email Monetization
Cheat Sheet
How To MonetiZe Emails
For ecommerce Stores
The Ultimate Cheat Sheet
Email marketing can drive an average of 30% of an ecommerce business’s revenues. But there’s no shortcut or a magic formula to monetizing emails. The key to significant revenues born from email marketing campaigns spans across many different factors and approaches. Some, when combined with others will achieve the same objective – driving more sales. At the same time there are those factors that can positively impact revenues all by themselves.
In this exclusive email monetization guide, we share our collective wisdom to present just a few of the tried and tested paths of creating emails that lead to better open rates, more clicks, and ultimately lift online sales for any ecommerce company. Whether you call it the Email Marketing Cheat Sheet (don’t worry, we won’t tell) or a collection of email marketing best practices, our team is certain that your team will not only love the results but may even claim the ideas as their own (again, we won’t tell).
1
Have all the Basic & advanced flows set up
Flows or automated email sequences are the emails that fire upon a trigger. Ecommerce businesses can win or win back a lot of potential sales that would’ve been lost if not for such automated flows. Some of the most common flow emails are the welcome, thank you for your purchase and the cart-abandonment flows, but we also do many other advanced flows.
2
Do campaign
marketing
Flows are great for driving revenue in a direct way, but sending regular emails (what we call “campaigns” as opposed to flow emails) is equally important. The campaign emails nurture your email lists on a regular basis and prime them for a purchase through regular content, offers, and promos. In fact, it may be fair to say that some people opt into an email list to keep on top of a company’s regular offers.
3
Improve
DELIVERABILITY
For emails that convert into sales, they first have to land into customers’ Inboxes! A lot of factors can affect deliverability and make them land into the spam or the promotional folder, which is not as bad as spam, but ideally, you’re gunning for the “primary” inbox for the most juice. Non transactional subject lines, balancing text, and visually-dominated emails are just some of the ways to improve deliverability. A few other ways are to prevent email clipping, putting a cap on the number of email sends, link tests, and regular spam tests.
4
Segment
Your List
The benefits of segmentation are manifold, but they primarily help with improving open rates and deliverability, which in turn leads to more emails converting. Segmenting your email list into categories according to the past action such as a purchase of a certain product, or behaviour such asopened the last 5 emails leads to heightened success of emails targeted those segments. Better historic performance of emails leads to better open rates in the future. In email marketing, all performance-affecting factors are usually inter-linked and have a bearing on future performance.
5
Crosssell
and upsell
products based
on past
purchases
Crosssell and upsell
products based
on past
purchases
Here’s another indirect benefit of segmenting your audience. You can cross-sell certain products to segments that are likely to purchase them. A classic example of these would be for an ecommerce store selling a variety of products. If you make a segment of say “customers who purchased 5 kitchen tools in the last 1 year,”you can be almost certain that this audience will be very receptive to emails focussed on kitchen tools and related products, and any offers on them would be highly convert-worthy.
6
Create
Scarcity
Human beings are given to the Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO), and we marketers are bound to leverage it. When a product is positioned as exclusive or limited in available quantity, it creates a sense of urgency in the mind of a receptive audience. While it may not turn a bunch of uninterested folks to buy your product, it does help the ones lower down the sales funnel to hurry up on their decision and make a dash for it. One of the tactical ways to create this scarcity is to have a limited time promo or announce how fast a product is running out.
7
Have a
clear CTA
The CTA is the culmination of all that the email has been trying to do. It implores the recipient to stir into a desired action. Every email should have a clear CTA, and more often than not, for ecommerce purchases, the CTA is usually the “Buy Now” button. But you can play around with the wording and have different CTAs like “Shop now” “Get yours” etc. But one thing to keep in mind here is to always have a single-action oriented CTA on the entire email. Having multiple CTAs like “Learn more”, “Explore” and “Buy now” in the same email can be confusing, and lead to dilution of conversions.
8
Always have the
value
offer out there
Highlight
value
offer for the targeted customer
When promoting products, it’s important to clearly highlight the value proposition or the “why” of buying. Consider putting yourself into the customer’s shoes, and highlight what would matter to them about owning the concerned product. A classic example would be that your brand could be engaged in manufacturing handicrafts and employs disadvantaged communities, and that’s a matter of great pride of you, but for it to resonate with the target audience, you may want to call out “How when owning an item from your brand, they helped support members of the disadvantaged communities.”
9
Implement reorder
trigger
emails
One flow that repeat purchase companies can leverage to optimise sales is the reorder email. A reorder email reminds the user to purchase a specific product again, after a specific duration or on the same time as the last time. For example, for an eyewear brand that has sold a pack of annual contact lenses, sending a reorder email just before the year ends reminding the customer that their refill is due, could work wonders to cement repeat purchases.
10
Try variations
of the same
offer
Having great offers is great, but pitching the same offer time and again tires out quickly and the customer may end up tuning it out. Using a % based discount offer? Try an absolute amount one. For eg. a 30% off discount on a certain product could be pitched as a $50 off. You could also word the discount differently. Avoid using the prefix “up to” before high discounts and use specific discounts as much as possible. A “flat 25% off” discount call is much more effective than an “up to 60% off” one
