Who else wants to improve their customer experience with email marketing? / Simon Bowker, Teradata eCircle

How to improve your customer experience with email marketing Simon Bowker, Country Manager, UK&I, Teradata eCircle

Online retailers are facing huge challenges with abandoned shopping carts, inactive customers and decreasing conversion rates. But all too often opportunities are left untouched to increase loyalty and engagement through personalised, targeted, event-driven email marketing. Email marketing is the most effective and measurable communication channel if you want to engage your prospects and customers to help increase the ROI of your online shop.

Engagement and relevancy are the key to success in ecommerce. Retailers must offer engaging and targeted content to customers, or run the risk of forcing unsubscribes or ending up in the junk folder if they send out generic messages. Email is an ideal way to manage the increasing levels of competition triggered by more tech savvy and demanding shoppers, but to provide true value and deliver high levels of ROI, retailers need to adopt an integrated CRM strategy with email at its heart.

Start interacting with consumers through your newsletter

Newsletters are a versatile and inexpensive way to reach your audience and engage with new prospects when delivering a targeted message. For online retailers, newsletters are an effective tool to capture new leads, nurture prospects, to communicate with existing customers and to position yourself as a leading brand and/or industry expert.

When producing a newsletter, remember content is king. It is vital to segment the audience and target the content (all or some parts of it) according to consumer preferences, recipients’ profiles, purchase habits and so on. Generic and non-relevant content will not capture your audience’s attention and can cause subscription numbers to drop significantly. You need quality and varied content to help retain customer interest, for example a mix of current trends, industry news, tips and tricks, as well as a selection of the latest sales and discount offers.

Always remember to promote the sign-up to your newsletter on your website homepage and e-shop, including a banner in a predominant position or a sign-up box where new subscribers can register directly. Always keep the sign-up process as simple and straightforward as possible – this will help you generate more leads for your database and avoid people not signing up because they find it too difficult or too long.

Engage new subscribers with personalised content

Making content personal to the recipient can help increase ROI and drive more customers to your online shop.

Exploit the time consumers spend registering onto your newsletter by collecting important information about them, which you can use to create more targeted newsletters in the future. At the registration stage build profiles of your customers by capturing information such as their name, gender, age and interests through a ‘preference centre’.

If you have content-specific newsletters, suggest your new subscribers specify which ones they would like to receive and how frequently (frequency is essential if you want to avoid annoying new subscribers with too many messages).

Once you have all this information you can start sending more targeted content that is in line with your subscribers’ preferences. Remember that not all subscribers should receive the same content as everyone on your mailing list will have different interests, and therefore each email should be targeted to each individual using the preference centre.

Addressing a subscriber by their first name is also an effective way of making an email feel more personal to an individual. A personal email better engages the recipient and helps the subscriber to build a strong affiliation to the brand.

Make a good impression, from the very first time

Response rates are almost always higher for new subscribers on an email list. According to the ‘Email Marketing Benchmark Guide’ by MarketingSherpa, click through rates for new subscribers are 25% higher in the first month compared to the second,  and 67% higher in the first month than after the first year.

It is essential brands take advantage of this trend by carefully designing and optimising the new subscriber experience to generate a positive impact and move customers forward through the life-cycle. Welcome messages are a vital part of this process as they establish an initial engagement between you and your prospects, and also help to reduce the un-subscription rate by reminding new subscribers they’ve been added to your list.

Welcome emails also establish a positive brand image for individuals who have just started to interact with a company online, and many new subscribers are presumably in a buying mode when they reach your website, so receiving an introductory email may be enough to secure their business from a competitor when the message arrives in their inbox.

For a welcome message to be effective it should be sent within the first 24 hours of subscription, be personalised (use the name of the recipient in the subject line and also in the salutation) and contain relevant content. You should also consider including a personal ‘thank you’ message, a coupon or incentive to buy, links to the most popular products, as well as some product ratings and reviews made by other customers.

Optimise your communications for mobile devices

These days ‘new and improved’ is the mantra for smart email marketers. To succeed marketers need to be agile and responsive, and work to optimise and re-optimise their emails for new devices. Users’ expectations evolve at the same rate as technology, so retailers must keep ahead of the technology game if they want to reach their customers on their preferred channels and devices. Email messaging is a key part of this. The content and layout you use can all be affected by the device it is received on, and can impact the consumer experience and their loyalty to the brand.

According to a recent study from Adobe, email is the most popular activity for tablet and smartphone users. 79% of smartphone owners use their device for checking emails, suggesting a trend that these individuals use their device for emails rather than making calls.

With more people reading their emails on the go it has never been more critical for marketers to understand how to create an effective and engaging mobile email. Optimisation is essential to establish a good user experience, in addition to providing the customer multichannel purchasing methods.