The surge in social media usage over the last five years has undeniably led to a rise in automated social messaging, becoming an essential tool for online retailers. While many brands believe they can thrive on social media alone, neglecting email marketing can unintentionally become a marketing misstep.
Online engagement is fleeting, and a brand out of sight quickly becomes out of mind. Email marketing is crucial in recapturing and maintaining customer attention in the absence of social media interactions. Automated email messaging becomes an indispensable tool when it comes to your brand’s marketing machine – simple to implement, budget-friendly, and highly efficient.
In fact, a simple automated “Welcome!” email with special offers or discounts can increase your conversion rates by 100%!
The Power of Automated Emails
With a forecasted 376 billion emails to be sent daily worldwide, the battle for consumer attention is very real. This makes it even more important that your retail business captures shoppers at the right time and in the right way. When done right, you can earn $44 for every dollar spent on email marketing.
Evaluating your email open rates is the first step in mastering your automated email marketing strategy. “Open rate” here refers to the number of people who opened an email message. The open rate only considers the first time the recipient opens the email, also known as a “unique open”. Keeping an eye on the open rate will help you gauge your campaign’s effectiveness, what you’re doing right, and what you need to improve on. Fortunately, modern retail platforms offer comprehensive reporting tools that make it easy for your business to use automated email marketing effectively. These tools provide a holistic overview of your campaign, from undeliverable messages and click rates to sales resulting from each email and more.
Using these valuable insights, such as the relevance of your target audience and the efficacy of your subject lines and email content, you can boost your email open rates to up to 30% from the average email open rate of around 20%.
But open rates aren’t the only thing that matters here. A good automated email marketing strategy will also boost your conversion rates.
How to Boost Email Conversion Rates
While achieving high open rates is essential, the true testament of a successful email campaign lies in the action taken by the recipients. Defined as the “conversion rate,” it refers to the number of people (usually in percentage) who perform the action you want them to take after interacting with your emails.
To boost your email conversion rates, there are three primary things to keep in mind:
- Attract
Attract customers by personalizing messages tailored to their time zones with catchy subject lines incorporating humor or emojis. Personalized subject lines in your emails can increase your conversion by up to 42%.
- Engage
Engage them with intriguing challenges, games, and promotions that interest them in your brand.
- Convert
Finally, convert them with irresistible offers like free shipping, discounts, or bundled products.
The right automation tool can make optimizing the seemingly daunting task of drafting conversion-focused emails a breeze, by simplifying the process of building and managing email lists and sending automated marketing emails at the right time to the right people.
Taking the Guesswork Out of Email Automation
CommentSold’s Marketing Automation includes many tools at your disposal to ease the process of attracting and retaining customers.
1. Automated Emails
With automatic email marketing, you can not only convert prospective customers but also retain existing ones. By sending out personalized discounts and enticing offers, you engage your customers and encourage them to return, which can significantly boost your conversion rates.
2. Comprehensive Marketing Integration
Fully integrated marketing offers a seamless brand experience across all channels. This feature helps coordinate your marketing messages and ensures consistency in tone, language, and branding, thereby strengthening your brand identity and improving customer engagement.
3. Auto Retargeting Ads
Embedding tools like Google Analytics & Facebook Pixel into your brand’s website lets you gather essential information about your website visitors. You can then use this data to serve retargeting ads, reminding customers of their browsing history and promoting relevant products, thereby increasing the chances of conversion.
4. 24/7 Auto Replies
Automated responses to customer comments are an excellent way to maintain real-time engagement. These can provide instant updates about items in their cart, their waitlist status, unpaid invoices, and more–keeping customers informed and engaged with your brand.
5. Facebook Messenger Notifications
Automated messenger notifications can offer personalized shopping assistance or send updates about upcoming sales and promotions. This feature helps you maintain direct communication with customers, improving customer satisfaction and increasing the potential for repeat business.
6. Push-Notifications
You can spur immediate purchases and keep your brand top-of-mind by alerting customers about sales, new arrivals, and more with mobile push notifications. The ability to send push notifications directly to mobile app users helps you engage with your customers in real time.
7. SMS Text Messages
Given the high open rates of SMS, using text messages to communicate with your customers can be very effective. This bypasses crowded email inboxes and social media algorithms, ensuring your messages are seen quickly. You can even send shoppable text messages to your shoppers.
8. Secondary Offers
Features that automatically display older products before checkout provide additional opportunities for sales. By filtering items based on the customer’s size and excluding previous purchases, you provide a personalized shopping experience that can increase customer satisfaction and conversion rates.
9. Flexible Coupon Codes
Offering discounts like free shipping, fixed-amount or percentage off, attached to collections and channels, and providing flexible expiration dates or unlimited usage, can attract more customers. These incentives can increase sales, making them a powerful tool for boosting conversions.
10. Mystery Items
Features that allow you to offer mystery items can help clear old inventory. By setting price limits and inventory days, you can surprise your customers with items they’ve never ordered before, adding an element of excitement to their shopping experience and encouraging further purchases.
Each of these features plays a distinct role in automating your email marketing process, helping to streamline operations, personalize customer experiences, and ultimately, boost your retail business.
Email Automation Made Easy
Employing targeted and personalized email marketing keeps customers engaged even outside direct interaction, be it during live selling or while selling on social media platforms like TikTok or Facebook. The beauty of automated emails lies in its “set it and forget it” model, saving time and effectively reaching out to customers with pertinent offers throughout their buying journey.
To rise above the sea of marketing emails, your customers should receive daily, personalized messages with compelling offers, such as exclusive discounts or free shipping. This can provide your e-commerce retail business with a distinct edge. Continually tracking and optimizing your open and conversion rates with the right retail platform and reporting tools will help you refine your strategy, leading to more successful future campaigns.
