Online retailers will need to engage with email marketing tools in order to drive effective campaigns.

For online retailers, engaging customers involves a number of intricate steps, often involving a number of different channels of communication. But too often limited resources trigger short-term activity and insufficient results. To truly be effective in reaching out to target audiences, e-tailers will need to zoom in on advanced email marketing strategies. 

Email marketing is one of the most effective communication channels that exists between brands and consumers. According to a Marketing Profs article highlighting a Message Systems’ report, “Consumers prefer to receive marketing messages, special offers, and coupons from brands via email more than any other communication channel.”

The stats displayed below support this claim:

While consumers like to get offers via email, these above figures don’t reflect how often they in fact engage with retailers’ email campaigns.How do online retailers increase their email marketing ROI?

To reach a positive level of email marketing ROI, online retailers will need to fully commit to understanding that the value of email marketing lies in its ability to reach out to consumers with exciting and engaging content, whether in the form of an aesthetically pleasing visual of a newly released item or a promotional offer with humorous, yet effective messaging. When all this falls into place, consumers at the receiving end are inclined to not only open the email in order to reach the coveted ‘inbox-zero’ status, but to actually interact with the brand by moving along the sales funnel, for instance by clicking a specific call-to-action that directs them to a promotional sale on your brand’s website.

The trick is being able to identify the most effective ways to tap into the power of email marketing. This, in turn, will help online retailers launch more rewarding campaigns and improve their relationship with consumers.

To help in this process, there are great email marketing tools that online retailers can adopt, including the three below.

1. Intercom’s email personalization templates

While “94% of companies say that personalization is critical to current and future success”, marketers seem to be falling short when it comes to mastering content personalization. This is also true when it comes to email personalization.

Launching successful email marketing campaigns requires forming a more personal relationship with both your potential shoppers as well as loyal,brand enthusiasts. Intercom, a leading communication platform designed to build bridges between brands and consumers, understands this need and offers personalized email templates (see below for an example of how this looks):

2. GetResponse’s responsive email design

Design for mobile performance. This should be the motto for all online retailers, as making sure your emails look great only desktop computers is no longer a viable solution. According to a 2016 report conducted by Adestra on Consumer Adoption & Usage Study, “…79% of teens—and 68% of millennials and baby boomers—say they delete emails that don’t render well on a mobile device.”

Moreover, the widespread growth of mobile device users has outpaced that of desktop. See the graph below for a visual of this assertion:

With this in mind, to effectively meet their email marketing quotas, online retailers should consider investing in email responsive design. One outstanding tool, which doesn’t require coding or advanced graphic design skills, is GetResponse’s responsive email design creator. This feature allows users to choose among hundreds of responsive templates and test out how they appear across differently sized devices.

3. Google’s Customer Match – email targeting

According to Ryan Hoffman, chief brand strategist at Listrak, an e-commerce-focused digital marketing automation platform, while emails are and will remain powerful, “…marketers need to take command of all customer data and use it to send the next best communication to each customer based on his or her most recent transactions and behavioral interactions.” Such data comes from various points along the customer sales funnel, from an initial customer interaction with your brand’s content, to an actual online transaction.

As such data reflects behavioral insights providing information on what consumers actually want and need; emails should be targeted based on those findings.

To help with such targeting, Google introduced Customer Match. According to CPC Strategy, this is an effective email targeting tool designed to help online retailers leverage their existing relationship with loyal customers by incorporating promotional email addresses into AdWords in the form of lists based on actual consumer profiles and stats.

To keep you inspired, below is an example of a carefully crafted email that is focused on a specific segment, in this case a newly signed-up user:

Mastering email marketing is possible

To sum up, thanks to user-friendly email marketing tools that are designed to bridge communication gaps between online retailers and consumers by helping brand retailers personalize messaging, design for mobile performance, as well as better reach targeted users based on behavioral insights, online retailers can more effectively launch and/or improve existing email marketing campaigns and increase their email ROI.

Inbound Junction helps retailers and brands reach online shoppers by connecting them with relevant bloggers.

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