How to Decide What Emails to Automate vs. One Time Campaigns

Leaders in ecommerce know one of the most effective strategies to grow business is through email marketing. If your store has not taken the time or set aside a budget for email marketing, consider the following statistics that prove you’re missing out on revenue and growth.  

Email Marketing Benefits:

ROI of email marketing is 3,800% Direct Marketing Association  Email marketing is 40x more effective than Facebook and Twitter when it comes to generating a sale McKinsey and Company  Average Order Value of purchases prompted by an email are 17% higher eMarketer

Email marketing also provides greater visibility and reporting. By analyzing data like delivery, open and click through rates, you’ll learn what works in driving engagement and traffic to your online store.  

Automated Campaign Emails vs. One-Time Campaign Emails

Once you adopt email campaigns as part of your marketing strategy, you’ll need to identify when it’s best to automate customer outreach and what types of customers are best suited for single campaigns.  The benefit of event-triggered or automated e-mails is once they are set up and tested for effectiveness, they are a low-cost and efficient method for staying engaged with customers. With multiple triggers and segments of buyers, handling these manually would be time consuming and distract from other marketing activities.  However, there are segments of customers in which automated emails are not appropriate or effective. Check out the guidelines below to determine when you should, and should not, automate.

Use Automated Emails for these segments:

First Time Customers - Send thank you email with incentive to make a repeat purchase.  

Lapsed Customers (3 months, 12 months since last purchase) - We miss you campaign with incentive to return. Click here for tips on effective win-back campaigns.  

Abandoned Cart - Email with enticing offer to follow up and complete transaction  Time to Repurchase or Replenish - Reminder emails for customers who buy products that need replenishing.  Never Purchased - Email to customers who signed up to your list but have not made a purchase.  Active Customers - Send them relevant offers, coupons or sneak peaks.

Use Direct Email Campaigns for these segments:

 
• Repeat buyers
 
• Lifetime Value
 
• Number of Orders
 
• Average Amount Spent Per Order

Segment and Automate with Glew

Glew now integrates with MailChimp, one of the more widely used email marketing solutions. This means you can use the power of customer segmentation to quickly and seamlessly send automated emails, targeted to each group of customers.  Glew’s Customer Segmentation includes over 20 unique segments that can be exported and uploaded into your preferred email management platform or automatically integrated with MailChimp. For each segment, you also gain insight into Lifetime Value, Revenue, Average Order Value and the Most Commonly Purchased Products.  MailChimp also enables users to segment lists based on purchase activity. You can view the ecommerce and customer segments here.  

Tips for Building Your Email Subscriber List

Once your customer segments are identified and you’ve set up automated email campaigns, you can focus your energy on growing your email subscriber list to further boost revenue opportunities. There a number of simple yet effective ways to add shoppers to your email arsenal.  

 
• Pop-up for email subscriptions shortly after shopper lands on your website.
 
• Make email acquisition part of the checkout process
 
• Offer a discount code or other incentive for joining email list
 
• Turn followers into subscribers by holding contests or giveaways on social media
 
• Include an email signup box on your homepage sidebar or footer
 
• Create email specific landing pages
 
• Minimize clicks and fields required to subscribe

The most widely used email marketing solutions have email opt-in form generators that provide you with a snippet code that you can drag and drop where you want the form to appear on your website.  

Finally….

Even the busiest ecommerce stores should not make the mistake of taking a one-size-fits-all approach to email marketing. By blasting emails to your entire email database you not only lose out on sales potential, you also risk alienating customers with irrelevant emails and offers.  Don’t waste time taking your email strategy to the next level by using the customer segmentation capabilities in your email management platform or advanced analytics solutions like Glew.