30-40%.
When you’re in eCommerce, that’s how much revenue your email marketing should be bringing in every month.
Sure, email has been around for a while. And even though it’s changed since it’s early days and the people who use it have changed, one thing in the marketing world remains the same:
Email marketing has the highest ROI than any other marketing channel.
But most eCommerce businesses struggle to hit that revenue target of 30-40% from email.
There are a few common reasons why this is the case.
And it was such a pain for many of our customers that we decided to put together an online course to help them overcome the issue.
However, we’ve found that one main culprit that negatively impacts results is when your other marketing efforts don’t mesh or work inline with your email marketing efforts.
Below, we’ll quickly show you a few ways to up your game and help take a step in the right direction.
3 Ways To Mix Email and Other Marketing Efforts Together
1. Include Strategic Email Opt-ins On Your Website
Now, chances are you already have an email opt-in form somewhere on your site.
Maybe you have a pop-up or banner that shows after a visitor comes to your store or on the checkout page when they’re entering their info to buy something.
And if you’re doing this, great!
But…
There’s a reason why we put the word “strategic” in this sub-heading.
Remember – email has the highest ROI of any marketing channel.
So you can throw as much money as you want at paid ads to bring in traffic, but most of those people aren’t ready to buy yet; you haven’t nurtured a trusting relationship at this point.
And if you don’t get their email or even a phone number, you will have lost your chance to build relationships with people interested in your brand and products.
So if you’re looking for list growth results, you gotta think a little past adding one pop-up on your site and calling it good.
Look at important moments in your buyer’s journey when they land on your site.
Did an ad send them here? Was it an affiliate or social post? What page did they land on? Are they browsing a certain product category?
Questions like these can help you move in on areas of where to place opt-ins and what those opt-ins can say.
Here are a few strategic methods to help take advantage of your site traffic to grow your email list:
- Use Exit-Intent pop-ups. Give them an offer like a discount or free shipping if they enter their email before they go. (Like how TOMS shoes do it.)
- Optimize opt-ins forms for mobile. Since most people are going to be coming to your site via a mobile device, you should make sure your forms take this into consideration. Even changing the copy on these to call out the mobile viewer can help add a personal touch and increase opt-ins.
- Use pop-ups in your store and not just the home page. If a viewer comes to a specific product page from say… a post you made on Instagram, you should have an opt-in form at the ready on those pages.
- Try gamified opt-in forms. Certain pop-up tools give you the option to use something like Spin-To-Win (like Pura Vida uses) or let you display a fun quiz. Gamifiying your opt-ins is a great way to boost conversions from site viewer to subscriber.
Don’t be overly worried about showing visitors too many opt-ins forms.
Most tools, including Sendlane, gives you customization options for who to show what and when to show it.
We’ve built intelligent pop-ups into our platform to make it easy to create strategic opt-in forms, like some of those mentioned above, on any page of your site.
2. Use Behavior To Trigger Marketing and Email Automations
Consumers don’t just want personalized offers — they expect it.
But it’s hard to personalize your emails and email promotions if you don’t understand what your customer likes and how they interact with your website.
So how do you give your store that almost innate personal touch to each and every customer that comes your way?
By using website tracking with marketing automation.
Why do we say that so confidently?
It’s pretty simple really.
With a tool like Sendlane, you can place our tracking pixel on your website to individually track each customer journey. Using the data you track, you can then create highly targeted automations that trigger based on a customer’s behavior or action.
It’s like POOF! Instant automated personalization at the ready.
Let’s give a quick example of this:
Your data — which you’ve been collecting with website tracking like that available in Sendlane — shows that some of your audience has an average order value of around $75 and purchase from you twice a year.
With an automation funnel set up, when someone’s behavior matches that criteria they get automatically put in a segmented list.
When they managed to be segmented to that list, you can place a trigger that sends an automated email thanking them for their support and offering them a special coupon they can use.
The power of this is three-fold:
- Your messaging to them is now hyper-personalized because you’re able to call out they’ve been a repeat buyer and you love them for it.
- They’ve already bought from you before which means they are much more likely to buy from you again.
- Instead of wasting money on ads (*blows raspberries*) to attempt to gain revenue, all you did was spend a bit of time putting this together. Now you’re consistently making an income while boosting brand loyalty — all on autopilot.
This is just one example, but you can see how tracking behavior that triggers personalized email automations have a big effect on ROI when you’re doing it right.
We can’t overstate just how impactful and valuable tracking browsing behavior and marketing automation can be for business.
Just so you can see it for yourself, though, here’s a glimpse at some Marketing Automation and Behavioral Marketing stats from Hubspot:
- “Businesses who nurture leads make 50% more sales at a cost 33% less than non-nurtured prospects. (Strategic IC, 2017)”
- “69% of marketers say converting leads is their top priority. (HubSpot, 2017) 79% of top-performing companies have been using marketing automation for three or more years. (Venture Harbour, 2017)”
- “Businesses with a full or partial personalization strategy experienced revenue growth 78% of the time.”
- “93% of businesses with an advanced personalization strategy experienced revenue growth.”
We’ve personally seen the impact for ourselves and our customers who doubled down on using the behavior-based features in our marketing automation platform.
With our built-in tracking pixel, Beacon, it’s possible to track each user’s browsing behavior and then trigger marketing automations like retargeting ads, SMS messages or email campaigns to get every last drop of ROI out of your efforts.
If you haven’t given it a go yet, click here to sign up for a free 14-day trial to see why our customers are raving about it.
3. Use Social Media To Grow Your Email List
Let’s face it.
Social media and email marketing don’t have a great history of consistently working together.
It’s not that they can’t work well together, it’s usually just that person in charge of social media and the person responsible for email marketing tend not to work closely together.
One person has one set of goals and duties to perform and the same goes for the other person. This means that their work doesn’t tend to overlap or need collaboration that much, if ever.
That’s not always the case, but it’s pretty common.
However…
When the marketing team has the common goal of growing their email lists, social media and email can now move in the same direction.
Here are a few ways social media can help list growth:
- Call out subscribing to your brand’s email in your posts. If you can link to a signup page, then do so.
- Include a way to sign up on your Instagram weblink. A tool like Shorby can help you do that.
- Use Facebook’s Customizable Tabs or Twitter’s Lead Gen cards to encourage email sign-ups.
Don’t be shy.
Ge creative here.
And use UTMs to see how much your social efforts are impacting list growth so you can benchmark and improve results.
Bring It All Together with Marketing Automation
We hope these high ROI methods give you a few ideas for areas of improvement when it comes to blending your email and marketing efforts together.
Getting 30-40% of your monthly eCommerce revenue from email takes a lot of work, but it’s definitely achievable.
We’ve seen others do it.
We’ve done it ourselves.
You can do it too.
Are you interested in learning more eCommerce email strategies from our CEO Jimmy Kim? You can check out his online course — eCom Email Academy.
Also, if you’re really interested in the course then be sure to sign up for our email list in the banner below.
We have something special coming up for it, and you won’t want to miss out.