10 Automated Emails Every eCommerce Company Needs

10 Automated Emails Every eCommerce Company Needs

10 Automated Emails Every eCommerce Company Needs

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Liz-headshot

Meet the Author

Liz Hersh is the founder of Hersh PR and Marketing, a digital marketing agency. Together with a team of marketing professionals she helps clients generate leads and increase revenue. 

Use Email Automation to Improve eCommerce Sales 

There is no denying that automated emails are one of the best methods to nurture leads and convert them into paying customers.  When you have an effective email campaign that provides significant value to those who follow your content, your organization can generate repeat conversions with minimal ongoing effort.

Your email list is the backbone of your eCommerce business, and making sure you are sending the right kinds of emails to those who have signed up for your list is incredibly important.

Why Automate Your Emails?

The savviest eCommerce companies understand that consistent communication with an email list generates web traffic and sales. By automating these emails, you’re freeing up time to spend on other areas of the business.

Automated emails are carefully planned emails sent to subscribers at a specific time or as a response to the actions of users on a website. Automation allows eCommerce companies to save time, boost sales, warm up leads, and create highly targeted offers.

Think of automated emails as a function of your business. Just as your business contains different departments that take care of each aspect of the business, the same can be said for automated emails.  Make them a regular part of your communications and marketing, and you will understand what a game-changer this can be for your business.

Transactional Emails

The purpose of transactional emails is to confirm that your customer has completed a purchase and that their order is on its way. Obviously, this matters because you need to let your customers know their order has been received and is being processed. We consider these to be standard transactional emails:

  • Order confirmation
  • Shipping notification
  • Delivery notification

As straightforward as this may seem, there are a few other things that you can do with transactional emails:

  • Provide an offer for their next purchase. It could be a fixed discount or free shipping.
  • Remind customers of products they might have been interested in purchasing.
  • Obtain feedback on your ordering process.

New Subscriber Welcome Email Series

The first major step in any prospect’s buying process is to subscribe to an email list. After they have subscribed to your email list, we recommend initiating a new subscriber email series.

This series matters because if a prospect is interested enough to subscribe to your email list, it turns them into a hot lead who is more likely to buy from you.

Emails in this series should be sent out immediately. Consider including content such as your most popular videos or blogs, more insight about your company and your mission, or an offer exclusively for new subscribers. The intent is to keep them engaged and encourage frequent visits to your website.

Pro Tip: You don’t have to activate all 10 of these automated emails at once. Start with what you can and expand as your company grows. 

New Customer Welcome Email Series

Once a customer has bought something from your organization, they need to be reassured that not only did they make the right decision, they also need to be assured that they are valued. The new customer welcome email series does this.

The emails in this series need to do two things. They need to cement that you provided a seamless buying experience and they need to encourage new customers to make a second purchase.

Start these emails off with a strong brand statement to establish credibility and trust. You can follow that up with information about social media channels and support resources if necessary. We also suggest including a request for product feedback, just make sure that email will arrive only after the order is delivered!

Abandoned Cart Emails

Abandoned cart emails in your campaign have the potential to be some of your most profitable emails. These need to be taken seriously.

Potential customers abandon their carts for various reasons, and the goal of this email is to get them to complete the purchase. These emails should be sent about a half hour after the cart is abandoned. Focus on helping the customer more than selling to them. They may have abandoned their cart due to technical issues so consider including contact information for customer support.

Back in Stock Notifications

Items that are out of stock are inconvenient for everybody involved and it can be a legitimate reason why a customer doesn’t buy anything. This is where the back in stock notification comes in handy.  It will let customers know that what they wanted is back in stock, which will hopefully lead them to buy.

Most of the time, back in stock notifications can take the place of an abandoned cart email in that it makes more sense for your customer to receive this email instead of the abandoned cart email if anything in your catalog is out of stock.

Showing pictures of the product that was previously out of stock, linking the email to a regenerated session of their cart and making alternative suggestions if the item has been discontinued are the best ways to use back in stock notifications.

Product Education Emails or Evergreen Blog Articles

Content in the form of information that provides infinite value is known as “evergreen” content.

If executed properly, these can be very profitable emails in your campaigns. These messages can convert followers into buyers and they can convince buyers to purchase more. Product education emails can vastly improve a buying experience and give you loads of opportunities to cross sell.

Product education emails should be part of your new customer or new subscriber email series, as they can provide information that those on your email list will appreciate tremendously.

Cross Sell Emails

There are two steps you should take when somebody buys one of your products.

First, make sure that the customer’s buying experience is as perfect as it can get. Make sure there is product education content attached to the purchase if necessary, and make sure any questions about the product can be answered easily.

The second thing you should do is send a cross sell email. This is where you send an email that sells something that is related to what was just sold to the customer. Cross sell emails are important because they will help your customers find something else that is useful for them as well as help you generate more sales.

Pro Tip: Test different variables like subject lines, delivery times and workflow spacing to determine what generates the best response. 

VIP Emails

Your most valuable customers ought to be treated differently than customers who just come and go. When your VIP customers remain happy, they will keep buying from you and you won’t have to work as hard to generate conversions.

This is where the VIP email comes in. VIP emails target the top 5 to 20 percent of customers, giving them an incentive to continue making purchases.

Executing these kinds of emails means you need to know who your VIP customers are. When it comes to determining your VIP customers, consider how much your customers have purchased and how frequently they have ordered from you. You can even take this a step further by creating a formal rewards program with different levels based on how often someone makes a purchase.

Win Back Emails

When a customer has not purchased something from your website for a long time, you’re going to need to win them back.  These emails are important because once a website visitor has bought from you, the chances of them buying from you again are very high, and a well executed win-back email campaign can accomplish this.

Executing a solid win-back email campaign is done by determining when customers lose interest. One way you can do this is by tracking how much time has passed between purchases. The average time between orders will vary from one online retailer to the next. Determine what makes sense for your business and build an automation with an offer they can’t refuse.

Date-Based Emails

Everyone can relate to important dates and milestones, whether it is a birthday, anniversary, or another similar event. Your customers and subscribers will appreciate anybody who remembers their birthdays or the date of their first purchase.

Executing date-based emails is as easy as collecting a subscriber’s birthday or anniversary, then putting those emails into your campaign. You’ll then be able to offer anything you want to them within your date-based email.

Your Next Steps 

Having one email campaign for everyone who visits your website is simply not enough if you are serious about acquiring and keeping customers for your brand.

Ten different email campaigns may seem overwhelming, but given that most email campaign software allows you to easily build automations with different kinds of triggers and parameters, this is much easier than it looks.

Hopefully the tips above will help improve your eCommerce conversions. Have more questions about setting up successful email automation campaigns? Reach out to us directly.

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7 Marketing Metrics Every Manufacturer Should be Tracking

7 Marketing Metrics Every Manufacturer Should be Tracking

7 Marketing Metrics Every Manufacturer Should be Tracking

Don’t waste time on meaningless metrics. Learn how your company can measure goals and track performance with these KPIs.

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How to Use Data to Run More Effective Campaigns 

What gets measured gets not only managed, but improved.

Of the dozens of marketing metrics that you can track, we’ve identified seven lead generation metrics that will ensure your organization runs more effective campaigns. In order to set the right goals and prove returns on your marketing spend, you must have a handle on these metrics.

The best part is that most of these can be easily tracked using Google Analytics or similar tracking tools. Sure, there are more advanced tools available, but you won’t need to spend a lot of money to obtain insight on these basic data points.

#1 Website Visits/Traffic Sources

Site visits are a basic but very important metric. Every campaign should have a “visits” goal because traffic is often the early indicator of how effective your message is — or if it’s time to update a campaign’s creative. If clicks to a landing page are lower than expected, then the message, graphics and/or the call to action needs tweaking.

A closely related metric is traffic sources. Within Google Analytics, there are several primary “sources” you need to be aware of:

Direct Traffic: Visits that comes from those who directly typed or copied the URL of your website into their browser, clicked on a bookmark or clicked a link in an email/SMS chat.

Search/Organic Traffic: Visits to your website from an unpaid search result on Google, Bing or Yahoo.

Referral Traffic: Traffic that comes from a third-party website rather than a search engine. This could include links from press releases, guest articles, business directories or social media websites.

Paid Website Traffic: These are visits to your website from people who have clicked on a Google paid search ad or display ad. This only applies to businesses running advertising campaigns, and you’ll need proper tracking set-up within Analytics.

All four of these are equally important in that search engines like to see traffic coming from each source. There aren’t any hard and fast rules about the ideal breakdown in traffic, but direct traffic and organic traffic are still highly coveted. Take steps to improve traffic from all sources and you’ll be moving in the right direction.

Pro Tip: Use your existing data in Google Analytics to create a baseline. Understanding your baseline is critical to developing an effective marketing strategy.

Ready to take action? Let’s have a conversation

#2 Time Spent on Site

Do visitors to your website leave after quickly scanning your home page? Or do they spend time digging into the content and your services? Most website visitors spend less than 15 seconds on any given website, and that’s not enough time to demonstrate your thought-leadership.

The first step to increasing time spent on your website is making sure your strategy includes a client persona that focuses on pain points as well as content that addresses their challenges.

Publishing original content such as blog articles, case studies, podcasts, videos or white papers gives visitors a reason to explore your website. Plus, when you create thought-leadership content, you demonstrate to search engines why your website is relevant.

Tools like Crazy Egg and Lucky Orange offer more advanced insight into what your visitors are doing with heatmaps and recordings.

#3 Bounce Rate

Related to time spent on a website is something called Bounce Rate.

A “Bounce” refers to the act of a visitor getting to the website and then leaving said website without any further interaction.

Ideally this rate should never rise above 60%. You need to make some serious adjustments to your message, homepage design, and some of your CTAs if your bounce rate is this high.

If your campaign message aligns with your landing page and you give visitors the information they want, you’ll begin to see your bounce rate fall. This is an iterative process that takes time. Systematic tweaks over time can yield results. Use your existing data as a baseline and start tracking your progress. 

#4 Number of Pages Ranked

Website success will always be related to search rankings, and the number of pages you rank for represents the number of chances for your potential customers to discover your content as well as your website.

Ideally you want this number to be the majority of pages that you have on your site. You can use a free tool like Google Search Console to track ranked pages. If you are ready to invest in a paid tool, you’ll get a little more insight on your ranking pages as well as those of your competitors.

Blogs, case studies or podcasts with specific key phrases are opportunities for your website to rank. These individual pages will begin to rank over time in searches, generating more visits and leads.

#5 Number of Leads Generated

Leads are generated by what is known as a call to action, or CTA.

Determining how many leads a given CTA in your content generates is one of the most useful marketing metrics you can track. Optimizing for leads (and quite often the goal is better qualified leads) is also an iterative process, involving incremental tweaks over time.

If you are running several campaigns and testing multiple CTAs, then you’ll be well on your way to understanding what is most appealing to your target customers.

#6 Lead Conversion Rate

Related to the number of leads is the conversion rate, the percentage of visitors to your website that complete a desired goal out of the total number of visitors.

A high conversion rate is ideal. Traffic doesn’t mean much if it doesn’t convert into leads who could possibly benefit from your services.

Think of conversion rate as a journey that a buyer takes that leads them to pursuing your product or service. You can segment this journey into three phases and track your conversion rate for each phase: The awareness phase, the consideration phase, and the decision phase.

By tracking your conversion rate through this journey, you’ll understand how far your visitors get into the conversion cycle. You can then alter your strategies and campaigns to improve conversions.

#7 Return on Investment (ROI)

Probably one of the most important metrics to measure is ROI because it shows you directly which tactics work and which ones do not.

ROI is best expressed in a percentage. For example, a $1000 investment that generated $1200 in revenue would have an ROI of 20% since 1200 is 20% greater than 1000.

Determine your target ROI during planning and strategy conversions. Then work backward to further define the resources required to achieve this goal. Consider all of the resources you have at your disposal when doing this with the understanding that successful marketing campaigns don’t come together over night!

Next Steps for Your Marketing Team

Digital marketing strategies are a marathon, not a sprint. And as the world becomes more and more digital in its communication, it’s necessary to have an understanding of these unique metrics. You’ll find that your internet visibility is stronger, and your expertise is in much higher demand, especially in the world of manufacturing where there is a lot of competition.

The same principles of traditional marketing apply to web-based marketing campaigns. You need to build trust and authority with your digital audience, using these metrics as indicators of your progress.

Hopefully the tips above will help improve your digital marketing. Have more questions about running successful marketing campaigns? Reach out to us directly.

Liz-headshot

Meet the Author

Liz Hersh is the founder of Hersh PR and Marketing, a digital marketing agency. Together with a team of marketing professionals she helps clients generate leads and increase revenue. 

Read 
More Articles.

Read 
More Articles.

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Writing High-Impact B2B Case Studies

Marketing as a small business presents several challenges. Between budgetary constraints and a lack of clarity about the right ways to market a business, it’s no wonder that marketing is often a small businesses least favorite business function. But it’s probably the most important. It’s crucial to maintain an ongoing marketing and lead generation strategy to yield beneficial outcomes for your brand.

read more
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7 Common Marketing Challenges + How to Solve Them

Marketing as a small business presents several challenges. Between budgetary constraints and a lack of clarity about the right ways to market a business, it’s no wonder that marketing is often a small businesses least favorite business function. But it’s probably the most important. It’s crucial to maintain an ongoing marketing and lead generation strategy to yield beneficial outcomes for your brand.

read more
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read more

Subscribe to Get The Latest Insights.

What makes marketing so challenging?

Trying to keep-up with the tools, technology and the limited attention span of your target market are all challenging. Get our tips on how to grow leads and revenue, delivered directly to your inbox.

Join The List

Request a Demo.

Are you ready to take action? Let's see how we can reach your
goals with a 20-minute introductory call.