5 Ways to Increase Email Marketing Conversion Rates
Email lists are a valuable part of any E-Commerce repertoire. Each email is a reflection of the time, money and hours spent turning hard earned traffic into sales. Now how do you turn those sales into repeat customers? Here are 5 ways to nurture your existing email lists and improve the conversion rates for your email marketing campaigns.
1. Test The Process
-You want to make sure that your email lists can actually receive your email. Sign up every once a while to double check that your auto responders are working properly.
-Monitor your open rates, click through rates and bounce rates.
-Make sure you have a decent sender score and haven’t been labeled a spammer. (www.senderscore.org)
-Double check the layout and formatting for various email systems/browsers. For example, Outlook vs Gmail or Internet Explorer vs Chrome.
-Check on your images. Often times default settings won’t allow for images to appear properly or sometimes require downloading.
2. Make Sure They Know It’s You!
-The sender email and offer should be clear and recognizable. Use an email address that is specific to the audience you are marketing to. Ex: [email protected]
-Come right out and announce your most appealing offer in the subject line and be as specific as possible. Ex: Receive 20% off Your next T-Shirt Order, or Free Gift with Survey
-Treat the subject line like an AdWords Ad and test which options lead to the best open rates and conversion rates.
-Avoid boring welcome messages. It’s a wasted opportunity to remarket and serves as a negative indicator for your follow up emails.
3. Make Your Offer Compelling, Blatant and Simple
-When getting into the bulk of your email always emphasize the benefits and skim on the features. The person you’re emailing already has an idea of what types of products and services your offer; make sure to drive home why buying is a good thing.
Ex: “Save up to $500 by switching to our loyal customer rate and using code SV500”
vs.
“Option A: Full liability coverage available, with no deductible required”
-Make sure the body is easily scannable. Use bold headings, proper spacing, and images to convey the Ad quickly and effectively.
– Keep it simple, clear and concise. A potential repeat customer may know who you are, be interested and open the email but if you force him to read two paragraphs of text, chances are he’ll move on to the next email.
4. Make The Call To Action As Obvious As Humanly Possible
-Make sure that every email in your repertoire has clear objective or CTA.
-A/B test the landing pages with various CTAs.
-Make sure landing page load times are quick.
-Tell the customer what to do more than once and use strong verbs.
-Spell out the benefits of the action you want them to take.
-Get rid of distractions.
-Incorporate extra features like pictures, color, buttons and video that are relevant to the CTA.
-Create multiple actions per product category: “Bundle Up” “Ride in Style” “Bring on the Cold” “Get Equipped”
5. Segment Your Lists and Be Relevant
-Split up your email list into various groups depending on their previous experience with the site. If they bought from a certain category of items you can email them deals or offers specifically on those types of products.
-Don’t send everything to everybody and overdo it. You’ll end up with more unsubscribes than sign ups
-The more relevant you are the better. The customer purchased the sweater from your site because you met all of their requirements. Your site seemed legitimate, the price was right, shipping was free, you had their size, and the checkout process was easy. You’ve done all the hard work to get this buyer to commit his money to you but in order to get him to come back you want to recreate the experience with relevancy. You want to build out templates for your varying type of shopper whether they purchased a sweater, a necklace, or a vacuum cleaner. An easy place to start would be to segment based on gender or product type.
There is no silver bullet when it comes to email marketing and there are no shortcuts. Best practices should serve as a template but the best advice I can give you is to TEST TEST TEST!
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