don’t know how to use email marketing rightly to increase sale.

In this article, we’ll learn the process of getting started with email marketing to help you generate more sales to your store.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is the art of sending marketing messages to prospective and current customers via email to generate more sales for your store.

So we can say that, email marketing is the process of targeting your visitors and customers through email. It helps your store to boost conversions and revenue by providing subscribers and customers with valuable information to help achieve their goals.

You should use emails to build strong relationship with your subscribers and provide them relevant, valuable information that will help them take action on their goals.

The Importance of email marketing

According to Radicati Group, more than 50% of the world’s population uses email as of 2020. And this number will increase up to more than 4.3 billion by 2023. In fact 92% of adults in the United States use email, and 61% of these email users are checking and sending emails daily.

We’ve put together a list of reasons why you needs to start using email marketing today to reach and connect to your prospect customers to increase your sales:

1. Email marketing is cost-effective

Email marketing is relatively inexpensive when compared to other marketing options such as like TV, radio, or direct mail. Email marketing allows you to reach a large number of customers at a rate of nearly nothing per message.

Email marketing generates the highest RIO for digital marketers. According to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA),  for every $1 spent, email marketing generates $40 in ROI. This makes email marketing the perfect digital marketing tactic for small businesses because its relatively inexpensive to start and maintain email marketing campaigns.

Also, email marketing tactics like segmentation and triggered campaigns help you maximize your RIO even more. This cost-benefit is a major reason why you should take the advantage of email marketing.

2. Everyone uses email

As already mentioned, more than half of world population uses email right now and it is likely to grow only. This means no matter what your niche is you can easily reach your target audience using email marketing.

Emails gives you a direct line of two-way communication with your target audience and it helps you in building your brand and better understanding your customers.

3. Reach people on any device

With more online shopping are done on mobile devices and also nearly two-thirds of all emails being opened on a mobile device, email marketing is one of the best tools you can use to target your potential customers.

In order to ensure that your email marketing campaign is effective for mobile consumers, you need to create email content with a responsive design. Any images or videos that you use within your content should be small enough to be loaded easily and quickly in mobile devices. Also your email content should be short and all the links that leads to pages should be mobile responsive.

4. Email is perfect for personalized, targeted messaging

When you write a post on your social media channels, you address your audience as a whole. But in emails you interacting with one particular person. By using your email marketing software intelligently, you can address people individually by name, select certain emails only for certain members of your list and eventually arrive privately in their personal inbox.

Something as simple as using the recipient’s  name can make all the difference when communicating with your customers and leads. According to Campaign Monitor, emails with subject lines that include the recipient’s name are 26% more likely to be opened.

Segmentation is one effective tactic that you can use to segmenting your audience into lists, and sending each list a tailored email message. According to Campaign Monitor, marketers that use segmented campaigns, have noted a 760% increase in revenue.

By segmenting your lists, you can be sure that your subscribers are getting the types of content and offers that they love. This increases relevancy, which can lower unsubscribe rates and increase your store sales.

5. Email marketing is action oriented

Email marketing offers small businesses the opportunity to provide action oriented content straight to consumer inboxes, and that to at a much lower cost than other marketing methods

Every marketing email carries a call to action. You’re asking your subscribers  to acknowledge your brand, to sign-up, to learn about your new products or sale, to visit your website, to make a purchase, etc..

You can not only send out regular newsletters, but also use email automation based on triggers of your customers. You can easily insert call to action buttons in your emails and these buttons can do a multiple things like – Ask people to sign-up for your latest course, direct them to your website,take them to your sales page, offer discounts etc.

6. Email lets you build brand awareness

Building brand awareness is an essential activity for every small business that wants to grow. Brand awareness is that intangible quality, which inspires consumers to choose your products over competitors.

Therefore, if you are a digital marketer wants to increase your brand awareness, leveraging email marketing is the key. It will not only help you stand out over competition and retain your existing customers but, also help you engage new customers and increase your ROI.

7. Emails are measurable

When you uses any email marketing software like MailerLite or Mailchimp, you’ll be able to track who opened your email, which links were clicked, and who are the people who unsubscribed.

You can easily get the status of how your email campaigns are performing, make adjustments and improve your effectiveness. Email marketing metrics are important to monitor and measure your internet marketing strategy.

Growing Your Email List

An email list is a collection of email addresses that that you have collected by appealing your potential customers through lead-generating campaigns.  So, in order to maximize the return your email marketing efforts, you need to grow a great list of engaged people to send your emails.

Building an engaged and targeted subscriber list is one of the most important task of email marketing. Often new store owners simply install a sidebar opt-in form on their website and hope their subscriber will grow automatically. This is simply not going to happen.

Below, we’ll learn some strategies that will help you build and maintain an engaged subscriber list.

1. Use Multiple Email Subscription Forms

If you want to get more email addresses in your list, then you need add multiple signup forms at prominent places in your website. Simply putting a sidebar opt-in form on your website will not work. Multiple signup forms provides your users more opportunities to join your email list.

You can combine sidebar sign up form with a sticky footer floating bar as well as lightbox popup subscription form. This will make your signups form more noticeable and will increase the signup percentage of your forms.

Also remember that multiple forms at same time can annoy your visitor and they might leave your website. An excellent idea is to set a display rule to only show floating footer bar opt-in when the user has scrolled past the sidebar opt-in, and show a lightbox popup only when they’re about to leave.

2. Use opt-in incentives to grow your list

An opt-in incentive also known as lead magnet is basically a bribe you offer your potential buyer in exchange of their personal contact information like name, email, phone number etc.

Offering opt-in incentives motivates your visitor to subscribe your newsletter and it helps to grow your email list. This does not needs to be too big, in fact it could be an e book, printable, email course or challenge, video training or tutorial, webinar or audio recording etc

 3. Add sign-up Button on your Facebook Page

Facebook offers a powerful platform to build an audience for your business. But it’s also important to move relationships off Facebook and encourage your fans and followers to join your subscription list.

Facebook’s call-to-action button appears near the “Like” button on your Facebook page and is a great way to encourage email sign-ups.

Add the “Sign Up” button and link to your sign-up form so your Facebook visitors can join your subscription list.

4. Try Gated Content to Turn Blog Posts into Lead Magnets

 Try gating some of your content to get email subscriptions of your website visitors..

This simply means that some part of a blog post is hidden. For example, 1/3 of the post is available to read, and rest part is blocked from reading further until the visitor enters their email address to “unlock” the content.

This is easy to implement as you can use content you already have. Your gated content should be highly valuable, well-written, and informative in order to give the reader the expected payoff otherwise your reader won’t be happy and they may leave your website.

If it is not used properly, then it could annoy your site visitors. But when it is done right, it could be very effective in generating leads and getting subscribers to your list.

5. Use Discounts and Deals

A discount or exclusive voucher coupon is what motivates a customer to finally make a decision. So, why not use this opportunity to encourage them into joining your email list?

Everyone loves saving money and using coupon codes to buy their favorite products and save money. n fact, email coupons and discount codes are one of the most effective ways to drive sales for your online store.

If you can use coupon codes in exchange of the email address in right manner, you can easily increase your subscribers list.

6. Create engaging thank-you page

You can even use your thank-you page to grow your email list. When a visitors sign-up your email list you can re-direct them to the thank-you page.

Then there are 2 ways to grow your sales and email list. On the thank-you page you can offer a discount or offer to your subscriber. This can immediately turn many subscriber into a buyer.

You can even use thank-you page as a subscriber generating page. You can create a referral program and offer your subscriber some small gifts in exchange of email address of their friends and family, who will be interested in your products.

Choosing an Email Marketing Service

Now that you have a great subscriber list, you need to send them your newsletters and other marketing emails.To do this you need a good email marketing services.

An email marketing tool helps you to promote your products and services to the people effectively. You can run an email campaign only with the best email marketing tools that get more sales to your store. A good email marketing app also display the stats of your email campaign and how your email marketing growing.

But, when it comes to choosing the best email marketing service, There are lot of options available in the market. In fact, there are more than 30+ email marketing services (both free and paid).

Here’s a list of the some best email marketing services for small businesses

#1. Constant Contact

Constant Contact is the one of the most popular email marketing platform for small businesses. It comes with a 60-day free trial and offers users multiple customization and integrations options while keeping it simple and user-friendly.

Founded in 1995, Constant Contact has grown to become one of the biggest email marketing services. They offers unmatched support with live chat, emails, and discussion forums. They also have a vast library of resources.

Email Plans:
Constant Contact pricing is based on the size of your subscribers list.

• $20/month – 0 – 500 subscribers.
• $45/month – 501 – 2500 subscribers.
• $65/month – 2501 – 5000 subscribers.
• $95/month – 5001 – 10,000 subscribers.

Constant Contact is best for small businesses who are new to email marketing.

They also offer 60 days free trails – get started with Constant Contact today.

#2. ConvertKit

ConvertKit was founded in the year 2013 by Nathan Barry. It is the best email marketing tool for bloggers and publishers. It was built specifically for online creators like vloggers, bloggers, authors, Instagram stars, course creators and more.

One of its biggest features is its ability to create email automation workflows. It provides a visual email builder, so you can visually see how your email automation sequences will work.

There’s also a built-in landing page editor that’s very useful, this means you can start email marketing even if you don’t have a website. You just need a source of traffic like your YouTube channel, or social media accounts.

They also allows free 14-day trial to test drive their services before actually buying it.

Email Plans:

• $29/month – 0 – 1000 subscribers.
• $49/month – 1000 – 3000 subscribers.
• $79/month – 3000 – 5000 subscribers.

ConvertKit is best for publishers, bloggers and course creators – get started with ConvertKit today.

#3. MailChimp

Mailchimp is more than just an email marketing service provider, its an all-in-one marketing platform. It also comes with important features that let you convert your visitors into subscribers and customers.

Mailchimp’s features are powerful as well as affordable for digital marketers of all sizes, whether you’re a blogger, small business, or an enterprise. Mailchimp also offers in-built templates and ready-made segments so that you can create professional emails more quickly.

Email Plans:
Mailchimp offers pricing based on the number of subscribers:

• Free – includes 7 marketing channels, basic templates,and 1-click automatons.
• Essential – Starts from $9.99/month for all email templates, A/B testing, custom branding, and 24/7 support.
• Standard – Starts from $14.99/month. Includes automation series, retargeting ads, custom templates, and advanced audience insights.
• Premium – Starts from $299/month, this plan includes advanced segmentation, unlimited seats and role-based access, phone support, and multivariate testing.

Mailchimp is best for marketing beginners – get started with Mailchimp today.

#4. MailerLite

If you’re looking to build an email list on a tight budget, then you might want to consider MailerLite.

MailerLite lets you grow your email list for free until you reach 1000 subscribers. They provide you with advanced technologies to attract your visitors and convert them into subscribers, such as landing page, popups and easy-to-use form builder. The major feature is their drag and drop editor that lets you create professional looking emails easily.

It’s very easy to use, beginner’s friendly. The interface is very easy to use and you can create emails pretty quickly. They does not provide any advanced automation or analytics features but it’s still best for users who want to keep things simple.

Email Plans:
With MailerLite, the more subscribers you have, the more you pay each month.

• Free – Upto 1000 subscribers, 12,000 emails per month, and limited features.
• $10/month – For 1 – 1000 subscribers, unlimited emails per month, and all features.
• $15/month – For 1001 – 2500 subscribers, unlimited emails and all features.
• $30/month – For 2501 – 5000 subscribers, unlimited emails and all features.
• $50/month – For 5001 – 10,000 subscribers, unlimited emails and all features.

MailerLite is best for beginners who wants to grow their email list. If you’re on a tight budget, then I strongly recommend MailerLite. Get started with MailerLite today.

#5. GetResponse

GetResponse is more than an email marketing software, it comes many online marketing features  like landing page creator and webinar solution.

GetResponse also publishes a lot of useful marketing resources such as courses, whitepapers, and videos that helps you in your email marketing campaigns. If you’re looking for an email marketing software that comes with a beautiful and fast user interface, then look no further than GetResponse.

Email Plans:

• Basic – $15/month, includes email marketing, autoresponders, unlimited landing pages, automation templates, and more.
• Plus – $49/month, includes everything in the Basic plan along with list building funnels, sales funnels, sell e-products, webinars (max 100 attendees), and more.
• Professional – $99/month, includes webinars (max 300 attendees), paid webinars, webinar funnels, automation builder, and more.
• Enterprise – $1199/month, includes advanced features like dedicated IP address, transactional emails, webinars and many more.

GetResponse is best for beginners and digital marketers. Get started with GetResponse today.

If you’re a small business owner who’re just getting started with email marketing, then MailerLite is the best email marketing service for you.  If you have an eCommerce store where you want more features such as abandoned carts, first-time users, return buyers, etc, then I recommend that you use GetResponse.

Email Marketing Campaigns to Increase Sales

Now that you have got the email list and also decided the email marketing software to use to sending email newsletters to your subscribers. Now the question is what to send and when to send?

Email marketing is all about sending right emails at the right time to the right prospects. This will bring more sales to your online store. If you will send right emails at the wrong time to the wrong prospect, they may opt out of your emails or even worse, move to a competitor.

Below are some e-commerce marketing campaigns that will help you increase your sales.

1. New subscriber welcome email

Subscribing to your email list is essentially the first interaction your visitors makes with your business. So, it’s important that you start the conversation to deepen the relationship and guide your new subscribers to take the next step. This email campaign is called new subscriber welcome email series.

This is your opportunity to introduce your business, show your new subscribers what to expect from your email program, and provide them with the resources so that they can be motivated to buy your products.

You must immediately send the welcome email as soon as customer subscribe your email list. If your introduction to a new subscriber isn’t memorable, they may never return back to your store.

Also, new subscriber welcome emails get 4x more opens and 5x more clicks than other promotional emails. If you don’t send a welcome email to your subscriber, you’re missing a huge engagement and conversion opportunity.

A few things to consider to get the best results from your new subscriber welcome emails:

• Always use a double opt-in for your email collection forms. This ensures that you get correct email addresses and minimizes unsubscribes.
• Send the first email immediately after subscribing. Subscribing to your email list means they are requesting for more information.
• Follow up with a customer service email.The purpose is to get more information about the customer’s interests and expectations, so you can make future emails as relevant as possible.

2. New customer welcome email series

The new customer welcome series is the email that you send once a customer purchased your products for the first time. The main objective of this is to provide an excellent buying experience by welcoming new customers to your brand.

It’s important to make the full use of the opportunity to encourage new customers to make a second purchase on your store.

A few things to consider to get the best results from your new customer welcome emails:

• Send a series of welcome emails – At least 3 to 4 emails should be sent in welcome mail series.
• Introduce your brand to your customer and use it to establish your brand credibility and trust.
• Follow up with additional product and marketing information.Include information about your social media, your blog, and try to up-sell customers similar products they have purchase.
• Include a discount in the last email. Everyone loves discount and a discount coupon in your email can encourage your customer to buy more products from your store.

3. Abandoned cart email

According to Sale Cycle almost 77% of people abandon their carts online without making any purchase. This means 3 out of 4 potential customers on who add your products in cart leave your eCommerce store without completing checkout process. Most of the visitors citing shipping costs as their number one reason for the cart abandonment.

You can turn most of your cart abandoners into customers by sending them cart recovery email and offering them free shipping or discount code.

An abandoned cart email campaign enables you to reach out to customers who have abandoned their cart, and bring them back to your online store to complete their purchase. 

A few things to consider to get the best results from your cart abandonment emails:

• Send multiple emails. You should send a series of emails to recover the as much abandoned carts as possible.
• Send your first email within 30 minutes of cart abandonment. It’s important that you reach customers before they purchase products from your competitors, and encourage them to buy products from your store.
• Intelligently employ offers and discounts. It may not be great idea to offer a discount immediately, in the first abandoned cart email, Only after knowing the exact reason of cart abandonment, offering a discount in next email reliably increases conversions.
• Make your abandoned cart emails mobile friendly. As most of the internet traffic comes from mobile devices, so your abandoned cart emails must be mobile friendly. Your abandoned cart email performance will drop if your emails are not mobile responsive.

4. Back in stock notification best practices

When customer add an item to the cart that is out-of-stock, it causes inconvenient to you and the customer. But it’s a valid reason for a customer not to buy your products.

As the customer wanted to buy that particular product, so you need to remove the obstacle for the customer. All you need to do is inform the customer as soon as the item is back in stock. Sending an email when the product gets restocked is an excellent conversion opportunity.

You can still send browse cart abandonment emails for products that were in stock when the customer abandoned them. Simply exclude out of stock items from the abandonment email.

A few things to consider to get the best results from your back in stock notification emails:

• Use image of the product in the email. Visually reminding the customer of what they wanted to purchase increases the chances of conversions.
• Use session regeneration, if possible. Make it easy and possible for customers to complete their purchases once the items have been restocked.
• Make alternative buying suggestions if the item won’t be restocked for a long time or will never be restocked.

5.  The Discount Email

Discounting is an effective e-commerce marketing strategy which help extend the life of your cart abandonment emails.

If you send a cart abandonment series to a customer, and they don’t complete their purchase, there’s still an opportunity to win the sale: when the price of the abandoned product goes down.

According to research, 54% of shoppers are likely to purchase abandoned products if they’re offered again at a discounted price. So when you reduce the price of a product, send a discounted price email to all your customers who received a cart abandonment email for that product, but haven’t purchased yet. 

A few things to consider to get the best results from your discount emails:

• Offer discounts to only subscribers that engage with your campaigns like opening emails, clicking links etc.
• Use session regeneration for price drop emails sent to customers, if possible.

6. Cross sell emails

If someone has purchased one of your products, and you know they would get value from a related or complementary item, then it’s the perfect time to send a cross sell email to that customer.

Cross-selling involves recommending a related or complementary product similar to the products they have already purchased. Just find two products from your tore that can be used together. Then build a segment of customers who have purchased only one product and not the other. Then send the emails to the customers recommending the other products as cross sell.

Conclusion

So I hope, I have made it clear to you what is email marketing, its importance and how you can use it to get more sales to your store. Do tell me your comments and suggestions in the comments box below.