www.remarkety.com

B E S T P R A C T I C E S F O R T H E

EMAIL MARKETER

CONTENTForeword

8 Email Marketing Pitfalls to Avoid

Setup Automated Email Workflows that Convert

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Targeting Inactive Customers

Can You Really Dodge Email Spam Filters

Product Recommendations – The Key to Upselling

Define your Email Marketing Benchmarks

Writing and Designing an Effective Email

Bonus

Segmentation in Use - Examples

Conclusion

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FOREWORDEmail marketing is a communication tool used to reach consumers directly and is a vital part of an eCommerce marketing strategy. The stereotype that once plagued this marketing medium as being a hard-core sales tool has long been discarded. Email marketing has transformed along with modern marketing methodology to become an indispensable inbound marketing tool that can strategically improve customer engagement and revenue.

The objective of email marketing is not always to directly sell, but to reach out to those that have shown an interest in your business’s area of expertise and guide them discreetly towards a sale. The magic of email marketing comes from the diversity that it provides to marketers to reach different consumer types, target consumers in different stages of the sales cycle, create and enhance the relationship between the consumer & the brand, and build relationships that will encourage loyalty and thus increase customer lifetime value (LTV).

Email marketing enables eCommerce businesses to interact with consumers at the right moment in time, on a fully personal level, through automated emails that are triggered based on data sent directly from your website. This form of marketing provides a cost-effective way to reach thousands of potential customers. Remarkety is a leading email marketing automation platform designed specifically for eCommerce and is changing the way retailers market, target and sell to their customers. Remarkety equips merchants with enterprise level tools that were otherwise unavailable to them.

This guide will take you through every aspect of email marketing, giving you all the best practices required to implement effective email marketing strategies to convert more customers and improve overall revenue.

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EMAIL MARKETINGPITFALLS TO AVOID8

We are about to take you on a journey that will transform your email marketing campaigns. You will learn the best practices that will transform you into a top-rate email marketer, but first, let's look at why so many email campaigns go wrong. Think of this scenario, you’ve created your perfect email, but your open rate is a measly 3.1%. Shock, horror, no… your email campaign has just fallen way below the 16.92% industry average. What went wrong?

Stop worrying, we will solve this email marketing mystery. Email marketing is made up from several different components that piece together like a puzzle. If you are missing one piece, your puzzle may never come together. Luckily for you we have collated a list of the most common pitfalls found in failed email campaigns. If your open rate has fallen or your click through rate is non-existent, then you too may have fallen victim to one of the top 8 email marketing pitfalls.

1. No-Reply Email Addresses

2. Send Timing

3. Buying Email Lists

4. Sender Score

5. Unsubscribes & Opting Out

6. Subject Line

7. Personalization/Email Design

8. Mobile Optimized

THERE ARE 8 MAIN ERRORS MADE IN EMAIL MARKETING CAMPAIGNS, INCLUDING:

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NO-REPLY EMAIL ADDRESSESIf you don’t want 10,000 people replying to your email campaign then use a no-reply email address. Stop! There are two reasons why you should reconsider using no-reply email addresses. Firstly spam filters will filter your emails from your customers inbox, and secondly, a no-reply status secretly screams, ‘attention, warning, this is an ad of some kind, do not open’ in the head of the recipient. If you are sending an ‘Im not going to listen to you so do not respond to me’ email then why should someone bother with you?

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SENDING AT THE WRONG TIMETiming is everything. If I ask you if you have time to open your emails at 8am, many of you may laugh whilst others would agree that this is their most productive hour. Timing of an email is crucial to its success. There are different times, and even days that will help endorse the email’s effectiveness. A/B testing will help you ascertain the right time/day suitable for your customers. Timing is also related to the frequency in which an email should be sent. Build a consistent relationship with your customers and maintain a communication link by testing frequency. An overkill will increase your unsubscribe rate.

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BUYING EMAIL LISTSThis is highly unrecommended and will quickly ruin your email reputation. Buying a pre-populated email list will only serve to gather a list of unqualified leads for your eCommerce website. A qualified lead is one that has willingly requested to open a channel of communication with your brand. Marketing industry statistics show email lists are the most likely cause for high unsubscribe rates. Worse still, the recipients from this list are more likely to flag your emails as spam and report your site which will lead to your ESP being blacklisted.

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HAVING A LOW SENDER SCOREMailbox providers identify email senders and place them into categories according to their sender score. Sender score is a number between 0 and 100 that identifies your sender reputation and shows you how mailbox providers view your IP address. Sender reputation is an indication of the trustworthiness of an email sender's IP address. Having a low sender score will place your emails at risk of being placed into the spam filter. Low open rates contribute to your score so it is time to clear up your email lists. Keeping your list clean from unresponsive email recipients will help boost your email reputation. Have an email list clear up at least once every 4-6 months.

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UNSUBSCRIBES AND OPTING OUTCustomers often opt out of email marketing when they initially sign up. Once a decision has been made by the customer to opt-out this line of communication has been closed. Unsubscribes is another issue faced by email marketers. Customers unsubscribe due to irrelevant emails. Reduce your unsubscribe rate by focusing on the importance of the first few emails and the relationship which you need to build with the customer. Build loyalty by providing relevant content that offers them something extra. Give your customers a reason to open your emails and not unsubscribe.

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SUBJECT LINESFirst impressions count. If you are not grabbing your customer's’ attention in the inbox then you are sending emails that will never be opened. You need to be creating a “link bait” styled subject line that will catch attention and will lead to relevant content. Subject lines must be unique and direct if you want your email to stand out in a crowded inbox and capture the reader's attention. Our top tip is to thoroughly A/B test your subject line for email blasts and email automation. Be original, creative and remember to test!

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PERSONALIZATIONBuilding a relationship begins with responding directly to the needs of the customer. Personalization failures will cause distress to your email marketing campaign. Personalized emails include static information such as name and purchasing behaviour including: purchasing history, order size, revenue spent etc, allowing you to target them with relevant discounts or product recommendations. Personalization provides a powerful message that shows you are relating to the customer as an individual. Keep the email realistic and don’t over personalize, being overly personal can scare people. Email personalization will dramatically increase your open and click rates.

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MOBILE OPTIMIZATIONOver 60% of all people access their emails on their mobile device, if your email can’t be viewed on mobile devices your email will be deleted. Scrolling back and forth to read content on mobile is a complete failure. You can solve this problem by creating a responsive email that will automatically respond to the dimensions of the mobile device. Many email marketing platforms, such as Remarkety will provide you with responsive emails, however not all platforms do. Always test your email prior to distribution using a tool such as Litmus to ensure that the email is responsive.

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SETUP AUTOMATED EMAILWORKFLOWS THAT CONVERT

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The whole idea of sending personalized emails to each and every one of your customers sounds time consuming, this is why automated emails are about to become your best friend. Simply, set it and forget it.

Automated emails are set up to sit within your sales cycle and capture your audience at certain stages on their journey on your website. Once a person reaches a certain stage this will trigger an email to be sent to them with your predefined content. Getting confused? Let’s simplify this for you.

Every business, especially in eCommerce, shares six core stages that require your intervention and they are:

Sign upWelcome

Emails

BrowseAbandonment

Emails

AbandonedCart

Emails

OrderPurchasedFollow up

Emails

RetentionEmail

InactiveCustomer

Emails

These six stages are placesin which you need to

strategically communicate with your customers.

Let’s go into some more detail about the four simple

& easy automated email campaigns you SHOULD

be running.

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You have acquired a newly qualified email subscriber. Time to welcome them. Welcome emails have high open rates (50-60%). It’s aim is to help engage a new customer. Welcome emails should be value-added and not sales focused. Added-value increases loyalty and loyalty leads to sales. The first email in this campaign series acknowledges the sign-up with an instantaneous email of gratitude including relevant, yet minimal information about the company and/or products. Sign-up incentives include a one-time coupon for the first purchase. Follow up welcome emails continue periodically until the first purchase. Personalize content to reflect the pages the user has browsed and add tips that they may find interesting. Add social links to your welcome series to allow the new customer to share their new-found love with their friends.

In contrast to the abandoned cart where the visitor that has actively added an item to their shopping cart, we have the browse abandoner. These people are those that have shown actual interest in a product and have spent time on the page on more than one occasion. This step is just one step away from adding the product to the cart. This website visitor has left without taking any action on your website. Browse abandonment allows you to target website browsers with personalized emails based on their on-site activity in attempt to coax them back with relevant incentives, product recommendations and alternative product suggestions. As with the abandoned cart, these emails should include a sense of urgency too.

1. WELCOME EMAILS

2. BROWSE ABANDONMENT

The abandoned cart email is an important automated email campaign aimed at recouping revenue that would otherwise be lost. A recent Shopify study suggests that an amazingly high 67.45% of all carts are abandoned before the purchase stage. You are losing a huge chunk of revenue by not targeting these customers and enticing them back. Abandoned cart campaigns are designed to re-engage the customer at three different intervals. Within an hour of cart abandonment remind the customer their cart is awaiting, include clickable links back to the awaiting cart. Follow up again between 24 and 48 hours after cart abandonment. This email content should include products in cart and relevant recommended products. Product recommendations can be similar to, or an alternative for, the products that they failed to purchase. Your final follow up should be sent up to a week after cart abandonment and should include a sense of urgency. Add a time-bound incentive, such as a time-limited coupon or one day only free shipping, to give the customer a reason to click through and complete the purchase immediately.

3. ABANDONED CART

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The follow-up email campaign aims to continue engagement and build a relationship. These emails are the perfect opportunity to add value with no sales spiel. Your customers will gratefully and willingly open emails if they add value to their purchases. Follow-up emails begin with confirmation of the purchase in the form of a transactional email. The automated series will then continue to thank the customer for their purchase and should provide relevant information including delivery details. Additional follow-up emails ideas include: suggesting products that will compliment a purchase, giving product-care/usage information, such as how to care for their new washing machine, or you may request a product review offering some form of completion incentive. These type of emails have the highest open and click rate and should be utilized.

Keep your customers engaged even after they have purchased with your latest news and deals. These emails include promotions, new arrivals, birthday emails and all of your event related news. These emails should be targeted and segmented to provide the most relevant content for the customer. Retention emails are educational and engaging and are not meant for spamming the customer with constant sales. Respect your customers and give them something that will add value to your relationship.

4. ORDER FOLLOW-UP EMAILS

5. RETENTION EMAIL

Inactive customers are split into two main groups. Those that have only purchased on one occasion and those that have purchased more frequently and haven’t returned after a substantial period of time. They came, they purchased, they disappeared, there is no loyalty in this World. Building a relationship takes time and effort and this is where your inactive customer emails come into play. There are many reason why a customer goes AWOL: not happy with a previous purchase, no longer have any need for your products (very frequently a problem in the time-limited baby consumer goods world) or your competitors are offering them a better deal. Segment your inactive list by distinguishing what type of shopper your customers were. Customers that were frequent purchasers over a 12-month period and have suddenly disappeared differ from the customer that made one small purchase 4 months ago. Each of these variations need to be targeted with relevant content and relevant sized incentives to entice them back to your store. Our top tip is to remember that you have nothing to lose and these campaigns should be more aggressive in nature. Statistics show that the bigger the incentive given the higher success rate. Just remember to know your limits and when to admit defeat and remove these emails from your lists!

6. INACTIVE CUSTOMER EMAILS

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COMMON MISTAKES TO AVOID WHENTARGETING INACTIVE CUSTOMERS

THE SIXMISTAKES

Generating qualified leads and getting people to sign up to your website is a feat that must be celebrated, but now you need to keep these customers active. eCommerce vendors often forget to nurture their customers after sales, this leads to a huge backlog of inactive customers dangling around on your database. Time to re-engage inactive customers effectively.

Inactive customer campaigns are there to reduce the turnover of customers, increase revenue, and thus increase profitability. These types of emails are also known as re-activation, re-engagement or win-back emails and they are as precious as gold dust in the eCommerce world.

Have you attempted to create an inactive customer campaign and failed to re-engage your existing customers? There are six common pitfalls that eCommerce owners often make that you need to avoid.

Wrong. If you are sending a blanket email to each inactive customer with the same content then you are going to fail, every customer is different. Segment your mailing list based on customer purchase and browse behavior. A customer that has purchased one item of a large value and another that made frequent small purchases have different needs that

need to be addressed. Inactive customer campaigns should include several win-back variations, each with its own segmentation and timing. Send a win-back email to customers who signed up for a newsletter, but have failed to make their first order within a two-week period with a time-bound free delivery coupon. Alternatively, send an email to customers who have previously placed frequent orders, but haven’t purchased in the last 60 days with a discount code for products relevant to their previous purchases.

1 ONE SIZE FITS ALL

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You gave up quickly! How many times have you received emails from a company that you have purchased from and ignored them because they aren’t relevant at the time or you simply just didn’t have time to open them? Persistency pays. Being persistent without being a pain is simple. For each of your segmented audience types create up to four different emails with slightly different subject lines, calls-to-action and timing.

2 ONE EMAIL AND YOU ARE DONE

You think you may have got to grips with segmenting your lists, but what you may have forgotten is to personalize the content. Including details of previous interactions with your company personalizes the content to the individual adding a feeling of self-worth. Create personalized content by extracting data from your website, this may reference previous orders, or a most popular item viewed by the customer. Remarkety can extract this data directly from your website and automatically insert into automated emails.

3 LACK OF CONTENT PERSONALIZATION

Feeling loved in the consumer sense means getting some form of incentive. Incentives are more cost effective than the cost to obtain new qualified leads. Fact! Not many customers will return after a period of absence if you don’t offer them a good reason to return.

4 NOT MAKING EMAILS WORTHWHILE

Test several different variations of your emails, test the subject line, calls-to-action and incentives. If you don’t know what triggers a response in your audience, you will never succeed. Test only one variant at a time so you can measure the response and know that this is the reason for the change in email performance. Once you can pinpoint a clear winner, then you can set the email as your default email.

5 NOT TESTING

You can’t send all these different campaigns manually. Even if your store only has 20 customers, this type of work is painstakingly difficult. Implement an automated system that will send emails at set trigger points. Set up a time flow, segment your lists and create content for your emails and let Remarkety email marketing tools do the rest. Avoid each of these mistakes and your inactive customer campaign will be a huge success.

6 FORGETTING AUTOMATION

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CAN YOU REALLY DODGEEMAIL SPAM FILTERS?

Spam filters are every email marketer’s nightmare and must be avoided at all costs. Emails that are sent to spam never get the opportunity to be read.

There are several tips and tricks that you can integrate into your email campaign to help you avoid triggering the spam filter, but let us firstly understand what a spam filter is and how it works.

WHAT IS AN EMAIL SPAM FILTER?

WHAT FILTERS TYPES ARE OUT THERE?

Email spam filters are added by email providers to fish out emails that are sent for mass promotion. These filters are set with criteria that scores email senders and decides if emails should be sent to the inbox or to spam. Emails sent to spam are emails that have a low deliverability rate and/or a low sender score. All outgoing emails sent from the IP address associated with the outgoing mail server are tracked and given a sender score. Emails are scored on their open rate, bounce rate and delete rate. Email senders that have a low open rate, or worse still a high bounce rate are viewed as spammers and will be given a low sender score. Once an email sender has picked up a certain number of ‘warning points’ they are relegated to the spam folder.

There are several different filters types that you need to be aware of, including:

BAYESIAN – Used by Outlook, Thunderbird and Apple mail. Bayesian filters spam according traits similar to what the user has previously marked as spam.

CHALLENGE/RESPONSE - These filters deter emails arriving from senders not in the recipients’ contacts.

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COMMON SPAM TRIGGERS TO AVOID

The most common mistakes made by first time email marketers include:

SUBJECT LINE – Subject lines need to be relevant to the content and simple. Do not use a gimmicky subject line and be aware of over-using Emojis. Other spam triggers include using the words: Re: or Fwd: An email filter will immediately take note if there has or hasn’t been any previous correspondence connected to the email. Some of the other words that you need to consider refraining from use include: Guaranteed; 100 % free; FREE; $$$; !!! or an excess of other symbols; Attention; Act now!

EMAIL DESIGN – Even if you make it past the filter your subscriber may dislike your content and report you as spam. Content should be unique, relevant, offer an incentive and be exciting. The body of the email should contain a balance of images and text, some people like to read information whilst others may get more information from visuals. Include external links to relevant content that can be of added-value to the reader and include the date to show content is timely and relevant.

UNSUBSCRIBE LINK – The CAN-SPAM Act states that there must be an unsubscribe option that is not difficult to find on each email and remains available for up to 30 days past the send date. Unsubscribe is not such a bad thing, it clears out your email list and will improve your open rate. The average unsubscribe rate sits at around 1% so be prepared for some unsubscribes.

BUYING EMAIL LISTS – Purchasing lists are a certain way to send emails to unqualified leads, and thus will endure low engagement. Subscriber engagement is important to avoid spam filters. One certain way to ensure there is a chain of communication and engagement is to ask your subscribers to click an opt-in. This way you are ensuring that you are contacting those that want to be contacted.

Email spam filters are your enemy. If your emails are going to spam then your customers are not getting the emails rendering your email marketing campaigns redundant.

UNSUBSCRIBE

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PRODUCT RECOMMENDATIONS –THE KEY TO CROSS-SALES & UP-SALES

To make the most of your automated and personalized emails you need to be incorporating the product recommendation tool. Product recommendation is a form of indirect upsales that can, and should, be included within your email marketing campaigns. Product recommendations are based on customer browse and purchase behaviour. The behavior data generates relevant product recommendations with images, descriptions and prices for inclusion into your automated email. This feature can be used for both cross-sales and up-sale opportunities dependent upon the customer’s purchase and browse behaviour data.

HOW DO PRODUCT RECOMMENDATIONS PROMOTE CROSS AND UP-SALES?When people purchase from a site they may not consider purchasing complementary products, or they may not, at the time, have the funds or time available to search for additional products. Product recommendations are not a new idea, you may have seen them in Amazon’s ‘Customers who purchased X also purchased Y’ feature. Product recommendations are highly effective in raising conversion rates, winning back customers and increasing average order size.

WHAT DIFFERENT TYPES OF PRODUCT RECOMMENDATIONS ARE THERE?There are plenty of different algorithms and recommendation combinations currently in use, however with changing practices and technological advances these combinations are often interchangeable. The most popular recommendations that have had proven success include:

Customers that have purchased X also purchased Y – This will display other products that have been purchased by customers who have also purchased product X but it will eliminate products that have been already purchased by this buyer.

Items usually purchased together: This will display other products that have been purchased by customers together with product X within the same order.

Best sellers from customer’s favorite category:This will display top selling products from the same category as the product being viewed or recently purchased.

Latest products from the website:Maybe the customer wants to know what is new

Product Viewed but not Purchased:Extremely popular choice in an abandoned browser campaign

Abandoned cart items recommendation:This recommendation analyzes the products that were abandoned by the customer and displays top selling products for this category or products that have been purchased by other customers together with the products that were abandoned.

Product recommendations are not limited to follow-up after sales email. The most effective campaigns to integrate product recommendations are:

WHEN SHOULD YOU INTEGRATE PRODUCTRECOMMENDATIONS INTO YOUR EMAILS?

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It is common practice to follow up after sales with a feedback/review email. In this email you may add the following product recommendation types:

• Customers who have purchased X have also purchased

• Other customers have purchased X together with (these can well be complementary products)

• Top sellers from the same category

FEEDBACK REQUEST EMAILS: ABANDONED CART RECOVERY: Carts are not always abandoned due to pricing, so while it may seem worthwhile sending a coupon for the cart products, it may not always be applicable or viable. Offering the customer an alternative product may just win you a sale.

REWARDS PROGRAMS: Loyalty schemes reward an active shopper with coupons or discounts. We recommend that you offer these rewards towards recommended products based on consumer behaviour. This has been proven to increase conversions.

INACTIVE CUSTOMERS: Inactive customers may have not returned because they have the product they required and have no need to return. Tempting an inactive shopper to return with a product related to the one previously purchased often proves to be very convincing.

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DEFINING YOUR EMAILMARKETING BENCHMARKS

A common issue that is often seen in email marketing is the lack of planning and strategy. Marketing plans often neglect specific goals and objectives. Each email campaign should have a refined sense of purpose to ensure that your marketing efforts are yielding the maximum results. Without a defined email marketing plan you could be damaging your business’s brand.

WHY DO YOU NEED TO CREATE BENCHMARKS?

Benchmarks enable an email marketer to monitor and qualify the success of a campaign. The benchmark acts as a validation point to compare

different variations of an email campaign. Email marketing goes much further than sending an informational newsletter to all your subscribers, it offers near-infinite variables that allow you to target niche audience types. The only way to identify, evaluate and improve different email variations is through tracking success against benchmarks.

WHAT BENCHMARKS SHOULD YOU TRACK?

When you are looking at the entire sales funnel, the “big 3” benchmarks are self-evident: open rate, click rate and conversion rate, however the entire sales process in reality has far more twists and turns. To get more out of your eCommerce email marketing campaign, you need to build additional benchmarks based around the personal interactions created throughout the buyer’s journey, this will enable you to create a more direct focal point for analysis.

In addition to the open rate, click rate and conversion rate you should also include the following benchmarks for analysis:

Bounce rate: Bounce rate represents the percentage of visitors who land on your website and leave ("bounce") without clicking through to view other pages. A bounce rate often indicates that the email campaign is irrelevant to the audience. A common mistake include sending customers to the homepage rather than a dedicated landing page.

Correlative clicks: Your audience have expectations of what content is awaiting them from your language in your email subject lines and email content. A/B testing will allow you to see which keywords best represent your content offers in the eyes of your audience.

Unsubscribes: Most people sign up to email lists without intention. In order to keep these customers from unsubscribing you need to ensure emails are relevant to their stage in their buyer’s journey. Irrelevant emails will be seen as spam and will increase your unsubscribe rate.

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BENCHMARKS AND OBJECTIVES

REMEMBER:

Analyzing the variables above will allow you to understand and tweak your email marketing campaigns however, benchmarks vary depending upon your email objectives. Let’s take a quick look at different objectives

Generating revenue – You need to analyze the conversion rate but note your benchmark for your Welcome email campaign and cart abandonment campaign will vastly vary.

Introducing a new product line– You will be looking to see the interest gathered over your new product line. Are people coming to the site, are they staying on the page for more than a few seconds, are they reading further pages regarding this new product line. The bounce rate and session times will be of importance for gaging success of this campaign

Targeting inactive users – Analyze the results of your open rate and click through rate to see if the customers are still willing to hear from you.

It is vital to define the objectives of your email marketing campaign before you set benchmarks. Understanding the nature of your email, and what you wish to achieve from the email will allow you to set the relevant benchmarks from which you can then analyze the success of your email marketing campaigns.

In addition to the open rate, click rate and conversion rate you should also include the following benchmarks for analysis:

Bounce rate: Bounce rate represents the percentage of visitors who land on your website and leave ("bounce") without clicking through to view other pages. A bounce rate often indicates that the email campaign is irrelevant to the audience. A common mistake include sending customers to the homepage rather than a dedicated landing page.

Correlative clicks: Your audience have expectations of what content is awaiting them from your language in your email subject lines and email content. A/B testing will allow you to see which keywords best represent your content offers in the eyes of your audience.

Unsubscribes: Most people sign up to email lists without intention. In order to keep these customers from unsubscribing you need to ensure emails are relevant to their stage in their buyer’s journey. Irrelevant emails will be seen as spam and will increase your unsubscribe rate.

Analyzing the variables above will allow you to understand and tweak your email marketing campaigns however, benchmarks vary depending upon your email objectives. Let’s take a quick look at different objectives

Generating revenue – You need to analyze the conversion rate but note your benchmark for your Welcome email campaign and cart abandonment campaign will vastly vary.

Introducing a new product line– You will be looking to see the interest gathered over your new product line. Are people coming to the site, are they staying on the page for more than a few seconds, are they reading further pages regarding this new product line. The bounce rate and session times will be of importance for gaging success of this campaign

Targeting inactive users – Analyze the results of your open rate and click through rate to see if the customers are still willing to hear from you.

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WRITING AND DESIGNINGAN EFFECTIVE EMAIL

Once your emails are being opened how do you ensure that your email is effective and will yield the desired outcomes? The email, this one little piece of content, is all you have to convince your recipients that your eCommerce site is the one for them. So, what are the tricks of the trade when it comes to ensuring that your email contains all the right components to convert your recipients into paying customers?

eCommerce websites should all be designing their emails using the five rules of the trade and they are:

SIMPLICITY

ADD AN INCENTIVE

Your goal is to ensure that your reader can clearly understand the motive of the email and see the call-to-action. The way to create a simplistic email is to format the email body into three sections:

Headline – Be bold and clear. What is the reason for the email? If you have a sale then the headline should refer to the sale.

Content – This content should be no longer than a sentence or two that will describe the reason for your mail.

Call-To action – Have a clear call-to-action that will take the reader directly to the offer content.

These three sections of your email should all remain above the fold so the reader doesn’t have to scroll. It is clear, concise and takes the reader directly to the relevant content on your website. Your email should also feature ways to contact you and social sharing options.

There are many ways in which you can offer an incentive, including: coupons, exclusive offers for subscribers, free shipping, free returns. You need your reader to feel that you are offering them something that they need/want and you are giving them a good deal. Personalized incentives should be relevant to the email campaign. An abandoned cart incentive may include free delivery if the customer places the order within 3 days. A discount on items related to their last purchase may convince an inactive customer to return.

Your goal is to ensure that your reader can clearly understand the motive of the email and see the call-to-action. The way to create a simplistic email is to format the email body into three sections:

Headline – Be bold and clear. What is the reason for the email? If you have a sale then the headline should refer to the sale.

Content – This content should be no longer than a sentence or two that will describe the reason for your mail.

Call-To action – Have a clear call-to-action that will take the reader directly to the offer content.

These three sections of your email should all remain above the fold so the reader doesn’t have to scroll. It is clear, concise and takes the reader directly to the relevant content on your website. Your email should also feature ways to contact you and social sharing options.

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PROOFREAD, TEST, REPEATYou want to ensure that you a giving your reader a positive impression and an email plagued with grammatical and spelling errors will not boost confidence in your brand.

In order to ensure every email you send is perfect we suggest that you:

Have someone else proofread Proofread the email 24 hours after creation Read the email out loud

Proofreading is only the first step, the second stage is to test your email responsiveness for different devices. The third stage is to launch your A/B testing to test different subject lines, calls-to-action and send times. Now you are ready to launch.

KEEP IN CONTACT – CONSISTENCY IS KEY

Persistency and consistency that serves as an incentive to the receiver will yield results. Follow up emails should be sent in all your automated campaigns. The only time you should not follow up with a customer is when the customer has chosen to unsubscribe from marketing and is now considered a dead lead. Did you know that according to a study by Union Square Ventures, around 80% of sales are made on the 5th to 12th contact. Statistics have shown that stores that follow-up on abandoned carts campaigns recover 40% more orders than a store that decides one email is sufficient.

BE AVAILABLE AND BE RESPONSIVE

Despite the clarity you believe you created within your email, your customers may still require further assistance. Make sure that there is a clear way for your customers to contact you from within the email. Include a responsive email address and social links, and if applicable, a telephone number in the footer of every mail. Responding swiftly to customers will increase your customer experience.

Everyone is segmenting, are you? The buzzword of the year in email marketing must be segmentation. Segmentation is the practice of splitting your email lists into smaller target groups enabling you to personalize your marketing messages and reduce non-essential emails.

Here are ten ways in which you can segment your lists and increase customer lifetime value:

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BONUSSEGMENTATION EXAMPLE LISTS

1. CUSTOMER TOTAL SPENDTotal spends will show you your high spenders, small spenders and everyone in between. Total spends is an important segmentation because it allows you to send incentives according to values.

Pro Tip: Send a time-bound product recommendation incentive discount with products related to previous purchased.

2. NUMBER OF ORDERSA low spender may be a loyal customer who frequently spends in your store. Loyalty should be rewarded. Targeting loyal customers is a way of saying thank you, we appreciate it.

Pro Tip: Reward customers after they hit an order milestone with a coupon for their next purchase.

3. LOCATIONEven though your products remain the same worldwide, your written email content must suit the geographical location. Joking about the NY Yankees last game may not get the same response in LA as it does in NY.

Pro Tip: Use a local reference in your written content.

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4. EMAIL BY AGE & BIRTHDAYAppreciate your customers and send an email on their birthday. We also suggest that you add age categories to this list so you can personalize the written content and the incentives.

Pro Tip: Change the incentive to suit different age brackets and highlight milestone birthdays.

5. PURCHASE HISTORYPurchase history allows you to include automated and personalized product recommendations to excite your audience. Purchase history, best-selling products are critical to making smarter, more effective recommendations.

Pro Tip: Send your customers automated emails when new/updated products become available.

6. SIGN UP DATE ANNIVERSARYSet up an automated email that will reward your customers on their sign-up anniversary. If a customer has remained loyal for an entire year, or more, then you should be celebrating that milestone.

Pro Tip: The longer a customer has remained loyal, the more indulgent the incentive should be. Add this to the type of purchaser the customer is to work out the value of relevant incentives you should be sending.

7. LAST ORDER-DATEIf a customer’s last order-date was recent then send an email offering follow up recommendations to replenish or accompany the products from their last order. If the customer’s last order-date was not recent, then you should trigger your inactive customer campaign that aims at re-engaging inactive customers with your brand.

Pro Tip: People hate salespeople! Word your last order-date email carefully without a direct sales pitch.

8. ORDER STATUSOrder status emails include: thank you for shipping, shipment status and feedback request emails. Try sending a follow up product information email to give the customer added-value without any sales spiel.

Pro Tip: The timing of these emails is critical. Requesting product feedback prior to delivery is a wasted email.

9. CUSTOMER TAGSCustomer tags allow you label a customer. One tag includes; source, indicating how a customer signed up to your store. A customer you met at a trade event may require a different welcome email than a customer that signed up following an organic Google search.

Pro Tip: Use tags to allow you to differentiate your content.

As an email marketer or an eCommerce business owner, you may be daunted at the prospect of marketing your business to the global marketplace. You are tasked with multiple initiatives: building your internal business structure, planning business growth, identifying innovation and opportunities whilst carrying out the daily tasks within the business. The right automation tool can save you time. Email automation will maximize ROI whilst allowing you to focus on other aspects of your business. Remarkety provides resources that will allow you to execute your email marketing strategies with precision. Use the tips and tricks set out in this paper to help you create a holistic email marketing strategy, implement vital tactics that will enable you to build lasting relationships with your consumers, and expand your reach with customer experience as your focus. By using data to understand your customers you will be able to implement smarter, contextual content and interactions that will benefit the customer experience and enhance brand value, increase customer engagement and stimulate strategic growth. Remarkety understands the needs of eCommerce, and has developed a tool that will allow email marketers to effectively communicate with consumers through automated email marketing. Using the right email marketing tool and following the tricks and tips illustrated throughout this document will help you to maximize your marketing efforts.

10. EMAIL ENGAGEMENTEmail engagement measures the way in which a customer has previously engaged with your email campaigns. Have they frequently opened your emails but never clicked? Have they clicked but not purchased? Do they only purchase only when a coupon has been sent to them?

Pro Tip: Emails opened but not clicked means email content failure. Do some A/B testing to see if you can convert your openers into clickers.

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CONCLUSION

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