Running an ecommerce business is a full time gig. You’re packaging orders. Running ads. Trying to get the word out about your product.
You don’t have time to add email marketing to your to-do list. Why is email marketing so important to ecommerce businesses anyway?
When done well, email marketing produces crazy ROIs. The last number I saw was in the range of a $42 return for every $1 spent.
Are you seeing returns like that elsewhere in your business? Probably not.
It’s not the number that’s important, though. You might do more. You might do less. What’s more important is to understand the leverage and value you get from email marketing — if done well.
Here’s why email marketing is (or should be) important to your ecommerce business.
Multiple Opportunities to Sell
If there’s one thing you can count on in business, it’s that you’re not going to convert 100% of your prospects.
If you’re running a business without an email list, then you’re going to have just the one opportunity to convert a prospect into buying. Maybe a couple of opportunities if you’re retargeting them.
Email gives you multiple opportunities to make the sale because you’re able to follow up with prospects. It might take you 10 emails to get that first email, but those are 9 additional interactions you wouldn’t have had otherwise.
You don’t have to pay for those additional interactions either, like you would if you were running retargeting ads.
What’s more is you’ll also have the opportunity to make backend sales — again, without paying for it. This will increase the lifetime value of each customer, which is a major lever is growing and scaling a company.
Build Rapport with Your Customers
Think about the ads you see on the internet from companies or people you don’t know. How quickly do you act on them? How excited are you to interact with or buy from them?
The same goes with prospects. It’s much harder to sell to cold traffic. They don’t know or trust you so they’re hesitant to do business with you.
Email flips this on its head.
Email gives you the opportunity to build rapport with your prospects. You can share your backstory, business mission, and the reasons why you started your company.
You will slowly warm your prospects up until they know, like, and trust you enough to buy from your store. You will ascend from a nobody or risk, to a friend or even trusted advisor.
How often do you open emails from your friends and family? How quickly do you respond? How seriously do you take their recommendations?
This is the rapport you want to build with your email list. Once you do, selling will become so much easier.
More Targeted Messaging and Offers via Segmentation
One of the awesome things about email for ecommerce is that you’re able to segment users. You can do this manually or this using conditional logic and splits — basically if/then statements.
For example:
- If a customer doesn’t buy from you in 90+ days, add them to a winback flow to reengage them and attempt to make a sale.
- Say you run a pet store. If a user identifies as a cat person, send them only cat related offers for things like cat toys, bed, and food.
- If you sell workout programs, you can sell different programs to men and women and even get as specific as workouts for different types of exercise i.e. powerlifting, crossfit, or bodybuilding, or even workouts for specific parts of the body i.e. arms, back, chest, legs, etc.
The more specific you can get with your messaging, the easier it is to trigger behavior because the customer feels like you’re speaking directly to them at at exactly the right moment in time on their journey.
For example, say you’ve never step foot in the gym before. Which of the following feels most right for you?
- 3 day a week beginner program complete with warm-ups, exercises, starter meal plan
- 6 day per week split, one day for each major body part, 15 hours per week in the gym, meal plan with macro and micro breakdown, etc.
Odds are the first bullet will speak to you. Can you imagine getting hit with ads for the second program though? You might buy but odds are so much lower compared to if you got an ad or email for the first bullet.
This can be tougher to do in other forms of marketing because you have less control over how someone paths through and to your offers. However, this is dead simple via email.
Each segment or sub-segment will have fewer people in it, the more specific you get. However, your numbers — open, click through, and conversion rates — should be well above the numbers you see from your main list.
You Can Spend More to Acquire Customers
This is a byproduct of everything I mentioned so far. If you have more chances to…
- make a sale
- make multiple sales from each customer
…then you’re going to make more money. You’re going to increase your average order value (AOV) and lifetime value (LTV).
The higher your AOV and LTV, the more you can spend to acquire a customer. The higher these numbers, the more likely it is that you can acquire a customer and turn a profit.
Your competition becomes irrelevant when you’re able to out-spend them. They won’t be able to afford the same ads when you’re out earning them multiplefold in your business. You’ll box them out and constantly be in front of your target market.
Your products or offers play a huge role here, but email gives you leverage. It allows you to make multiple offers to each subscriber giving them the chance to buy again and again. The more they buy, the higher their LTV. The higher the LTV, the more you can spend to acquire a new customer.
You win. Your competition loses.
Build Automated Flows for Common Shopping Behavior
Another amazing thing about email is that you can build a lot of flows or autoresponders that run 24/7/365 in the background. In fact, you should build these out for common online shopping behaviors or challenges.
- Cart abandonment
- Browser abandonment
- First time customer
- Post purchase
- Shipping
- Customer winback
- Renegagment (or sunset) sequence
Take cart abandonments, for example. It’s been shown that 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned.
This means, in theory, that if you made $30,000 this month in sales, that you had the opportunity to make $100,000.
The purpose of a cart abandonment email is to remind and encourage the prospect to complete their order.
You won’t recoup 100% of the lost sales. However, what if you could recoup 20%,i or even 10%? Using the numbers above, that’d mean adding $7,000 to $14,000 in sales to your business per month.
What’s great is that you need to write and setup this email sequence once, and then it runs for you in the background. So you take a couple days or even a week to write these emails (because you’re running a business and have other things to do) and then you make this $7,000 to $14,000 per month or $84,000 to $168,000 per year without having to do anything.
That’s only the cart abandonment sequence. You can build several other automated sequences like this that work for you around the clock, making sales that you’d otherwise miss out on.
This is the power and leverage you can wield with email marketing. But you need an email list, automations, and emails sent out on a regular cadence to experience and enjoy these benefits.
Start today and you’ll be happy you did 3, 6, 12 months down the road.
If you don’t yet have an email list or strategy and don’t feel like you can start one today, then tell me — what’s stopping you? What’s holding you back?
How can I help?