Email has been around for a while now, and smart business owners know it is here to stay and is an integral part of marketing businesses. Your email list is a prized possession for any business that takes time to build and maintain.

An email list adds significant value in several ways and helps in selling your business. It lets you contact people directly who have either purchased a product or service you sell, are interested in your product or are inclined towards learning about your industry or niche. Keeping in mind the long-term interest and growth of any business, building an email list should be a top priority. Especially for e-commerce businesses, email marketing is the key to their success.

Importance of an email list

Most people who visit your website may not return to it unless you do something to keep them coming back. Building an email list helps you get this done and retain more of the traffic you worked so hard to earn. Your email list and campaign drives help to bring traffic back to your website by providing an incentive to return like with discounts, valuable content, new products, etc. It also ensures direct communication on a regular basis. If your e-commerce business hasn’t taken the time to adopt email marketing, then it is time to buck up now.

Content marketing through Email

A strategic way of marketing is through content marketing, where businesses communicate original content to their audience.  Gone are the days of traditional advertising with potential customers, nowadays businesses aim to draw attention by delivering relevant information and entertainment which creates a buzz for the brand as well as builds trust with the audience.

It makes collecting email addresses from your visitors a critical ordeal. It allows you to keep in touch and follow up with your audience over time and ensures more than just one-time visits.

Build relationships with your customers through email

Social media and search engines may offer an easy way for potential customers to discover you. However, email is the best way to maintain and to cement a relationship over time.

It is common knowledge especially for those who are well-versed with online shopping that you’re more likely to buy from the websites that you are more familiar with and have already formed a relationship.

Email Drives Traffic and Sales

Email is an effective and efficient way to reach and communicate with customers and potential customers on your email list, in a wide variety of ways. The kinds of marketing content that can get delivered through email are newsletters, drip campaigns, individual occasion emails for holidays, birthdays, and other personal events, etc.

Choosing the Right Email Marketing Platform

To send your customers promotional and offer related emails you need first to select the email marketing service and set it up. There are many email marketing services out there for you to pick. Ultimately, you need to choose the one that would work best for your business and goals, and that can integrate easily with your website. These email marketing platforms allow you to maintain your mailing list as well as automate the production and sending of your emails.

Some of the things you’ll also want to consider while choosing your platform are if it offers customizable email templates, audience segmentation to send targeted emails based on customer profiles, opt-in forms that can be embedded on your website and detailed analytics to measure your email marketing campaigns.

Opt-in forms

To grow your future email recipient list, you need to get creative. Making it easy for anyone to sign up is one of the preliminary things you should try to incorporate. Attractive offers need to be clear and concise with a simple action item: the opt-in form.

The strategic placement of these opt-in forms is an essential element that drives your website. Opt-in forms are nothing but those email sign-up boxes you see on almost every site.

Opt-in form generators offered by popular email marketing software solutions will provide you with a fragment of code that you can just paste into various places around your site. Adding multiple opt-in forms to your website may seem like going overboard, but it’s not. Every visitor that comes to your website does not look at every inch of your site from header to footer so it would be justifiable for you to place these forms at different spots.

Audience segmentation for better engagement

Sending the same email to everyone is most often one of the common mistakes many businesses make with their mailing list. Not all subscribers on your mailing list have to get engaged with the same content you send to all.

For example, if you are selling items in different categories like women’s clothing, men’s clothing and kid’s clothing not every subscriber will find the mailed information relevant or exciting. It doesn’t make sense to send the same message to everyone as it needs to be engaging with your subscribers. You want your emails to be relevant to the recipient as often as possible. While it is not possible to customize an email for every individual subscriber on your list to cater specifically to them, you can create emails based on particular criteria using segmentation to increase engagement and conversions.

Segmentation allows you to ideally sort your contacts into different lists or “buckets” based on their engagement, interest and the information you have on them. You can differentiate your contacts in the following ways such as customer type, gender, interest, location, and behavior.

Converting Subscribers into Customers

If you want your subscribers to stick around and open your emails, you have to regularly provide them with value—via discounts or useful content.  Along with promotional emails, it is crucial also to include nurturing emails as not every subscriber is ready to buy. It is essential to get their interest first with relevant information.