If your ecommerce business has been around for a little while, you might be experiencing the dreaded sales plateau. Your sales are steady and your customer base is solid, but you aren’t sure how to take things to the next level.
Upping your email marketing game is one way to push past this plateau. In a competitive marketplace, if your emails don’t deliver exactly what your customers need, they’ll end up in the trash and you’ll lose that potential revenue.
How do you cut through the noise and make your emails stand out? How do you turn those email readers into paying customers for your business? Forget cold prospects and outdated tactics, focus on people who are already in your ecommerce pipeline and use killer copy to take them across the finish line to a sale.
Here are four email marketing campaigns you need to start doing ASAP. These campaigns focus on delivering the right message to the right customer at the right time — an essential #saleshacking formula.
Cart abandonment
Depending on which study you read, anywhere between 60 and 80 percent of potential online purchases are abandoned at the shopping cart stage. This is known as cart abandonment and is a huge opportunity for growth through email marketing.
If someone has shown enough interest in your site and your products to go all the way to the shopping cart, it is definitely possible to get them to complete the transaction. Do this by determining what their obstacles are and how you can help overcome them.
Maybe you can offer a discount or other incentive to get them across the finish line, or maybe remind them of why they chose your company in the first place and why you are better than the competitors.
Either way, these emails need to be sent quickly, ideally within 12 hours of the time a customer leaves your site. And, the copy needs to be powerful enough to make them remember why they almost bought product in the first place.
Browse abandonment
A browse abandonment campaign is similar to a card a cart abandonment campaign, but instead focuses on people who have looked at one or more products on your site without progressing to the checkout stage. Think of it as the digital equivalent of trying to capture window shoppers on a crowded city street.
These campaigns generally have a lower rate of conversion than cart abandonment campaigns, but you have a much larger pool of customers to start with since you are higher in the sales funnel. However, if your copy is written in a clear and compelling way, a browse abandonment campaign can be successful in its own right.
The window to reach people and get them back to your site is much shorter in a browse abandonment campaign. If you wait more than 30 minutes, you’ve probably lost someone to a competitor or the next thing on that day’s to-do list.
Customer reactivation
Given the high rates of cart abandonment and browse abandonment, getting someone to purchase something from your site is huge. The next step is making sure they come back and buy something else in the future.
A customer reactivation campaign focuses on previous customers who have not been active in more than 90 days. Many of us can’t remember what we ate for breakfast this morning, let alone what we bought online three months ago so this is a great opportunity to send an email reminding them of why they chose your store in the first place.
A little bit of nostalgia can be a powerful thing. Rekindling the feeling someone had when they made a purchase may be just what you need to get them to come back. The goal is to make your store the only option for their need and the only business they’ll consider for it in the future.
The data to make this campaign happen is at your fingertips. With a little creative strategy and content, you can turn your one-time customers into lifers for your business.
Lead generation and audience building
Working with customers who are already on your radar is great, but in order to be truly successful you need to cultivate new leads at the same time.
A lead generation or audience building campaign is designed to bring new prospects into your funnel and make them fall in love with your products or services. Once you get them to your website, the browse abandonment and cart abandonment campaigns kick in and you are on your way.
You can also leverage the power of your existing customers to recruit new ones. Focus on campaigns that turn them into super fans and evangelists for your products. Incentivize activity on social media and reward participants with discounts or other perks. The more traffic you drive to your site, the more opportunities for engagement you’ll have down the road.
From email marketing to #saleshacking
These email campaigns sound great right? But as a small business owner you might not have time to implement them given everything else on your plate.
AmeriSales can help you create and execute an email marketing strategy for your business. They’ve helped clients from coffee shops to electronics stores double their revenue in just 30 days using their #saleshacker philsosphy.
And, they give out 10 free spots each month to new clients who have a great reputation and do at least $30,000 in sales each month.
“For our clients, we are all about results. If you aren’t bringing clients significantly more revenue every month, you’re just a marketing company, not a #saleshacker,” said AmeriSales CMO Jesse Sanders.† “There are a lot of ‘email marketing’ companies out there. We don’t compete with their services; we create new ways of doing things.“
If that sounds like a good fit for your ecommerce business, contact AmeriSales to find out whether you qualify for a free trial. The only thing you have to lose is potential revenue from doing the same old, same old email marketing.