The most significant aspect of running an independent ecommerce website is your ability to build an email list.

This is proprietary data nobody else on the web has but you. It is your advantage over the competition. It is your vehicle for building esteem and engaged relationships with your customers. It is a key mechanism for how you increase customer lifetime value and effectively predict the direction of your business.

The strategies you employ with your email list are important, similarly how you communicate to and interact with your customers on social media, in forums, or on calls is important. You are building a relationship. You are sharing information. You are providing opportunities and touchpoints beyond what someone not on that email list would get.

These people are VIPs.

After all, they have already purchased with your brand. Industry benchmarks demonstrate that nearly 21% of people will open your email, with 2.56% of them navigating to your site. Additionally, 33% of recipients will open your email on the subject line alone and nearly 55% of emails are opened on a mobile device.

5 Tips to Beat Email Marketing Benchmarks and Increase Sales

Ecommerce email marketing is both a science and an art. You can review your metrics and find areas to A/B test, but every test will likely call upon good copywriting and psychological triggers in order to increase performance.

When using email marketing platforms and engaging with your list, there is no one method that works for every brand.

So, here is the best advice for brands looking to improve the performance of their email marketing efforts.

Tip 1

Don’t be boring. Most brands could benefit from adopting a significantly more friendly way to deal with email.

Instead of sending out a boring email that says “your package has been shipped” take that time to add a funny GIF of some penguins dancing with joy that your package has shipped.

Make the text lighthearted by putting yourself in your customer’s shoes. Now when you ask for that up-sell by including a few recommended products, it’s much more likely to be received positively.

Tip 2

Many newsletters are too sales-oriented, which is a weird experience for the user who most of the time will read that content while not in a purchasing mindset.

Instead, you should focus on building a long-term relationship with the user and optimize the content for high open and sharing rates rather than just the CTR.

The newsletter from TheHustle.co is a great example of that strategy.

Tip 3

Have a clear call to action.

The average user received 84 emails per day in their inbox, according to Radicati’s report. Your email is most likely just another one of them.

Despite your best effort to send beautifully designed emails with relevant content, your customers are bombarded with a lot more emails, hence why your call to action is so important.

We see way too many examples of stores trying to demonstrate how amazing they are instead of thinking about the person actually making the purchase.

Talking about CTAs, a big no-no is having many calls to action in the same email. Knowing that you’re fighting for your customers’ attention, you want to be clear from the get-go. An effective way to be clear from the get-go is to use your subject line as a call to action preview that incentivizes the reader to open the email and get value out of it.

Tip 4

Prepare a welcome email template for new subscribers –– or even a welcome email series –– for every opt-in form you have placed on your ecommerce site. The best time to send someone an email is immediately after they sign up to hear from you, and this is a great time to share your best content and offers.

Tip 5

Segment as much as possible.

The segmented email shoot saw around 11% open rate while the segmented mailing with almost 40% open rate. All it takes is a bit of focused copy and a segmented list of email subscribers.

With a fantastic email list gathered through content subscribers or customers, your email campaigns ought to be one of your astounding converting.

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