How you can you dramatically increase your ecommerce sales with transactional emails
Transactional emails are a fascinating and often overlooked part of the ecommerce marketing landscape. Many business owners not only don’t take advantage of them but also don’t even have a clear idea of what they are. This is a shame because if harnessed properly, 'transactionals' can offer some truly remarkable benefits to those who use them for increased conversions and sales.
Now, we’re going to cover some effective marketing strategies and statistics for a select list of key transactional emails but before we do, a quick run-down of what transactional emails are.
So what are transactional emails?
In simple terms, transactional emails are the email messages you send to users of your site or application whenever they specifically, individually interact with either.
Thus, when someone joins your site and gets a welcome email or loads up their shopping cart or makes an order…
Practical techniques to increase response to your marketing emails, from copy to layout to product
An effective email is so much more than just finding some pretty images and filling the copy with superlatives and hype words, in the hope that someone will be motivated into action by this. Based on a recent breakfast seminar I’ve pulled together 15 of the best tips for better emails.
Pick images that speak for your email
We’ve all been told an image speaks a thousand words but the skill is picking an image that speaks the right 1000 words!
1. Show your products. An attractive woman or handsome man might make the email look beautiful but if you are selling products, a high quality product image is the better choice. It’s an absolute must in fashion and many retail verticals. Depending on your product showing it in use or context can help too. It helps customer imagine themselves using…
Essential checks even the email professionals get wrong. What should your Email marketing broadcast checklist contain?
Does your email campaign check all the boxes? A possible mistake can be at best embarrassing, at worst a legal risk or an opportunity cost of missed revenues that could lose you your job. Although as marketers it is our task to get the most out of our communication, the test, test, test mantra only applies to split testing and sometimes Quality Assurance for email doesn't get the attention it should as we all battle common sense / best practices amnesia from time-to-time and Murphy's law must have been developed for email marketing, right?
You'll know that there was once a man named Murphy whose law simply reads:
'Everything that can go wrong, will.'
Similarly in email marketing, the more campaigns you run, the more mistakes are likely. But rather than just accepting you can manage these risks, in fact this risk reduction approach…
8 reasons to use dynamic email personalisation and 18 scenarios for using dynamic content
EmailMonks have produced another informative infographic for email marketers looking to improve their use dynamic content.
As you will see in the infographic, dynamic, also known as smart or adaptive content enables email marketers to personalise their messages in an efficient way. Different messages or different offers can be given to different subscribers depending on their profile fields using the same template rather than creating a separate email for each target segment.
It's packed with examples, so you may need to click to expand to see the detail.
Thanks to Email Monks for sharing their Infographic. Email Monks offer fresh email design, template customization and design to HTML…
A creative subject line choice boosts clicks 228% for Money Dashboard
In this example, the email was gave uplift when targeting an inactive list segment and the winning subject line was itself being pitted, in an A/B split test, against a previously strong performer. So this was not an easy win against a poor subject line. It also shows the power of a creative approach to devising subject lines.
Re-engaging inactive customers is an important element of all email strategies.
Money Dashboard email marketing campaign case study
As this case study shows, the gap between good and great for inactive customers is wider than for active customers.
The details below include how it was done and a drill down into the performance difference between active and inactive customers.
Money Dashboard is a superb free online solution that keeps track of your…
Customers have similar traits but are not all alike and should not be spoken to with a single message in the same manner and tone. This was initially looked at in an earlier article ‘Talk to your customers or talk to your customer?’, but once the need to communicate with and not at all your customers is understood, providing different messages/offer/content using surface level details is a tempting approach, for example splitting the message by gender and/or age group.
This approach assumes that the surface level details represent the best groups of customers which will not always be the case. Looking at the sand in the first image at first glance all the grains seems to be identical with some obvious differences becoming apparent when a more detailed…
Plus a clever Facebook cover image trick
With ever lowering Facebook reach, fan acquisition on Facebook is increasingly less of a desirable goal. Yet I do believe that the platform still has a major role to play for many brands, not least because of the ubiquity of the platform, but also for its simply awesome targeting potential.
Savvy brands are using the platform to acquire new potential customers, but not necessarily as fans, instead they are using Facebook's wealth of advertising opportunities to data capture email addresses for their own databases.
Page admins have moaned long and hard about decreasing reach - how hard it is to reach fans which many have paid to acquire. With the end of like gating and further algorithm changes afoot in January (Facebook will drastically reduce the reach of Pages that have a tendency to post promotional content with limited "context"), it is most certainly time to…
Exclusive excerpts from Chad White's new book
You don't have to be...ahem...nearing 50 to struggle to keep up with all the changes in digital marketing. (In fact, life becomes a lot more relaxed once you accept you can't.)
It's why guidelines, frameworks and similar play an important role in ensuring your marketing is based on solid foundations.
For email marketers, Chad White provides those foundations in the 120 best practices contained within the 2nd edition of his "Email Marketing Rules" book. The new edition also has additional chapters explaining the interactions and synergies between these best practices.
Obviously some of those rules cover basics like "Don't buy email lists", but Chad kindly allowed me to pull out other rules that many marketers neglect in the rush to write the next subject line.
1. "Focus on maximizing the value of a subscriber, not on maximizing the results of…
Three steps to organic list growth
Often marketers will want to email as many people as possible, as quickly as possible and as cheaply as possible. This is a common mindset which can end in marketers purchasing or renting an email list.
If you are looking either for immediate or long term results, buying a list is not the answer. Instead follow our three steps to organic list growth to build your database without damaging your email list health.
Step 1. Optimise your web sign up
The first step in building an organic email list is optimising your web sign up. This may seem obvious; however web sign up can be easy to get wrong, so make sure you have this basic step perfected to avoid any negative knock on effects further down the line.
Optimise your form
Begin by creating a solid form which will encourage users to hand over their information instead of leaving your site.
Make…
7 key email strategy questions every email marketer should be able to answer
Company owners and marketing directors won't want to get into the details of your email marketing like your click-to-open rates or your deliverability. But in my experience, they will often know the important questions to ask . Here are 7 tough questions that as an email marketing specialist you should be able to answer, plus my suggestions of how you should answer.
7 key email marketing questions
Q1. How do you manage our email strategy?
Good answer
Strategy is determined by a review of all opportunities to improve our email marketing based on marketing objectives. Each opportunity is reviewed against all others rather than trying to evaluate improvements in isolation. As resources are limited, we balance effort between activities that will bring fast return and those are of part of long-term vision and require more investment. Business and revenue value is predicted wherever possible to…
