Back in 2014, email marketing was responsible for over a quarter of all ecommerce Black Friday sales across all industries.
This made email marketing the single most effective marketing channel available - and that was a couple of years ago.
Unsurprisingly, email marketing is not slowing down anytime soon. Over 90% of consumers use their email at least once every day, and most people use it far more.
If that's not convincing, Get this:
If you sunk just $1 into email marketing, you'd earn $44.25 back. That's an extremely strong ROI.
So it's surprising that most ecommerce businesses don't even bother with email. They leave email up to the giants like Walmart and Amazon, and give up tons of sales, revenue and knowledge in the process.
You need to start paying attention to email marketing for ecommerce. Here's why:
1. Email Helps You Increase Your Sales
Since you probably can't afford to make 25% fewer sales, your ecommerce business needs to hop on the bandwagon.
If you're not emailing your customers, you're relying on them randomly checking your website for new stock, or stumbling across your shop through social media sharing. It's highly unlikely they'll do so at the frequency you want them to.
Email helps you get in front of your customers directly when you want to communicate with them (rather than when Facebook's algorithm decides to let you).
Don't be passive when it comes to your business.
2. Email Helps You Decrease Cart Abandonment
If you run an online shop, you know all too well what cart abandonment is.
It's when your customers visit your website, put items in their cart, and then leave without actually purchasing them.
This used to gobble up a lot of potential sales and customers, but email marketing has made it more possible to change that script.
When you have your customer's email addresses, it can help you both identify and communicate with the customer, so you can remind them what they have in their cart without having to hope they return back to your website (which, when they leave, is unlikely).
Reduce cart abandonment while also email list building by having your customers create an account with their email addresses, or gating your checkout process with email. That way, you can communicate with them, bringing them back to finish what they've started.
3.Email Helps You Do Pro-Level Market Research
What if you could find out not only what your customers wanted to order from you, but in which colors, variations, and sizes?
To get this information a couple of decades ago, it would be time consuming and expensive. You'd have to go to a market research agency and hire a focus group, or run expensive and mostly pointless phone surveys (that, let's be honest, most customers don't want to complete).
Now, you can combine email marketing with market research by literally collecting emails by getting customer opinions.
And it's fun for the customer, too. Oh, and it's almost free.
You just have to get the customer to "Be the Buyer" like retro-retailer Modcloth, or "vote" on the item and size they'd like to purchase and be notified for it, like Shop Matina (which sells clothing made by Filipino designers).
Then, you not only collect emails and can then notify your customers of when the items they want are in, but you also get valuable information about what they want before you order inventory.
This leads to less stagnant inventory, more sales, and a lower cost of goods sold.
If you only choose one of these reasons to start email marketing for your ecommerce business, it should be compelling enough. Don't overlook email for your online shop. Start growing your list (click here to get 21 of the best list building strategies for ecommerce), and your bottom line will thank you.