Integrated newsletter management is essential for email marketing

Published on September 16, 2010 Integrated newsletter management is essential for email marketing

So you have the shopping cart system set up that you want, you have loaded all of your products and customers are signing up. Where to from here? As you start spending money on marketing and promotion, you may start to notice that the costs of acquiring new customers are often substantially more than the costs of encouraging customers who have already bought from you to buy again.

One key way of marketing to your existing customers is through the use of email marketing – providing useful and valuable content to your existing customers, usually through the use of a newsletter, to encourage increased spend through your online store. The trick is to ensure that emails are not perceived as spam because people will quickly request to be removed from your mailing list if what you give them is no different from what you have on your website and just a blatent product push.

Ozcart makes integrated email management possible by allowing you to send newsletters to all of your signed up customers without having to maintain a separate list in a separate email marketing program. That’s not to say you can’t manage the list separately if you want to, as you can most certainly export email data for importing into another program, but if you want to manage your own newsletters Ozcart helps you do it.

Here are our thoughts on email newsletter content:

• Keep it relevant, short and simple. A good way to do things is to create a newsletter article about some featured products. For example, if you are selling children’s clothing, you might write about how you can combine different items together and then provide a discount code for orders received in the following week after your email is sent out.
• Newsletters about upcoming products are often well received by customers if you have a lot of new styles or get products in frequently
• Write about industry trends. If you are selling laptops for example, what types are the best for different types of people: a gamers laptop, a business PC, why should someone buy a laptop versus an iphone? What’s the point of tablet PCs compared to mini laptops? Think about trends and frame them in terms of the questions that customers might ask you. That’s what will get people thinking and help you convert clicks to sales
• Make it interesting – don’t just rehash what you found by Googling other websites or what your competitors do. Write something different and interesting that people find valuable and others will recommend you.
• Use the newsletter sidebox in Ozcart that allows you to get subscribers without them having to buy things in your store first – this is a great way of turning potential buyers into actual buyers.
• Think about the outcome you want. This may not necessarily be getting a sale. You want everyone to read your newsletter and do something rather than just read it, but signing up to your Twitter feed or Facebook page could be just as valuable as a sale in the long run, as potential buyers may check out the statistics of how many followers you have on these sites in evaluating whether you are someone they want to buy from.
• Consider making links in your newsletter go to a specific content page that describes an offer and then links to the product you are trying to sell. It gives you a chance to explain things in more detail from the email newsletter which will generally be brief, and also gives you the chance to manage how well you’re doing with the campaign.