How Email Marketing is Crucial for e-Commerce Companies

I know I will succumb to the temptation or at least rethink my vow to save well for the current quarter!

All these messages are meticulously crafted in few sentences and involve a smart combination of video and image content and are sent out, regularly. In new age marketing terms, I call these efforts of e-Commerce brands and companies’ successful email marketing campaigns.

As per statistical data based on research by the Onmisend, a renowned e-Commerce marketing platform, sending a customer a series of three automated emails can increase orders by 90 percent. The report analysed more than 964 million emails sent by over 7,200 e-Commerce companies to derive insightful data on email campaigns and automated messaging strategies that drive conversion. The findings also revealed that sending automated emails will drive open rate and click rates up to 309 percent and 455 percent, respectively.

Email marketing is adopted by many e-Commerce brands to engage with their existing customers and generate revenue by incentivizing sales activities through discounts, promotional offers and providing valuable information on new products or relevant content about the brand.

The major part of the decision of reaching customers through emails is influenced by the fact that a quarter of website traffic consists of returning visitors. Moreover, the possibilities of people revisiting an e-Commerce website or mobile app is slim unless the brand’s marketers take initiatives to keep them coming back. And, the cost and effort of acquiring new customers is higher than that of dealing with existing customers.

When these facts surface as harsh realities for e-Commerce brands and online businesses, they resort to reaching back to customers or prospects after permissively receiving their consent through signups to receive emails, updates, event notifications and newsletters. Insights from another survey also suggests that goal behind email marketing is to scale business. About 29 percent of the participants in the research said they use it to retain their customer base and 22 percent reported using it for increasing engagement.

Email marketing is arguably one of the most successful and popular methods of engaging with customers across all marketing channels including search and social media. According to data from MarketingSherpa, about 72 percent of the customers prefer receiving promotional content via emails in comparison to 17 percent that prefer social media.

But, the outcome of communicating with customers via emails?

There are plenty of brands and e-Commerce firms that repeatedly iterate the marketing content and messages with better personalization features and to translate engagements with better clicks on call of action buttons, accompanying the content, etc.

For every dollar spent, email marketing generates 44 USD worth of revenue.

Given below are some brief pointers on the advantages of email marketing for the e-Commerce community:

• Massive Scale of Reach: In just a click, brands can send marketing emails to vast number of customers or prospects anywhere across the world. Email marketing can be practised even at national, local or hyperlocal level for brands and businesses to make their campaigns more specific to the audience’s geographies.
• Cost-effective Marketing Channel: Budget limitations is the biggest constraint that impacts the performance of the most marketing actions. Email marketing is one exception as it is a cost-effective investment that yields enormous rewards in form of ROI. Another advantage of email marketing is that it does not include additional cost associated with engaging middlemen as it forms a direct medium of communication between the brands and its customers.
• Measurable Impact on Sales and Customer Engagement: Brands can see and track quantifiable changes on the sales and customer actions like clicks, signups, referrals, online purchases and reorders resulting from email marketing campaigns. Unlike other forms of marketing campaigns where it takes days and months of waiting as well as research to measure the impact on sales, turn over and customer’s brand perceptions, email marketing has an instant impact.
• Boost Sales and Encourage Online Buying: Email campaigns with relevant call of action buttons that can result in instant purchases entice customers and drive online buying behaviors. Additionally, email marketing campaigns are a thorough mix of strategies based on customers’ psychology to ethically encourage impulse buying. This ultimately increases sales and revenue.
• Disseminate Targeted and Personalized Content: Email marketing also helps marketers segment their audience based on the responses to emails and online behaviors to send targeting and personalized content. Most email marketing tools also include email segmentation, automation and personalization features that makes it easier to send relevant messages to the right audience at the right time.
• Increase Customer Retention: By engaging with existing customers and reaching them through emails, businesses and brands remain organically connected the customers. This association increases the possibilities of re-purchase and re-engagements with the brands by offering attractive discounts, loyalty points and rewards to customers to curb attrition or losing them to rival e-Commerce companies.
• Easy Customization and User-friendly Features: Email marketing software and tools are easy to implement and run compelling marketing campaigns that result positively on the profits and revenue. Most tools and solutions carry features for customizing content and marketing messages using unique templates, layouts, attractive color schemes, drag and drop options, texts, video and call of action buttons to expedite conversion.

Armed with all the above advantages and measurable impacts on the outcomes, e-Commerce brands can chart out plans and strategies for further business expansions and profitability. That is the power of email marketing.