The year 2019 was marked by the implementation of AMP technology by email services, which took email newsletters to a new level of interactivity. AMP letters allow you to use various scripts. You can add an image carousel to the letter instead of a single product card. Or provide the ability to add goods to the cart and pay directly in the letter, without going to the site.
Soon after the announcement of AMP technology, the first platform appeared that introduced it. The pioneer was the Sendsay email newsletter service.
However, for all its merits, AMP technology did not redraw the market. It is hardly worth waiting for revolutions in 2020 too – most likely, the systematic development will continue in the areas outlined in recent years.
Today, for small and medium-sized businesses, e-mail marketing is an almost free tool for promoting your online store, retaining and returning customers, and increasing sales. According to statistics, in e-commerce today, almost 50% of sales are made thanks to e-mail marketing.
E-mail marketing is an even more effective tool for increasing sales than traditional banner advertising or attracting customers on social networks. One e-mail newsletter can increase the number of orders by 2-3 times. At the same time, banner advertising does not give such a response and conversions as e-mail marketing.
At the same time, experts in e-mail marketing say that this is rather a tool for communication with a visitor and a potential customer. While many perceive it as an advertising channel, which negatively affects their experience using this tool.
Every man and his dog tried to predict the death of the newsletter, but every time the statistics say that mass mailing does not die, but is gaining momentum. If you have not yet implemented letters in your strategy, it’s time to do it in 2020. And if you are already a newsletter, learn how to stay in trend and get more feedback from subscribers.
The effectiveness of e-mail marketing in evaluated by two parameters, which are “open letters” (Open Rate, in %) and “conversion rate” (Click Rate, in %) by the links from the letters to the website of the online store. The effectiveness of e-mail newsletters – following openness and clickability – should be monitored by the number of orders that were made after the transition from the letter and the average check. Averages for different services can vary greatly. We give the average performance of the UniSender service:
- open letters per month – 12.73%;
- conversion rate – 2.68%.
But at the same time, if you analyze some types of mailings, you can see that there are letters with a percentage of discoveries of 80%. This efficiency can be explained by the fact that the letters were sent to their own database of addresses of loyal customers. Thus, one of the first expert advice in e-mail marketing is sent letters to those who themselves want you to communicate with him.
Bulk mail-out is incredibly effective. A third of customers visited the site or made a purchase only after seeing an incoming message from the brand in their inbox. That’s how effective this strategy is!
It doesn’t matter if you are blogging or selling products online, everyone needs a quality mailing list.
But how to make recipients interested?
Take into consideration the following list if you are a beginner in the field of marketing.
Website: exacttarget.com
Its key Features are Email, SMS, API, Deliverability, Analytics, Social Media, and CRM.
A platform for large companies that are ready to send at least 45,000 messages per year (it is from this number of mailings that the cost of the service will begin to pay for itself). Exact Target provides professional tools for working with lists and mailing lists, for full integration with your site and third-party applications, for testing and analyzing your campaigns. According to some ratings, this platform leads the world in the number of letters sent through it.
Website: mailchimip.com
Its key Features are Email, Social Media, Design, Analytics, and E-commerce
MailChimp, at first sight, captivates with its attractive design and simple interface, it pleases with colorful comprehensive reports that help analyze user behavior. A huge selection of ready-made templates and integration with numerous CRM, e-commerce services and Google Analytics make it a perfect tool for individual entrepreneurs and startups who want to save on designers and developers.
Despite the fact that MailChimp is close in functionality to professional platforms, we included it in the list for beginners for the reason that the service itself positions itself as a tool for small businesses. In addition, when working with large amounts of data, using professional platforms will be much cheaper than working through MailChimp.
You can use many other mailing services. Such as, for example, MailerLite. More than 750 companies have already taken advantage and made about 200 mail-outs. At the same time, every third recipient opened the letter from the mailing list, and every tenth one followed the links in the letter. Moreover, most of the letters were opened in the following categories:
- Bedclothes/lingerie: 44.65%
- Household appliances: 36.17%
- Climatic equipment: 33.41%
The largest number of clicks (in%) for links in letters was in the following categories:
Bedclothes/lingerie – 17.02%
Clothing/bags/accessories – 14.83%
Children’s goods – 13.86%
According to the statistics of the Simple Mailing Service, 20% of users follow the links from the letter to the online store. At the same time, the conversion to purchase using “Simple Mailing Lists” is 1%.
Why do e-mail newsletters?
- to remind customers of your store;
- to quickly get discount information;
- to notify about new products;
- to increase customer loyalty;
- to increase the chance of a repeat purchase;
- to sell more without any advertising costs.
If you want to do email marketing, first you need to build a subscriber base. The minimum initial base of subscribers is the email addresses of your customers and visitors to your site who have ever written messages to you. These people are unlikely to immediately send your letter to the cart.
Customers have already collaborated with you and are most likely quite loyal to you. Provided that they have received positive customer experience, that is, they were satisfied with your work and the quality of the goods and services ordered. Visitors who have written messages to you are potentially interested in your company’s offers, which is also a good place to start. Use this customer base you have honestly gathered to start making newsletters.
Typically, the subscriber base is developed in parallel with various activities to attract new customers and retain existing ones, for example:
1. Bring customers offline. In exchange for discounts or small gifts, invite your customers to leave your e-mail for newsletters in a real store, salon, and office of your company. In addition to the mailing address, you also receive a customer who is happy with your gift and who will most likely return to you.
2. Collect the addresses of site visitors. On the trading floors in the control room of the online store, such a mechanism is often implemented in the form of a “Customer List”.
Loosely speaking, this is a ready-made base for your newsletters that you can use. However, you can increase this base with a little effort and imagination!
Just a couple of lines additionally in the product description, on information pages or in the through text on the site can significantly increase the number of subscribers. It is enough to offer visitors to voluntarily subscribe to your company news to receive information about new arrivals and various promotions, and provide a link to the subscription page.
This link can lead to a special page for a subscription if you use one of the services for sending mass mailings (for example, MailerLite). If you have not chosen a service yet, you can simply create a profile on your Google drive and give a link to it or even ask you to write a message to your email address marked “I want to receive news.”
3. Give a link to a subscription on social networks. If you advertise your company in the thematic communities on Facebook, for example, do not forget to place a link to the subscription form under your advertising message, make subscription a prerequisite for participation in the contest, or give “discounts for the chosen ones” for future purchases provided that you fill out the questionnaire.
Melisa Marzett is a freelance writer who is currently traveling and writing for <a href=”http://essay-editor.net/“>re write dissertation</a> write dissertation</a>. Among her hobbies are swimming, handmade, cooking and shopping. She likes people who can do things with their hands and open for anything new.
