5 ways to make your eCommerce emails dramatically better

You’ll have seen lots of statistics in your feeds telling you that email is still the number 1 online communication tool. The fact that 99% of consumers check their email every day is tantalising. Even if your list is tiny you need a plan to make sure your emails work hard to enhance your sender reputation, keep those hard-won customers and drive growth through personalisation and a strong cache of consistent high quality content.

With a good list and a well-crafted email strategy you’ll be able to re-engage existing customers and nurture new leads. This is your guide to five essential building blocks that can significantly make your emails better whether you’re just setting up shop or on your third online store.

Customer segmentation – personalisation starts by using the segmentation feature in your marketing tool to create lists to target specific consumers. You can group by demographic, location, past purchases, browsing history etc.

Personalisation tags – use personalisation tags to start the email on first name terms.

Triggered messaging – automatically send real-time personalised content for specific customer activity (we get on to this in more detail later).

Email personalisation strengthens the customer experience and keeps your customers or prospect engaged with campaigns that offer valuable content tailored to their interests, motivations and behaviours. Obviously you’ll be sending messages about your offers, daily deals and giveaways or simple emails to say hi and re-engage inactive customers or subscribers. One thing’s for sure, boring generic emails will end up as spam fritters. Now we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty of what you’re going to write.

Triggered messages

Triggered messages are near real-time personalised emails based on customer activity.
There are lots of ways that you can set up automated trigger campaigns as part of your wider email strategy – if your website is integrated with your CRM and email marketing tool.

Here’s a very quick list of the types of trigger emails you could send to:

• Welcome a new customer
• Welcome a new product, offer or content subscriber
• Engage and gently nudge when a website visitor abandons a browsing session or shopping cart
• Boost post-purchase engagement
• Reply when a customer completes a feedback form or information request
• Celebrate customer birthdays with a treat
• Let your list know about an exclusive flash sale

Whatever your goal, you’ll need an experienced copywriter either in-house or outsourced to write the subject lines and content to achieve it. The first thing you’ll need to think about is your target prospects and customers and the right tone, style and language to use. While there may be many other online retailers selling the same products as you, your tone of voice can set you apart and make your brand instantly recognisable in an inbox.

When it comes to the copy, you don’t want to be writing emails on auto-pilot or blast everyone on your list with the same email – again and again. So you’ll want to write copy that makes the recipient feel each time like it was just written for them. Do this by tailoring the content to make sure it relevant and interesting to them as an individual. Similar to every other channel you need to be sending relevant content to the right person at the right time.

Subject lines / preheaders / titles – use power words that immediately make a message feel personal. The most powerful word in marketing is ‘you’. You want people to feel like the copy was custom-made for them. Use lower case lettering to set a friendly tone. It’s how friends email each other. USING CAPITALS MAKES YOU SOUND ANGRY.

Make it scannable – benefit-rich headings, sub-headings, bullet points and short paragraphs help ease people through who quickly scan emails.

Make it succinct – get to the point quickly, include a hook and offer in the first paragraph and use persuasive language that inspires the reader to continue reading and take action. Keep it simple and don’t overly complicate things with jargon or ‘industry-speak’.

Make it immediate – capture the attention of people with a fear of missing out and use language like ‘last chance’ when you are promoting daily deals, discounts and offers.

Calls to action (CTAs) – You’ve worked hard to get people to open your email. You’ll need to think about you’re going to optimise CTAs so that readers click through. Using the same CTA on every email says that you have the same campaign goal. But you won’t. You will be sending out your offers and deals, product campaigns, or sharing a blog post, a newsletter, or other valuable content. Each needs a more personalised CTA for the target group rather a basic CTA used for everything.

Personalised CTAs perform 202% better than basic CTAs (HubSpot).

As we mentioned earlier, customer segmentation means that you are able use something that is intrinsic to the target group (location say) or tailor your CTA to where they are in the buyer’s journey – are they a prospect, a new or long-standing customer or an inactive subscriber?

If people sign up for updates, newsletters or you have a blog page, you need to be able to keep up with demand for fresh, useful content that you share with your email lists to keep them informed and engaged with your brand. Even when someone is not actively buying, you need to offer value that respects the relationship you’ve built with them.

Customer loyalty after the first purchase is a hard-won battle.

A win-back campaign to bring customers and inactive subscribers back into the fold by showing them a bit of love is an effective campaign tactic. Again, words matter here and it’s best to use emotive words in the subject line to cut through.

Don’t forget to structure the copy so that it is mobile-friendly and optimise the subject lines for mobile devices (Validity reports that these devices show just 25 – 30 characters). Most people will just scan your email keep it simple and use sub-headers and bullet points to make it easier to skim but still sustain interest.

Don’t forget to test different subject lines, preheaders, copy, CTAs and formats to see which have the better open and click-through rates etc. There’s always an element of trial and error when you are just starting out and testing what piques your customers’ interest and influences their behaviour.