Why You Should Utilize Email With Ecomm Customers

Email marketing is alive and well in 2022. The channel’s rare combination of favorable ROI metrics and immunity to the effects of increasingly strict privacy regulations makes it a viable outlet for effective, personalized digital campaigns. However, there’s a major difference between delivering successful email promotions tailor-made for your target customer’s inbox versus ending up in the digital purgatory that is the spam folder.

Here’s what email marketing looks like in the current ecommerce landscape, the potential obstacles advertisers still need to solve, and why successful email campaigns are worth investing in both now and in the future.

Defining Email Marketing

Email marketing is usually an exercise in mass lead generation, although it can be used further down the sales funnel using data collected by additional campaigns. While traditional channels experience sweeping transitions with each new OS update or algorithm change, email remains remarkably steady. Because collected email addresses are first-party data, the effects of stringent privacy rules on other platforms fail to have much of an impact on email campaigns.

Top-funnel email campaigns might deliver general messages on a set schedule through a sequence or drip campaign, while more carefully targeted advertising might serve to remind a customer of an abandoned cart item or provide extra incentive to complete a purchase through special events, promotions, and coupons.

There Are Still a Few Roadblocks

The ecommerce industry is leaning harder into email campaigns, but that doesn’t mean delivering a worthwhile email is easy. The number of emails delivered per day is estimated to be near 320 billion (up from 306 billion in 2020), and spam filters are working overtime to bring only the most relevant email messages to your customers’ attention. Sifting through the noise of the average user’s inbox may only get more difficult as more advertisers pour their marketing efforts into email while other advertising modes remain in flux.

Other challenges facing email marketing include finding the right delivery frequency for your target audience (it’s not the same for everyone) and strengthening customer interest and intent through quality content.

Want to Run Successful Email Campaigns? Incentivize Signups

It should come as no surprise email has thrived in the wake of stay-at-home safety measures and a historic increase in remote workers. People are on their personal devices and computers more than ever before, making email marketing a natural fit for brands looking to fuel top-funnel campaigns and promote new products to their loyal subscribers.

There are a few tried and true methods to growing an email list that still tend to catch the attention of undecided users — coupon offers, free gifts, and especially offers for free shipping in exchange for email signup continue to see positive results. Once subscribed, you’ll be better able to dynamically retarget or remind your new soon-to-be customer of the specific products they’ll find most beneficial.

Why Personalized Email Marketing Works

If there are two campaign elements every marketer loves, it’s the ability to personalize a message to individual customers and to do so inexpensively. Email campaigns offer advertisers both of these components, provided they can deliver content with engaging subjects and genuine personality (we’ve all seen all-caps clickbait emails in our inbox calling us by name, those aren’t fooling anybody). Delivering relevant content with a personal touch in the subject line alone boosts your chances of a successful email by more than 25%.

Even in environments where most other marketing methods aren’t completely in flux, email campaigns are worth the investment. A new subscriber providing your brand with their personal 

email address allows your foot in the door better than almost any other piece of data and allows advertisers to do what they do best — shape the story of their products to a captive audience.