Improve Your Email Marketing Campaigns with Analytics

Email marketing is an important tactic for nearly every online store. In fact, research indicates that email marketing efforts generate $38 in ROI for every $1 spent. Additionally, the average order that is placed because of an email is typically at least three times greater than those that come from social media efforts. With the total number of email accounts anticipated to reach over 4.3 billion accounts worldwide by the end of 2016, an immense amount of potential lies within email marketing efforts.  While an extensive list of email addresses is an asset for your online store to have, this information is only valuable if you know how to use it properly. It is not an efficient use of your time and resources to simply send out a general email to thousands of individuals and cross your fingers that it translates into a few sales. Instead, the data from your ecommerce analytics can help you tailor email marketing campaigns to make them as effective as possible.  How can ecommerce analytics help you implement better email marketing campaigns?  

Send Targeted Emails to Customer Segments

Ecommerce analytics makes it possible for you to differentiate between your various types of customers. You may have one group of customers that orders on a regular basis, another group that places very large orders occasionally, and yet another group that typically only places orders when they are presented with a discount code or other special promotion.  Since ecommerce analytics enables you to group customers based on their shopping habits, you can use this information to your advantage as you craft email marketing campaigns. For example, it may be most beneficial to send out an email about new products to your loyal customers, since you know they are already browsing and buying from your website on a regular basis. Additionally, if you are trying to get a quick boost on sales, you could send out a discount code to your shoppers who have previously placed orders from one of your promotions. You don’t want to constantly bombard your customers with emails, so ecommerce analytics allows you to send fewer emails that are more targeted, and hopefully more successful.  

Promote Your Hot and Cold Products

Sending out carefully planned and executed emails is an ideal way to sell even more of your hot products or attempt to boost the sales of your cold products. Just one advantage of using the right ecommerce analytics platform is that you can easily identify which products are selling and which are not. (For more strategies on hot and cold products download our visual guide!)  Your hot products are the items that are your most popular sellers – the products that are your real moneymakers. Your cold products are those that are selling at a lower rate and producing the lowest profits for your ecommerce store. By pulling data from your online sales, your ecommerce analytics makes it easy for you to see which products are performing well and which ones could use some improvement.  You can then use this information to your advantage as you put together your email marketing campaigns. Since you already know that your hot products tend to be popular among many of your customers, you can promote these products in your email to turn even more customers onto these best sellers. Conversely, since your cold products are struggling, you can utilize your email marketing campaign as a test to see if lack of awareness is the problem. If the sales increase after the email, maybe you just need to advertise these products more. If the sales remain stagnant, it may be time to stop carrying these items.  

Send Reminder Emails

Another useful data point provided by ecommerce analytics is which customers tend to place the same orders repeatedly. Whether they order the same office supplies each month or the same building materials every few weeks, you can use this information to your advantage. Based on their order history, you can easily identify when they should be placing their next order. To help them out, go ahead and send a reminder email about the products they typically order. You can also use this as an opportunity to suggest a few other related products that they may also need, or suggest some new products that you just started offering.  With the right ecommerce analytics platform and the right information at your fingertips, you can easily improve your email marketing campaigns.