From new product announcements to promoting sales, celebrating customers, or recommending products, retailers around the world are using email marketing to drive sales. And thanks to email automation, many are setting up and sending campaigns that are triggered to send at just the right moment.
As a retail marketer, you know that email is an important part of your overall marketing strategy. But maybe what you don’t realize is how effective it can be for your business.
In this post, we’ll highlight statistics that show email is crucial for boosting retail sales and can effectively deliver personalized content with great ROI. Let’s explore how you can enhance your strategy to turn your email marketing into a sales powerhouse.
What data says about retail email marketing
A 2015 study from Forrester Research indicates that email is a major player when it comes to how marketers spend their online budgets, and that it’s second only to search-related efforts.
In terms of ROI, it’s extremely effective, too. Data from eTail showed that within the US, email accounts for 17% of the total digital budget, and produced an impressive 24% of revenue.
But wait, there’s more: Data from Custora, a marketing platform focused on customer lifecycle, reveals that 15% of e-commerce sales for its retail clients came straight from email marketing. Netta Kivilis, who leads marketing at Custora, stated that email is a key revenue-generating channel for customers, sometimes making up to 40% of total revenue.
So what can we glean from these statistics? Email is a powerhouse for generating sales for retail. What you need to know, then, is how you can use email marketing to drive these same results for your business.
Let’s look at some real examples of companies seeing positive results from retail email campaigns, as well as some strategies that can make your efforts more effective overall.
Rip Curl: Driving sales with email marketing
Rip Curl is a global surfing brand that uses Campaign Monitor to promote their surf-related products and events and have seen fantastic results from their email efforts.
When Rip Curl launches new products, they use email to drive shoppers to their online store. They’ve seen particularly high performance in relation to a line of wetsuits, called the Bombshell. James Taylor, Rip Curl’s Global Creative Director, said, “Beautiful emails have turned our Bombshell wetsuit into a global phenomenon.”
Other brands like Seafolly, Jaybird, On, and Topshop are also using retail campaigns–and we recently looked at what makes each of their emails so effective.
But it’s not just big brands who are reaping the benefits of well-designed, sales-oriented emails. You can harness the power of email marketing to do the same for your business, too.
Let’s examine a few tactics that you can implement right away:
3 effective strategies for retail email campaigns
Maybe you’re wondering: What are some of the specific strategies that are helping retail marketers drive sales and revenue with email marketing?
One of the most effective ways marketers are boosting sales within email is by ditching the mass-message email blast of the old days. Instead, they’re opting for a more customized approach–which helps ensure subscribers are getting the right message at the right time.
But what’s truly surprising about this tactic is that it’s still largely under-utilized. Media Post found that only 21% of marketers were using real-time personalization or A/B testing, and only 56% were using segmentation-based targeting as a top tactic within their email strategy.
So here’s what you need to know about customized messaging to improve your retail email campaigns.
1. Personalization
Data proves that emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened, and information from The Aberdeen Group echoes this truth: Their research shows that 96% of organizations believe email personalization can improve email performance.
And personalization comes in many forms. You can make emails feel more tailor-made by leveraging custom fields for features like:
• Subject lines that use the subscriber’s first name
• Message body text that use the subscriber’s first name or a recent purchase
But personalization also relates to content. This means leveraging personalized content that is relevant to subscribers’ unique interests, relates to their geographic location, where they’re at in the sales funnel, etc. Relevancy is extremely important for customers. In fact, 74% of online customers get frustrated with content when it has nothing to do with their interests.
You can deliver more relevant content via segmentation.
2. Segmentation
Segmentation is the grouping of subscribers into lists based on a categorical context. Lists can be segmented in a variety of ways, including:
• Geographic location
• Average spend
• Gender
• Age
• Interests
• Job title
• Transactional data (like last purchase made)
• Behavioral data (like which content they’ve interacted with)
This tactic is proven to deliver impressive results, too. Segmented emails have been shown to produce as much as a 760% increase in email revenue. It makes sense: The more relevant the message, the more likely your subscriber is to act on it.
But in order to execute segmentation effectively, you need to collect the right data from subscribers up front. You can segment subscribers in two main ways:
1. Self-segmentation via separate, page or location-based opt-in lists
2. Sorting subscribers based on data they’ve provided
Once you’ve created your different segments, you can start sending more targeted emails with content that relates to your subscribers’ unique interests.
Retail marketers can use our integration with Shopify to power smart email campaigns using pre-built segments including high spenders, repeat customers, first-time customers, and newsletter subscribers.
You can learn more about using Shopify with Campaign Monitor here.
Dynamic content is another way to personalize your emails for increased relevancy.
3. Dynamic content
Dynamic content allows you to decide which customers should see which blocks of content within your email.
So, for example, you might be sending out a retail email campaign for two new product lines: One for men, and one for women. Using dynamic content, like Adidas did in this example, you could indicate “who should see this” for each block of content, and create two separate types of content: One for men, and one for women.
This way, you can create two different versions of the same email that’s optimized for your customer data–all within a single campaign. Again: No one-size-fits-all messaging. You’re sending emails that are highly relevant to the recipient.
With these three tactics, your retail emails can become much more effective at boosting website traffic that ultimately translates into sales.
The bottom line: Personalization matters.
Wrap up
Now that you’ve seen some examples of effective retail emails and have some specific strategies you can implement to make your email marketing more effective, all that’s left is for you to do is to deploy and test.
We challenge you to work toward incorporating more personalization features in your campaigns. Before you know it, you’ll see your ROI for retail email marketing begin to climb.