If you’re running an ecommerce business and you’re ready to grow your business, two of the most important things you need to consider are to run an email marketing campaign and set some automations in place.
Why Run an Email Marketing Campaign
It's a valid concern when you don't want to email people every day because you're afraid you're going to bother them. But you need to deprogram yourself out of that belief. Instead, you should reframe your mind and think about these two things:
1. It makes sense.
When you're running Facebook ads, YouTube ads, or Google ads, you're showing people ads every day on social media. Then how would emailing be any different? So it just makes sense to email them every day.
2. You’re helping people.
If your emails are just about yourself and your products, then you know you're bothering people 100%. But if you make a little bit of a shift and make your emails about outcomes that your customers want to achieve, then you're not bothering people anymore.
If all you ever do is talk about outcomes and focus your emails on outcomes, then you're in a safe space. You never have to worry about whether you're bothering people or not because you know you're helping people.
If you have a good product and your people are in pain, and you're not doing every single thing you can to help, then you're only holding them back from achieving better outcomes in their life.
You’re not just emailing to make a sale – but you’re doing it to solve a problem or reduce pain.
Common Rookie Mistakes in Ecommerce
1. Not having basic behaviorally triggered automations
These are just basic automations but if you don't have them, you're leaving money on the table. Examples are:
- cart abandonment
- browse abandonment
- welcome sequence
- VIP sequence
- a review gathering sequence
- an order confirmation flow
- cross-selling (after the product was delivered)
- the win back
- “before it ships” – immediately after someone buys, you make another offer
The cool thing is that these automations trigger based on behavior. There's high intent and high engagement. Then you won't be bothering people who haven't been engaging with your brand.
And if something doesn't work it's just a matter of tweaking the testing until it does. Because once you do find that, you could have 20 emails that don't work, and you then find that one angle.
2. The spotlight syndrome
If you think people are thinking about you, well guess what? They’re not! They're not thinking about you at all. It could be that these people have gotten all the way to checkout but maybe they just got distracted because their kid walked into the room and then they had to go make dinner. And then you just assumed they left because they didn't like you.
Don't think they're just messing with you because life happens all the time and you can never guess what’s happening in your customers’ lives.
You don't have to send an email every day. You could even do it once a week. Whatever frequency you can stay consistent with is the most important thing.
If you want to learn more about the basics of email marketing, check out 050: Email Marketing for eCommerce with Chris Orzechowski
