12 Best Email Marketing Ideas to Increase Conversion Rates

top10-websitehosting.co.uk
by LUCY DAVIS

Is your email marketing strategy working to its best potential? Is your click-through rate (CTR) not what you expected?

Ensuring that your email marketing campaigns are working is not only cost-effective, but can also drive more traffic, leads, and eventually sales.

Increasing conversion rates should be a top priority for any business; after all, that’s what’s going to keep your business running! The power of email is ever-growing, even more so with advanced technology, such as, smartphones, and voice recognition devices.

Spending more time focusing on your email marketing campaigns can essentially win you more sales and business. Emails can easily be forwarded and shared with others, so creating the right content, in the right format, at the right time is what we want to focus on.

In a 2012 report, data was examined for over 77,000 consumer orders; the results showed that email communication and marketing still presented itself as one of the top factors in repeat purchases.

Building an email list for your online store (whether you sell products online or offline) is an absolute must; an invaluable resource that you’ll wish you had of implemented sooner. Your customers, after all, are your business’s lifeline, they are the people that will continue to purchase from you and increase your conversion rates going forwards.

Building a relationship with your customers is a key factor here; if your customers trust you, and you can engage with them on the right level, you’re onto a winner where a lifetime of loyalty could be in your hands. Whether you’re engaging with your customers face-to-face, via social media, or email, the way in which you do so can affect conversion rates.

On average, around 21% of people will open your company’s email, with a 2.5% average click rate. Regardless of whether you’re a small business of up to 10 people, or a large-scale player in the hundreds, those figures count for something.

But, we don’t want you to settle for the average; we’ve put together 8 email campaign ideas that you can actually put into practice in order to help increase conversion rates.

We’ve put together a list of the 12 best email marketing ideas in order to help increase your business’ conversion rates.

#1 | Abandoned Cart

Customers abandon their online shopping carts for many reasons; Statista found that over 77% of online retail orders were abandoned in 2017 across selected industries. Research and investigation into why your customers are abandoning their carts is of course necessary to reduce the amount, however, email campaigns can certainly help in recovering some of what has been lost.

Creating an abandoned cart email campaign doesn’t have to be difficult; if you’re an eCommerce company using software, such as, BigCommerce, there are built in solutions ready and waiting for you.

There are some key factors to consider when putting your abandoned cart campaign together; a simple email, reminding customers that they may have forgotten to purchase their items simply isn’t good enough, and will most likely be dismissed or not even read.

• A large call to action image with at least one of the abandoned items
• Additional recommendations of other products that your customer may be interested in
• A call to action button to ‘shop now’ or ‘recover cart’
• Your company’s logo (or header and footer from your website)

We’ve taken an example of Topshop’s abandoned cart email for you to see what we mean. Creating an abandoned cart email campaign can recover 15% of potential lost revenue.

#2 | Promotional Emails

Whether you decide to offer a site-wide promotion, or a promotion targeting specific customers, promotional emails can be very successful. This is where it’s time to get creative, and again, this doesn’t have to be over complicated or difficult to do.

One study showed that video-based promotional emails saw click-through ratios (CTR) 96% higher compared to emails without videos. Video content alone is increasing in popularity across the web, so why not include it within your marketing campaign?

We’re not saying you need to create something big; a small video sample of promotional products, or an interactive coupon showing price decreases could provide a 9.68% click-to-conversion (CTC) rate.

#3 | Social Sharing

Social media usage is continuing to grow on a daily basis; in 2007, Statista’s share of survey respondents using social media every day was 30%. In 2015 those figures had increased to 81%.

Optimising your emails to include social links is very easy to do, but makes a big difference. GetResponse’s study showed that emails which contained at least 3 social links and options led to 55% greater CTR.

When you produce quality content that is share worthy, make sure it’s shareable! Your loyal customers are already dedicated to you, so why not allow them to share your company with others, leading to potentially more traffic and therefore higher conversions. At Top 10 Website Hosting, we always include social links/buttons across all of our content (and within our newsletter).

#4 | Up-Selling 

Once a customer has purchased a product from you, they’ve committed to your company; they obviously like what you sell, so why not optimise on that?

BlueCore produced a study to evaluate what effect up-selling and cross-selling products via emails had on CTR and conversion rates. Emails of this type generally produce a 0.55% conversion rate and 6.84% CTC.

The aim of the game is to follow up a customer’s purchase with similar or recommended products to those that they have already bought. You can even include this type of marketing within your product invoices and receipts that you email to your customers; call to action images with related products can entice further buying.

Another interesting up-selling tactic is through a lead generation quiz: you ask a number of targeted questions to your customer with the goal to discover his needs. Subsequently, you direct him to the most appropriate product page.

#5 | Life Events

If you’ve ever purchased something from an online store that requests your date of birth as part of its data collection, you’ll no doubt have received a “It’s your birthday, have [x]% discount on us” email.

These types of emails are not only clever, but make your customers feel that you actually care about them, and want them to enjoy something on the house, or at a discounted rate. Birthday emails, anniversary emails, etc. are really simple to set up regardless of which email marketing solution you’re using.

Customers will no doubt take advantage of your offer, and may even recommend friends and family to do the same, knowing that they’ll get something special on their big day.

#6 | Bundles and Subscriptions

This type of email campaign is quite specific dependent on your industry, but you could tweak the method to suit your business. Emailing your customers with extra offers, discounts, and products if they sign up to a subscription or bundle via your store could produce further revenue.

According to MailChimp’s research, out of at least 1000 subscribers in the games industry, 20.82% opened their emails, and 3.33% clicked through. If you can present a desirable subscription based bundle or package, that’s 200 customers that may open your email, and 30 that might click on your link.

Of course, those figures can be improved upon depending on how you pitch your ideas and target your market specifically. Generally speaking, subscription based products are more effective on increasing conversion rates, because often this works out cheaper for your customers.

#7 | We Miss You

If you’ve not seen or heard from your customers for a while, they may need a gentle reminder that you still exist! These types of emails should generally contain a short “we miss you” message, as well as the option to opt out, to reduce the feeling of spamming.

An overview of your latest products may be able to grab an old customer’s attention, along with an enticing offer code that appears specifically for them to use in order to come back and purchase again.

You may experience that these types of customers will only come back when an offer or discount is brought to their attention, but at least they’re coming back, and those small conversions can make a large difference.

#8 | Welcome Email

Welcome emails go a long way to converting new customers or subscribers to your website. First impressions count, and so should your welcome email. When a customer creates a new account, 74.4% of consumers expect to receive a welcome email.

• Engage your customers straight away; a small ‘about us’ section can introduce new customers to your company whilst getting to know you
• Let your customers know how often you’ll be in contact with them, and give them the option to change how often they’ll receive information from you
• Inform your customers of other ways they can contact you, engage with you, and stay in touch, for example, social buttons like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube

On average, the open rate for customer welcome emails can be more effective than newsletters.

#9 | Mobile Optimised

In 2017, a study showed that 55% of emails were opened on a mobile device; this kind of trend isn’t due to decrease in the future. These statistics alone should be a driving force to ensure that all of your emails are mobile ready.

There are several factors to consider when creating an email marketing campaign aimed at mobile users:

• Subject lines and titles should be limited to around 30-35 characters to display correctly on a smartphone or device
• White space is key to ensuring that the end mobile user can read emails quickly and efficiently
• Larger fonts should be considered for a user-friendly experience
• Links should be visible and clickable
• Call to actions should be working and easily clickable

#10 | Subject Matters

When a new email pops up in your inbox, what do you look at first, what do you see? According to Litmus, 34% of people will read the subject line before deciding to even open an email.

Subject lines should prompt your readers to open the emails you send to them; you want to make the subject relevant, but also promote curiosity so that your emails are opened. Closely related to mobile-ready emails, subject lines should be short and sweet.

If you don’t nail the subject line, or your readers deem what they see as spam, they’ll likely delete their email before they’ve even read it, unsubscribe, or mark it as spam. Make sure your emails stand out and entice your users to open and read for more information.

#11 | Preview Text

Referring back to point 10, 24% of people will read the preview text included in an email before opening it. Common email clients such as Apple and Gmail both support and use preview text.

Email software often comes with the option to edit your preview text, however, if yours doesn’t, you can check out some standalone software here. The content of your email is very important, but you’ll want to ensure your users actually open the email to read the content.

Preview text needs to be short, snappy, and to the point. If you’re offering a discount code, state that within the preview text so that your users are encouraged to read more.

#12 | Timing Counts

This may seem a little odd at first sight, but the timing of your email marketing campaigns can really make a difference. According to research across the EU, USA, and AUS, the optimal email open rate was between 8PM to midnight. That’s a 20% increase in open rate compared to other times of the day, as well as increased CTR.

Now, we’re not saying to send an email every day at these times, but if you’re planning a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly campaign, timing is key to your readers opening their emails. When you think about it, by the time people have got home from work, had their dinner, and relaxed, they’ll probably check their social media accounts and emails, so it makes sense.
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