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30% of Ecommerce Repeat Purchases Come from Email Marketing

 In Email Marketing, Optimization

“Ecommerce businesses should concentrate more of their efforts on traditional online marketing tactics like search and e-mail rather than social media,ā€ declared a September Forrester report (ā€œThe Purchase Path Of Online Buyers In 2012ā€), after determining ā€œthat less than 1% [of orders] could be traced back to social networks like Facebook or Pinterest.”

Forrester advises: “For repeat shoppers, e-mail is the most effective sales influencer: Nearly a third of purchases from repeat customers initiated with an e-mail. As such, businesses should up their efforts to collect e-mail addresses, and tailor their e-mail marketing messages to each recipientā€™s device and prior purchase behavior.”

So if you have an ecommerce business ask yourself if you are taking full advantage of e-mail marketing to increase your sales and profits. Admittedly, it takes a bit of time, focus, strategy, and ongoing testing to get the results ā€“ but the ROI is clearly there. We know this well from our ecommerce clients, but itā€™s nice to get it confirmed from a reputable third party like Forrester.

A few common tactics to get the most out of your ecommerce emails:

Donā€™t Treat Them All the Same

Are you sending ā€œbatch-and-blastā€ type emails where you are treating all of your database the same? When was the last time you segmented out those that did not purchase or engage in the last 6 months or a year? Or sent a different message to those that just purchased? Do it and watch you sales increase!

Purity Cart Abandonment EmailSet-up Cart Abandonment Emails

If you have a typical ecommerce site you are probably experiencing at least a 70% cart abandonment rate. Can you afford to let all those potential buyers disappear? You can capture some of them.  With cart abandonment emails you may be able to convert 10-15% of these prospects to clients! The key to cart abandonment is a tight integration with your ecommerce platform and an ability to send real-time emails when someone abandons, and then follow up with 3-4 more reminders.

Use Triggered Emails

In addition to automated cart abandonment triggers you can easily automate a “Welcome Campaign” for new subscribers to your email list, or following a purchase, with an offer to ā€œLikeā€ you on Facebook and receive a discount on your next order. If you sometimes have items out of stock, automate a ā€œback-in-stockā€ trigger to get those prospects back and purchase. There are numerous other ideas you can explore with automated emails.

The Forrester article mentioned a few other very interesting data points that are not related to email marketing:

Following direct visits to ecommerce web sites, organic search (SEO) and paid search (PPC) were responsible for more than 29% of new customer transactions.

Social media is effective as an engagement platform and an influencer but direct correlation to transactions is still a way off. The study saw less than 1% of transactions linked to social media.

The study focused on larger ecommerce sites and as such small businesses may have different results. Hereā€™s some additional information from a Mashable article discussing this report.

So if you want to maximize your e-commerce sales concentrate your efforts on utilizing search marketing and email marketing advanced features. Give us a holler to set up a cart abandonment program or drive more traffic to your site using SEO and PPC.

 

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