Emails to potential or past customers can be a crucial way to generate interest and revenue. When done correctly it can be a form of passive marketing which can generate large numbers of clicks on your eCommerce site. When a future customer signs up to a mailing list they are volunteering to receive tailored advertising for your site directly, alongside their other emails. When an eCommerce company can earn that position it can be an incredible opportunity to turn the potential in that customer into real results. For most online companies, some sort of emailing list is crucial to success in as busy a marketplace as the internet.
With that being said, here are 7 ways to help you grow your emailing list and, in turn, grow your business!
1. Hide Certain Content
Probably the most effective way of snaring those potential customers is by withholding website content until they have entered their email details and accepted that marketing emails might come their way. The ‘unknown’ is an incredibly powerful motivator on the internet and withholding entry to your site, or access to information on new deals without agreeing to be on the email list is an amazing way of capitalising on that fact. It also plays on the short-term interest and impulse of most internet users. For them, eager to access what they want to access, their threshold for allowing an eCommerce site to email them is lowered impulsively opening the door to future marketing materials. Furthermore, this method forces the potential customer to knowingly agree to the marketing which is psychologically advantageous and more likely to produce a long-term customer.
2. Advertise Your Site Through Facebook
Facebook Adverts have become a huge resource for eCommerce stores, offering very specifically tailored advertising options to companies with really any budget. If you post a Facebook advert for a particular product or service, then anyone who intentionally clicks on the advert can be assumed to be directly interested in your company. Putting an email marketing sign up at the junction between the Facebook ad and the site that the potential customer is trying to access will most likely result in another email for your list. It also helps identify customers who have a pre-existing interest in what you are selling which helps your email list to be filled with shoppers who are more likely to actually engage with your site.
3. Offer Rewards
A normal eCommerce business can afford to offer small rewards in return for being granted the opportunity to put a potential customer’s email address on their mailing list. Rewards can come in many different shapes and sizes and relate specifically to the product being sold by the site. For example, a clothing store might offer a 5% discount on all stock in exchange for an email address, whilst a news or journalism website might grant 24 hours of unlimited access to all their articles for the email. There will always be people who will take advantage of this but the act of subscribing to a mailing list is far more convenient and, with rewards, far more easily motivated than going through the ordeal of unsubscribing immediately afterwards. You can get creative with this as well, coming up with fun rewards as incentives and even fun ways of deciding the rewards themselves (see Spin To Win). It also allows you to begin your relationship with a potential customer on a good note, something which is more likely to generate a lasting relationship which reaps benefits for you and your company down the line.
4. Catch Them On The Way Out
If a potential customer has visited your website, no matter what they have done, whether they’ve checked a price and then immediately gone to leave, or they’ve put in a huge order the moment they go to click out of your website is a good time to quickly interject with an entry bar for an email. It can be another junction to offer them some deals, a moment to thank them for their purchase or even just their interest, or a chance to display a bit of your company’s character. If they’ve made a purchase, they are of course much more likely to want to sign up to the mailing, and you might have caught them upon check out anyway. But even if they were just browsing offering them a chance to put their email in plays directly on the idea of the internet being a crowded place. “A user can check a website one day and then a week later they will have forgotten what it was and how to return. The goodbye email list offer encourages a potential customer to avoid losing your page in the enormous world of internet eCommerce and allows you to, for a moment, communicate directly with them. Again, this encourages an active choice, as opposed to an inadvertent sign up, which plays well further down the line,” says Michael S. Louis, an email marketer at Professional Essay Writing Service.
5. Have Strong Email Content
It’s a somewhat obvious point, but it can be one of the most important things in terms of building your emailing list. When you do manage to get a user to sign up for your mailing list you’ve got a crucial opportunity to impress them. If what they receive at first is a complete disaster, poorly written, with mistakes in grammar and spelling, or if it is formatted badly, you’re going to find it hard to keep a hold of those readers, for future correspondence. Even if the people themselves aren’t especially good writers, the fact that you are a company means that there is an assumption of a certain professional standard you must adhere to. However, the skill of having strong email content isn’t as simple as getting it right, in a baseline sense. Writing an effective eCommerce letter is much easier said than done and can require a lot of quite intense work, simply to even make sure there is appropriate quality control.
6. Write With A Personality
Bland marketing content, while safe, is the death of some emailing lists. There’s nothing worse as a consumer than opening an email which, from the get-go, is simply dull. Consumers already know that they are receiving blanket emails so it’s important that at the very least what’s written in the emails doesn’t sound generic. It can be perfectly phrased, spelt and have good grammar but if it doesn’t grip the reader it might as well be gibberish (in fact gibberish might be more effective!). Execute your emails with a sense that you want the reader to know something about the character of the company and to have learned something new about the thing they are signed up to by the end of the email. Don’t be afraid to startle! It’s better to have one or two unsubscribes but grow closer with your target audience than to play it too safe. Include graphics, colours, bold text, gifs, videos whatever you need to so that no-one closes the email without having had an impression left on them.
7. Make It Personal
Which leads us to the final point. Nothing grips a reader more than feeling like they’re somehow understood by the company they are subscribed to. Again, as above, it plays on that idea of startling the potential customer with the email. If a customer visits the site once and views an article on tech policy as their free article, then the next email to their account should be with a link to something related to that. To generate clicks and returns to your eCommerce site you want your readers to feel understood. The feeling of being understood encourages a desire to perpetuate that understanding, and a belief that your site is in some way unique in its perception of them as a customer is an incredibly valuable thing. Offer them a deal on whatever they clicked on, send them a link to similar articles to something they’re interested in, send them offers to complete the jewellery set of which they own the earrings. Allow them to begin to form a personal connection with your company and you could have a customer for life.