Throughout the years, email marketing has remained one of the most effective ways to convert prospects and up-sale existing customers. An effective email marketing strives not only to reach numerous potential customers but also to optimize essential metrics such as open rate, click rate, bounce & complaints, etc. Increasing email marketing efficiency is among the most important tasks for every marketer.
This blog will discuss elements of an effective email marketing campaign and how to improve them.
2 key elements of an effective email marketing
1. Personalization:
What: Personalized email marketing means messages triggered coherently in response to customers’ activities in your store. For example, sending emails to customers every time they complete a purchase or register new accounts, etc.
Why: 94% of companies say that personalization is critical to current and future success. In fact, in terms of email marketing efficiency, if an email isn’t relevant and personal to your customers, it won’t get opened.
How:
- To thrive in personalized email marketing, you first need to gather relevant information regarding customer personas: who they are, their demographic & geographic information, behaviors on your store, and how to serve them the most effectively.
- As a next step, based on all the information gathered, segment your contacts into customer groups.
- Lastly, rather than quantity, high-quality email content should be taken priority. A/B test with which segments, content angles & visual your recipients would respond best to so you won’t burden the inbox with dozens of “spam emails”.
Suggestion:
- On Atom8’s Advanced Segmentation feature, you can add customers to a specific group and add custom attributes to individual customers based on their demographics, geographic, psychographic, behaviors, or even mixed attributes.
- The customer grouping feature allows merchants to allocate customers who share one common characteristic to a specific group. Custom attributes are tags that you have to create yourself, then label them according to your segmentation strategies. In this unique feature, each customer can share multiple attributes that solve the nature of BigCommerce’s problem in terms of customer grouping, where one customer is only added to one group.
For example, segmenting customers based on geography:
When: Customer created
If: Customer’s zip code is equal to 73301 (Texas)
Then: Assign customer to group “Texas customer”
- Atom8 can also connect to and synchronize with other solutions for E-commerce stores including Slack, Trello, Google Sheet, and such well-known email marketing platforms as Mailchimp, Sendgrid, Klaviyo. As the volume of emails you send grows, a new problem emerges: synchronizing vast data is highly integral in controlling and optimizing email marketing performance.
For example, for Mailchimp & Google Sheet, after every purchase on BigCommerce, Atom8 auto-send email (via Mailchimp) to customers, then generate the receiver list (Google Sheet) for tracking and analyzing.
When: A customer created.
Then: Tag the customer on Mailchimp.
Then: Send email to the customer via Mailchimp on the preset workflow.
2. Timely delivery:
What: Another way to ensure email marketing efficiency is timely email marketing delivery. This means having a quick and suitable response time for the customers. For instance, once your customer has left an incomplete cart, follow-up emails should be instantly triggered.
Why: According to statistics, with email marketing, the highest click-to-open rates are 21% at 10 AM, 22.5% at 1 PM, and have seen a spike at near 6 PM. However, those numbers can vary depending on your customers’ personas and purchasing behaviors. As a result, in order to maximize the email conversion rate, it’s vital to understand your customers and follow their activities in the store.
How:
- To send timely email marketing, the first step is to A/B test to find out the time at which the open and click rate is highest.
- Secondly, it’s essential to deeply understand the “customer footprint” on your store and send them the corresponding content in response.
- The last step is to apply smart tools to optimize and automate the process of triggering emails.
Suggestion:
On Atom8, you can now manage all your emails easily in automated workflows. When a customer has executed any events such as subscribing to your newsletter, purchasing a product, Atoms will auto-segment them to a specific group. Then, it can automatically send multiple welcome or thank you emails via Sendgrid, Klaviyo, or Mailchimp and the newsletters & deals in the following days based on the preset workflows.
An example of Atom8’s automated workflow:
When: Order completed.
If: Total spending is greater than or equal to 500USD.
Then: Assign customers to a group.
Delay: Wait for 1 hour.
Then: Send notification emails to the customers.
Most common use cases in email marketing
Welcome email
When a customer has signed up an account in your store, it’s extremely necessary to have a welcoming process for new customers or offer discounts for newly-created customers.
An example of Atom8’s workflow in welcoming new customers:
If: A customer has just created an account on the store.
Then: Auto-group “New customers”.
Delay: Wait for 2 hours.
Then: Send “Welcome email” via Mailchimp.
Thank you email
After customers finish their purchase, auto-send them a thank-you email & a 50% discount code.
One example of Atom8’s automated workflow:
When: Order is completed.
If: Order product contains iPhone
Then: Assign the customer to the “Apple customers” group.
Delay: Wait for 1 hour.
Then: Auto-send “thank-you” email to customers and offer a 50% discount for all promoted Apple products.
Loyal customers:
Loyal customers should always be kept engaged and excited for the purpose of upselling and cross-selling. Therefore, it’s important to segment them into loyal customers for exceptional care with email marketing about loyalty discounts.
An example of special care workflow for loyal customers:
When: Order is completed.
If: Customer total spending exceeds $5000 and the customer has created an account since 01 Jul 2020.
Then: Atom8 will automatically add the customer to a group and upgrade the customer tier to Gold.
Then: Send a thank-you email to customers and a 50% discount code.
Delay: It can also wait for 24 hours.
Then: Send a welcome offer email to new gold customers.
Email after a refund request:
When you get a refund request, you can let your customers know that while you are sad to see them go, you are hoping that you can rekindle the relationship in the future by sending them alternatives.
An example of Atom8’s workflow to cope with a refund:
If: A customer has refunded an order.
Then: Auto-tag “Refund customer” (via Sendgrid).
Then: Send an automated email to the customer and offer alternatives.
Atom8 unlocks the power of automation in your relationship with potential customers. Let’s have Atom8 as your great supporter in the journey of effective email marketing.
Key takeaways
#1: 2 key elements to ensure email marketing efficiency are personalization and timely delivery
#2: To optimize the process of converting customers, Atom8 will certainly be your powerful assistance in exploiting the full potential of email marketing automation.
Optimize the process of building a strong customer relationship with Atom8.>> Get free trial today <<
