Email Marketing – crucial to boosting online shop sales

Email Marketing – crucial to boosting online shop sales

If you’re running an online shop, don’t forget about the importance of email marketing to drive traffic. Email marketing can be a very low cost compared to offline or pay-per-click advertising. Recent studies in the United States have also shown that email marketing continues to be a heavy influencer on online purchases.

One recent Feb 2012 study in the US asked customers what messages they had received from companies that influenced them to make an online purchase, and through what means they received those messages. By a clear margin, email marketing and direct marketing (via letters, postcards, catalogues) were by far the most influencial methods – coming in at 66% and 65% respectively. It’s therefore clear that email marketing should continue to play a strong part in the marketing of your online shop.

Some specific results of this study that can help the marketing of your online shop include:

  • Deal Finding – when looking for a deal from an existing website they have dealt with, consumers are most influenced by emails they have received from that company (44%) or deals posted on the website itself (e.g. on your specials page or a banner) – 43%. This compares with only 4% who look to Facebook in the first instance for a deal.
  • Advertising and Marketing Deals – when receiving deals and other marketing material from businesses, email was preferred by over 75% of survey respondents across all age groups (and over two thirds of teens prefer it in spite of the multi channel media appetite of younger Internet users).
  • Interestingly, email is still used to refer friends and family to site content even more so than social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

When you are using email marketing for your business, make sure you always do the following:

  • Ensure you only used permission-based techniques to collect an email address. Ozcart for example, does not allow the “sign me up for your newsletter” box on the create account page to be ticked by default – your customers must click to agree to accept emails from you
  • Make sure you are getting the right type of people subscribing to your newsletter. It’s not about the number of people in your list that matters, it’s about the quality of the people in the list. As an online shop, you want people in your list who are likely to buy from you – not just a useless list of email addresses of people who will just delete your communications
  • Use interesting subject lines to break through the clutter of the inbox. A short subject line can be effective if it’s interesting, but if it doesn’t make sense it will not encourage click throughs
  • Use email marketing to integrate with other parts of your marketing effort. For example, encourage customers to review your sites on social media (Ozcart’s automatic email follow up system built into all packages can help you do that)
  • Encourage customers who have signed up and never purchased to come back to your site. Encourage customers who purchased and haven’t done so for a while to come back. Encourage people who have abandoned carts with you, to come back or at least tell you why they didn’t complete checkout.

Smart, savvy email marketing is an essential part of growing an online business. Don’t overlook it if you want to succeed.

Ozcart Ecommerce

Ozcart has been in business since 2006 and is an online, hosted shopping cart that you can use for your current or new online store. We offer so many features for the same low price. In fact, we are addicted to adding new ones to ensure that we remain one of the best choices for a shopping cart. https://ozcart.com

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