A retail business is always customer-focused, which means how you deal, interact, and engage with your customers can make or break your sales. Email marketing is an effective way to engage with your audience and get leads. Here’s how.
As a retail business owner, you must understand that dealing with customers first-hand is your everyday business. Not only should you provide the best possible customer service but also offer phenomenal after-sales services and keep them engaged after they’ve made a purchase. One of the best ways to do that is via email marketing.
While many marketers think email marketing has become obsolete, the truth is many of them just don’t know how to reap its benefits. In this blog post, we’ll discuss the core email marketing strategies you need to focus on to run a successful email campaign.
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Build a subscriber list
The first thing you need to run an email marketing campaign is a subscriber list. As the name suggests, this is the list of all your subscribers who want to be in the loop of any latest updates, upcoming discounts, or new products your company is about to launch.
Consider a subscriber list as your lead generator, but the problem is how can you expect people to share their email addresses so easily? There’s only one way to do that — engage with your audience. Engagement depends on a lot of factors, including how you craft your email, but before that, you should consider posting valuable articles on your website blog to increase your traction online.
The subject line has to be perfect
How many sales emails have you tossed into the trash folder without even opening them? Lots, right? So, why would you expect your potential customers wouldn’t do the same to you? People are busy and don’t have time to read sales emails, especially if they get an initial idea that it’s a sales email.
You only have one shot to impress the reader. And for that, you need a savvy subject line — something that would pique their interest and curiosity. A great subject line can make or break an email, so make it distinctive and tailor it to the interest of your target audience so that they’re enticed to open it after reading the title. Something like “X% off on your favorite Canada Goose jackets till next week. Don’t miss out!” would compel the reader to take action sooner rather than later.
What to include in your email’s content?
Now comes the tricky bit. When you’re drafting your email, make sure you add visuals and graphics but not so much that it appears overwhelming. For instance, you could insert a Black Friday poster into the email with all the relevant information on that poster. This way you can avoid writing blocks of text that readers avoid.
Secondly, your email’s structure is crucial to how well it will be received by readers. Laying out your email structure can be cumbersome, so we recommend using an online tool like PosterMyWall as it contains dozens of free email templates so that you craft your email in a few clicks.
Market segmentation is another must-have
Every business has different shades or sub-groups of the target audience. For instance, if you’re a luxury apparel retailer, you may have one product category extremely popular with younger folks (Gen-Z and millennials) and another lineup popular with baby boomers. Therefore, if you send one email to everyone, you’ll be missing half or more of the shots you take.
That’s why market segmentation is so important. You must identify various sub-groups that make up your target audience and craft an email relevant to each of them. This way, you can make your emails more relatable and personalized to each segment and maximize the chances of seeing them at your doorstep.
Don’t forget the CTAs
A call-to-action (CTA) is something most marketers forget to use in their emails. CTAs are what make sales happen, often by bringing the registration link or the product page of your website right to the customer’s doorstep. This way the customer doesn’t have to put in the effort of going to your website, clicking the right page, etc.
Make sure you spread CTAs throughout your email. In the case of a poster, have a bolded banner at the bottom that reads, “Get your 25% discount” with a hyperlink to your discount’s landing page. However, don’t flood your email with too many CTAs as it’ll come off as overly sales-y, and customers get repelled by that.
Remember the 80-20 rule
Last but not least, always remember the 80-20 rule when crafting any marketing email. This rule states that 80% of your email’s content should be geared towards identifying and solving a customer’s problem. And only 20% of it should be directly advertising your products in relation to how they can solve the customers’ problems.
Therefore, you must craft an email by imagining yourself in the customer’s shoes. A good way to do that is to identify the customers’ paint points and write them down. This would make them think that you’re genuinely invested in helping them solve their problems. The entire purpose of this exercise is to develop the needed trust between you and the customer so that your oncoming advertising efforts have a greater impact on them.
A few final thoughts
Crafting the perfect email strategy has no universal fixed formula since every business is different and has a unique target audience. Therefore, you must experiment with several strategies to see which ones work best for you.
It is also crucial that you track the results of each strategy. For instance, monitor your website traffic every time you send your marketing emails or newsletters to your subscribers. If the numbers reflect the fact that people are visiting your website and making purchases, that’s the sign of a successful email marketing campaign. Before you roll out your email campaign on a large scale, conduct A/B testing on different variants and only go with the one that provides the best results.