How do you overcome eCommerce email marketing strategy challenges effectively?
The year 2020 brought down a whole host of new challenges that eCommerce businesses are struggling with. As the eCommerce landscape evolves, your email marketing strategy should always be one step ahead.
You may have already noticed it’s not all smooth sailing to reach the 3800% ROI you were promised.
Take a step back and evaluate the most glaring challenges you’re currently facing with email marketing. You can narrow down the solutions you need and what you can do about it.
Identifying Email Marketing Strategy Challenges
So you’re already seeing healthy traffic to your eCommerce store, and you’re scaling your paid strategies. You’ve probably even kickstarted your email marketing strategy to harness the potential of your traffic and build a solid email list. You’re ready to grow your tribe.
As email marketing has evolved into an elegant solution for eCommerce businesses, the challenges have changed too. At some point, your email marketing strategy probably faced some pretty hard knocks. Maybe you shut it down altogether. But you’re ready to straighten out the chinks in your armor.
So to make sure you’ve got all your flanks covered, here are 3 of the most common email marketing strategy challenges you should look out for. See if you can spot the common theme in each one.
1. Getting to Know Your Audience
Nowadays, email marketing techniques can gather the customer information you need easily. But the real challenge here is not the absence of a solution—but the presence of new factors.
The major factor that contributes to this challenge is the dynamic customer base. The needs of the common person change over time. Their behavior and their general mentality, current events that affect their perception of the world—all these create an ever-dynamic population.
Also, it seems like society never tires of producing new trends and subcultures. New people with new wants and new needs are always going to be a challenge.
Creating relevant content for newer generations of potential customers means adapting your email strategies according to their evolving needs.
Your Answer: Segmentation and Personalization
Segment your email list according to your customers’ personalities and buying behavior.
Consider their gender, interests, and product preferences. They may help you narrow down on what content you should include for your different customers.
Proper segmentation and sending practices have the potential to boost your revenue by as much as 760%!
And once you’ve created your segmented lists, you’ll know how to best personalize your emails for each list, and even for each contact in those lists.
Here’s an example for a personalized email based on buying behavior:
In this email, they’re recommending other diners based on where their subscribers have already dined so far. You can apply this similar method by recommending similar products to what your customers have bought.
Considering your customers' product preferences in your email strategies is always a plus. This helps in showing your customers that you value them.
You’d always want to show them what they’d want. That’s the very essence of an effective personalized email that your subscriber list would love to receive.
Serving your customers content that brings them value and relates to them on a personal level will make them anticipate hearing from you. Making your email messaging more effective, and boost the most important aspect of your strategy — your returns.
2. Customer Retention
The need to acquire new customers is a given for eCommerce stores. It’s also a well-beaten path. What's most challenging is retaining your current customers and keeping them coming back for more.
The value of recurring customers and how they generate long-term value for your brand is often overlooked. Further, customer retention has been pivotal for eCommerce brands amidst the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Today, the average eComm customer sees more value in respect than coupon codes.
Constant exposure to half-baked ads and promotions have created more critical buyers. And on the internet, it's much easier to spread the word about a business—be it praise or criticism.
Younger generations of customers may also demand higher standards of business practices. While most are fairly reasonable, you won’t be able to avoid customers who ask for too much.
Meeting the standards of every single customer can be difficult. So focus on meeting the standards of as many of your customers as you can.
Solution: Retention Emails
The OpenTable email example above also demonstrates the value of retention emails.
Other examples include Thank You emails, Reminders, Feedback requests, and even Seasonal or Event emails.
Retention emails engage your customers and build your customer relationships, which are keys to sustaining retention.
Here are some more examples:
Thank You Email
Seasonal or Event Email
3. Increasing ROI
All eCommerce businesses always want to find more ways to increase their return on investment (ROI), and that’s completely okay. What makes it a challenge is your ever-changing customer base.
In email marketing, ROI is dependent on the performance of your marketing emails. Email marketing deals more with customer engagement. This means your emails’ performance depends on how well you know your target audience.
Not only that, but you must continue developing new techniques in email marketing so you can make up for missed opportunities. You can’t expect your email marketing team to catch every opportunity to send an email at the right time to the right customer, right?
Solutions: Automation and A/B Testing
What do you need for better ROI generation efficiency? Email automation can save time and resources for your email marketing team that is better spent elsewhere. For example, experimenting with different elements of an A/B test to find what best fits your brand.
In short, creating flows and automating your emails helps in minimizing missed opportunities. Opportunities that your team may have missed when sending manual email campaigns.
Email automation may take some time to learn, but hey, whether it’s through blog posts, videos, or a handy email marketing automation eBook, it’ll all be worth it.
And of course, always A/B test your emails. Test them twice, thrice, or how many times you need to to create the most effective email. Continuously test your emails based on their subject lines, content, design, CTAs, and timing.
Overcoming Your Email Marketing Strategy Challenges
So, have you caught on to the theme yet? All three of these challenges have more to do with keeping up with what’s sustaining your business in the first place—your customers.
Capture the interest of your potential customers. Retain their interest in your brand. And finally, convert your customers into buying customers. This all leads up to the creation of your own loyal customers.
Overall, the challenges that affect your emails’ effectiveness depends on your content and your recipients. At the same time, however, even the content you create will depend on the specific audiences you’re targeting in your segmented email lists.
Get to know your target audiences by analyzing their personalities and behaviors. Then design your emails and campaigns, test their performance, and adjust your emails accordingly.
Do you have any other email marketing strategy challenges that you’d like to overcome once and for all?
Schedule a free 30-minute call with Chronos and get a custom email marketing game plan.
You’ll see how email marketing can be a valuable and profitable solution for eCommerce. And you can delve deeper into supercharged strategies that will take your email strategy beyond a set-it-and-forget-it mindset.
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