E-commerce: 2 tactics to increase relevance in your email sends
Relevance.
Relevance is the biggest reason why a customer opens your emails amid the flurry of messages they don’t open.
True relevance is elusive, tough to achieve and even harder to maintain.
In today’s MarketingSherpa Blog post, I wanted to share two tactics for moving the relevance dial that you can you can use to aid your own email marketing efforts.
Move from rebates to readership
For some marketing teams, promotional sending is habitual on a scale viewed as borderline narcotic.
With limited time and resources, incentives intuitively seem like the right move to drive sales, but when the customer experience becomes built on a quid pro quo discount purchase relationship, you’ve got a bit of a problem on your hands.
So how do you break the cycle of promotional-only emails?
Well, one approach Marcia Oakes, Senior Online Marketing Manager, Calendars.com, shared in a recent case study is to create relevant content that celebrates your product and engages your customers.
Marcia’s team realized that their problem was two-fold, as calendars are a seasonal product and even promotions have their limits with customers.
“There are only so many ‘calendar clearance’ messages that our subscribers will receive before they will opt-out,” Marcia explained, adding, “We don’t want our list to go cold. That would hurt us with our deliverability with the major ISPs.”
Marcia’s team built a monthly newsletter around blogging and social media that engaged their subscribers with year-round entertaining content.
Their move beyond promotions to audience building resulted in open rate increases of 46% over the previous year.
Customers will abandon more than just your cart
I think it’s important here to make a distinction.
Moving beyond a tactic doesn’t mean you abandon it altogether.
It just simply means you take one more deliberate step toward doing it better than you did yesterday, and hopefully better than the other guy.
For example, Laura Santos, Marketing Manager, Envelopes.com, saw an opportunity to move beyond cart abandonment triggers and seized it.
Laura’s team used their customer data to determine a chance existed to increase sales among their multiple-visit shoppers by sending emails to customers triggered by abandoned product pages that encouraged them to return and complete the transaction.
The tactic slashed checkout abandonment rates by 40% in less than two years while increasing overall checkout conversions by 65%.
You can learn more about how Laura’s team used triggered sends and testing to increase their ROI in a recent case study, “E-commerce: Moving beyond shopping cart abandonment nets 65% more checkout conversions.”
