There are many reasons why we use email marketing. It’s an excellent tool to help you and your business connect and engage with your customers. It can keep them informed about your company, let them know about any new products or services you may be launching, and make the customer feel valued. But, when you’re spending a good chunk of your marketing budget on email, you’ll want to see a return on your investment. Therefore, part of your email marketing output should be focused on boosting your sales.
Things can get tricky when using email to boost sales. Of course, you’ll want to see results, but you’ll also need to make sure that your emails are still of interest to the customer, and that you’re not constantly ‘badgering’ them to buy things from you. Here are a few of the ways you can use your email marketing to boost sales, while still providing value to your customers:
Ask For Feedback
Countless studies have shown how powerful product reviews can be. In fact, a recent study by Argos found products that had been reviewed had a 10% higher conversion rate than those that hadn’t. Therefore, getting feedback for your products can amount to a significant boost in sales.
However, getting feedback from your customers can be difficult. Writing reviews can be time-consuming and, let’s face it, dull! You need to make it as quick as simple as possible for a customer to give their feedback, like in this email from Just Eat:
In this example, giving feedback is as simple as clicking one button.
It’s also usually worthwhile to incentivise giving feedback. Argos themselves enter the customers who leave reviews into a competition:
You could also offer a free gift or a percentage discount.
Reward Loyalty
It is said that, in general, ecommerce businesses get 80% of their business from 20% of their customers. This shows how important it is to take care of your loyal customers.
As it much easier to keep an existing customer than it is to attract a new one, an effective way of boosting sales can to encourage your current customer base to buy more. A simple way to do this is to reward them for their loyalty. A small free gift or discount will show your customers how much you value them, while also pushing them to make a purchase, particularly if you make the incentive time-limited.
Green Man Gaming offered a 23% discount to their loyal customer, but the voucher code was only valid for one week:
The wording of this email also shows that company is keen to highlight how much they care about their customers.
Take Notice of Abandoned Shopping Carts
What do you do when a potential customer puts something in their shopping cart, then abandons it? This is not an area that you should be ignoring. If someone has got this close to making a purchase from you, they are highly likely to buy something in the future. They may have just experienced a technical problem at checkout, or they could simply have forgotten about it.
If a customer abandons their shopping cart at any stage of the checkout process, send them an email that highlights this. This could motivate them to finish their transaction, or could draw your attention to technical problems on your website. You could even offer them a discount for completing their order, like Levi’s do:
This just scratches the surface of how powerful email marketing can be at boosting sales. There really is no limit to what you can do. As long as you always keep your customer in mind, you’ll be sure to see results.
