Email marketing is a great way to increase your Shopify revenue, conversion rates and customer retention. Business owners are often quick to pay for adverts to bring traffic to their site, but make the costly mistake of underestimating email marketing effectiveness.
If this sounds like you, discover how to take advantage of email marketing and learn about the best email integration for Shopify and e-commerce stores.
In this article, we will go over how to increase email marketing effectiveness and address the following topics:
- What email marketing is
- Why email marketing remains a good strategy
- Why email marketing effectiveness is critical for your business
- The value of your email list
- Marketing trends you should know about
- Why Klaviyo is the best email integration
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is the digital practice of communicating with leads and customers via email. The use of email marketing goes from just sending an e-commerce receipt to full flows automation.
Emailing allows brands to turn potential leads into customers and ultimately into brand advocates. It includes email automation like abandoned cart, welcome series or win-back series.
To increase email marketing effectiveness, you can also create newsletters that bring value to your customers, announce events or product releases and keep clients updated.
Compared to other marketing channels, email marketing effectiveness is significantly higher when it comes to ROI. It is also one of the only direct online channels, a channel that you completely own. Your email list is a big asset for your company.
Why is email marketing effectiveness so high?
From what we know, many of our customers were under appreciating email marketing effectiveness. A lot of people wonder if it still is a good strategy, or if social media has taken over. The truth is that email marketing is growing and is stronger than ever before.
So, when it's time to have a sales conversation and drive conversions, there’s one channel that continues to outperform the rest: good old-fashioned emails.
During the pandemic, we saw email marketing effectiveness increase exponentially. At Medito Digital, we created flows to help clients with logistics. Our retail partners were initially having trouble keeping an efficient supply chain. Emailing helped to keep customers updated about the products they ordered and shipping delays.
Email marketing, when done correctly, significantly decreases your cost of customer service and increase customer satisfaction. Covid-19 led to an increase in email open rate. By adapting email strategies to the pandemic, we saw an increase in engagement.
Boosting email marketing effectiveness means helping your business continue to have steady sales even through hard times. You can create a deeper interaction with your customers and increase your sales while all your competitors are struggling.
Why email marketing effectiveness is key
Email outperforms social medias like Facebook or Twitter
Email marketing effectiveness is 40 times greater than that of Facebook and Twitter when it comes to driving sales.
One of the reasons while email is more effective at driving traffic and sales is because you get to take the conversation about your products and business to your customer’s most personal online space: their inbox.
While platforms like Facebook and Twitter are great for free content distribution and engaging your community, they’re also noisy and your audience may not be on them when you post an update. Your emails, however, are there waiting for someone when they open their inbox
Email is content marketing's best friend
Content marketing is a strategic marketing activity whereby businesses create and distribute original content that their audience finds valuable.
Rather than paying to get in front of potential customers with traditional advertising, businesses aim to draw attention to themselves by delivering relevant education and entertainment which builds buzz for the brand as well as trust with the audience.
That’s why collecting email addresses from your visitors is so important. It gives you a way to keep in touch and follow up with your audience over time.
With a great email segmentation, you can send content that is relevant to their shopping behaviour. You can also create content that is adapted to the different seasons.
Increased email marketing effectiveness allows you to make your messaging personal and direct. Content will bring potential leads, but it is with email that you will convert them into customers. By continuing to bring value to them, they will eventually become advocates of your brand.
Your customers love emails
72% of people would rather receive promotional material via email than social media. While social media and search are great ways to get discovered by future customers, email is the best way to maintain and strengthen that relationship over time.
66% percent of online consumers prefer to buy new products from brands that they are familiar with, and the best way to build that trust relation is with emails.
But why are customers more comfortable with emailing than other marketing channels? It brings us to the difference between interruption marketing and permission marketing.
INTERRUPTION MARKETING
This is the generic term for any marketing technique that consumers did not ask to receive.
Interruption marketing cuts into people’s activities and thoughts, with the aim of redirecting their attention toward a certain product or service
PERMISSION MARKETING
Permission-based marketing is customer-centred, allowing the customer to be an active part of the marketing communication — not just a passive recipient. Permission-based marketing costs less than interruptive marketing because the campaign is targeted and more measurable.
Permission marketing gives companies real permission—not just presumed permission—to deliver messages to consumers. It often has a high conversion rate and can effectively target and engage specific audiences. Through website content, emailing and SEO, permission marketing helps companies build strong and lasting relationships with customers.
“Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than interrupting strangers who don’t” - Seth Godin, best selling author
Your email strategy should account for 20% of your online revenues. In other words, if your e-commerce business hasn’t taken the time to assess email marketing effectiveness, then you’re leaving money on the table.
Understand the value of your email list
Your email list is one of your biggest assets. From a financial standpoint, you increase your conversion rate and the LifeTime Value of your customers.
Just so you know, the average value of a subscriber is $37.66 - which tells you why we're so enthusiastic about boosting email marketing effectiveness, and why you should be too.
Emailing allows you to focus more on existing customers. Marketers usually spend 80% of their interactive marketing budgets on mass acquisition of customers, but fail to optimize the revenue that existing customers could generate.
By marketing to existing customers, you do not stop at the sale the customer does. You want to transform this first time buyer into a repeat purchaser. The reason why? Customers have higher trust and confidence that items purchased will arrive as promised, greater familiarity with the retailer’s brand, its products and website. Companies also have more data with which to personalize for returning and repeat purchasers than they do for shoppers.
Marketing trends you should know about
These days, customers want more value from brands. In fact, they want to learn about your brand, about your products. You can't just send promotional offers anymore. From our experience, the best recipe for email marketing effectiveness is to send out 80% of emails bringing value to the customers, and 20% focusing on promotional offers.
Create loyalty
Your clients want their loyalty to be recognised and you need to be smart about your loyalty schemes. Millennials in particular seek instant gratification and 44% of them stated that experiences are more important to them than possessions. That’s why loyalty programs that focus on financial rewards are quickly losing relevance in customers’ eyes.
Here at Medito, we build loyalty schemes for your customers in 5 steps.
- Give engagement incentives | Encourage your customers to engage and advocate your brand outside of the buying cycle and across all channels
- Give emotional rewards | Create unique experiences and exclusive services, do not rely only on discount rewards
- Be focused on value | Reflect the values of your brand in ways that align with interests and passions of your customers
- Care about data science | Use predictive analysis to make every interaction relevant
- Make the best of loyalty mechanics | Create features that utilise the best practices from behavioural science and use industry insights.
The better your loyalty scheme is, the higher the involvement of your customer is. It's important to create a reciprocal relationship.
Brand storytelling
Many brands adopt overly-polished ads, customers look now for a genuine brand with real people behind it. It is the era of brand authenticity. Thus, it’s time to humanize your brand if you want to sell more with the power of brand storytelling to hook your subscribers and engage them.
“In a digital world, the companies that stand out are brands that adopt a human face.” In fact, stories have a great impact on your perception as they are 22x more memorable than facts. Moreover, brand storytelling helps to create an emotional bond with your subscribers, humanise your brand, build brand authenticity, hold customers’ attention and influence consumer behaviour.
Email marketing effectiveness is not about having a one-size-fits-all approach to reaching your audience. With a focus on psychology, brands can increase their open rate if they put their clients first and think about their individual problems. And when it comes to email marketing, hyper-personalised automated campaigns are the future of personalisation that gives great results: Segmented and targeted emails generate 58% of all revenue.
Hyper-personalised automated campaigns help to reduce cart abandonment and increase sales. In order to create hyper-personalisation, you need to browse customer behaviour and real-time data to send highly-relevant emails.
But which is the best email integration to create highly-personalised emails, optimised email flows and innovative email campaigns? Klaviyo.
Why Klaviyo increases email marketing effectiveness
Klaviyo is the best email integration for Shopify. They are growing more Shopify stores than any other marketing platform.
They have over 200 pre-built, one-click integrations plus open APIs to ensure that you can easily get your business data without hassle.
Speed
Klaviyo was built from the ground up on the principle that immediacy is everything. They believe that data should be processed and actionable in real-time, that creating a segment, even across billions of data points – should take seconds. Setting up integrations should take minutes.
Therefore, they built the world’s most advanced data processing pipeline so that we can immediately see and use all of your data. Their query engine is also custom-built since existing commercial systems were too slow.
E-commerce focus
Klaviyo is the email software that has the best integration for e-commerce. It supports product catalogues, coupons, flexible cross-device revenue attribution, predictions (churn risk, LTV, next order), recommendations, back-in-stock automations, pre-built integrations with commerce platforms and more. A lot of email service providers try to become e-commerce friendly, while Klaviyo was built for e-commerce.
Scale
From the data perspective, Klaviyo is built for massive scale. They process billions of data points every week. Klaviyo was responsible for more than 2% of all global e-commerce sales this past year. Talk about email marketing effectiveness!
With their data and great integrations, we can create for you really effective remarketing (also called retargeting) campaigns that will allow your brand to scale to new heights.
Ready to increase email marketing effectiveness?
If all this is sounding tempting, get in touch. Here at Medito, we can organise your transition to Klaviyo so you can finally increase your email marketing effectiveness through a tailored strategy that fits your brand values.
