If you want to know a series of Magento email marketing tips, you’ve come to the right place.
Now that you’ve got your Magento store up and running and chosen a good selection of Magento extensions to improve the way your store runs, it’s time to start thinking about how you’ll communicate with your customers and build stronger customer relationships.
For the most part, an email will be a primary source of conversation between your e-commerce store and your customers.
In this post we’ll cover:
- Why it’s crucial to segment your audience
- The importance of setting goals for your email marketing
- How to optimize your Magento store to prepare for a potential influx of traffic
- Why you should think about creating specific email marketing campaigns
- Don’t forget about abandoned carts
- How to get personal with your emails
Segmentation
Not all your customers are equal and because of this, the communications you send to them shouldn’t be either.
When you start doing email marketing for your Magento store, it’s important to factor in segmentation.
Segmentation allows you to split customers into different groups so that only specific customers receive specific email marketing material.
For example, if you have customers who buy from you religiously and act as customer advocates, you might want to send this group of customers an email that offers them 50% off for being a great customer advocate.
Likewise, if you want to connect with customers who haven’t bought from you in a while, you don’t want this email to go to everyone.
Not only is segmentation good for getting the right message to the right person at the right time but it’s good for your revenue too.
Many email providers charge you based on the number of emails you send.
If you have a database of 1000 customers and send every email to every customer, the cost will quickly increase.
If customers receive an email from you every single day and it starts to become annoying, they’re likely to unsubscribe from your mailing list and the likelihood of them returning to your Magento store is slim.
Instead, think about what you want to achieve with your emails and work backward to come up with the ideal cadence that offers your customers value without overflowing their inbox.
Decide your email goals
Before you begin email marketing you need to decide what you want your goals to be.
Some stores only send transactional emails. Namely, the only time they email you is after you’ve made a purchase. Others, however, like to use email as a line of communication between them and their customers.
You might decide to do a mix of promotional and transactional emails but make sure they all have a purpose.
If customers receive an email from you every single day and it starts to become annoying, they’re likely to unsubscribe from your mailing list and the likelihood of them returning back to your Magento store is slim.
Instead, think about what you want to achieve with your emails and work backward to come up with the ideal cadence that offers your customers value without overflowing their inbox.
Optimize your site for increased traffic
Another thing many Magento owners forget to think about before they crack down on email marketing is optimizing the site for periods of increased traffic.
Normally, you have an idea of how many people visit your site. This could be 100 people per day or it could be 1000. You’ll also likely optimize your site to support this number of people.
But when you send an email that encourages people to click a link to your site, you need to account for that increased amount of traffic.
Granted, not everyone will click the link at the same time but let’s suppose they do. If you normally get 1000 people to your site, and then you send an email to your entire list and suddenly another 1000 people land on your site, can your Magento store really handle the influx in traffic?
Create specific campaigns
We’ve already mentioned the importance of thinking about email cadence. You don’t want to send too many emails that people unsubscribe, but at the same time, you don’t want to send too few emails that people forget who you are.
To combat this, start thinking about ways your Magento store can implement targeted campaigns. Targeted campaigns are where you send a series of emails around a given topic.
One great example that you’ve probably come across in the past are Black Friday campaigns.
E-commerce store owners know that shoppers are much more likely and willing to spend money during this time period and so create emails that highlight their offers and encourage them to visit the store.
And, in reality, your campaigns can be about anything. The core principle is that they need to have a goal. This way you’ll be able to measure the success.
You might, for example, went to promote your new blog posts and so the metrics you’ll track here would be click-through rates and time spent on page.
For other campaigns, you might want to push a specific product. In these scenarios, you might look closely at click-through rates, bounce rates, and sales conversions.
As you can see, different goals warrant different measuring and analytics. Because of this, it’s important each campaign you create for your Magento store has a goal in mind before you get creating.
That way, when it comes to putting the copy together, everything you’ve written has the end goal in mind.
Abandoned carts
If there’s one thing e-commerce owners hate, it’s abandoned carts and Magento store owners are no different.
Abandoned cart emails are where someone visits your store for a prolonged period of time, adds items to their basket and maybe even fills out the delivery information.
Here’s the kicker, though.
They leave the store before they have a chance to purchase.
For store owners, this is frustrating. And what adds to that frustration is that you don’t know why the (potential) customer abandoned their cart in the first place.
It could be that they do plan on buying the item but forgot to complete the purchase.
It could also be that they found the item cheaper elsewhere or with better shipping information.
Whatever the reason, sending an abandoned cart email is a great way to win back what could’ve been a potential lost sale.
But the best tip we can give is to not seem like you’re pushing for a sale. If your email comes across sales you’ll have less chance of winning the sale.
Instead, kindly remind customers that they’ve forgotten something in their basket. You could even go one step further and offer customers money off.
A monetary incentive isn’t mandatory for a successful abandoned cart campaign but often helps increase the chance of a sale.
Use data to inform email marketing ideas
Your Magento store holds a wealth of data about your products and your customers and email is no different. By looking at historical emails you have the chance to assess what did and didn’t work.
There are plenty of email marketing statistics online those highlight core strategies but in most cases, these should be used as a guideline.
You might find that your best email subject lines are the ones that use emojis.
Or maybe you’ll find that plain text emails work better than HTML ones.
You’ll only know this, though, by looking at data. It’s data that can inform you of the right thing to do for your next campaign.
Get personal
If you had the chance to speak with your customers in person, face-to-face, chances are you’d have real, personable conversations with them.
So it’s interesting that so few Magento store owners really put emphasis on adding elements of personality into their emails.
Personalization can come in many forms. You could, for example, use your customers’ names in the subject line of the email or even the body itself.
You could also remember key dates in your customers’ lives and send an email to celebrate and recognize that date.
A birthday is a great option. Once you’ve made a sale with a customer, use this opportunity to gather more information about them like when their birthday is or what type of products they like to buy.
You can then use this information to send them targeted relevant emails that make sense to them.
How nicely do you think it’d feel for a customer to receive a “happy birthday here are 40% off” email, especially when they haven’t heard from you in a while.
Magento email marketing doesn’t need to be complicated
To wrap things up, and remember that your email marketing efforts are a powerful way to connect with your customers and drive more sales.
But keep in mind that you don’t need to over complicate the process.
Magento email marketing should be fun for you and your customers so follow the tips listed in this post to ensure that they are.
Hi Burc,
After more research I have seen segmentation is always on the tip list. It's about creating and sending targeted emails rather than sending 1 email that suits everyone.
Speaking from experience, abandoned basket emails are a success and allow you to capture a few more orders.
Thanks for sharing your email marketing tips.
Hi, I read your article and your information about email marketing is very amzing and so much helpful for me. Keep it up And Thank you very much:)
Hi,
I would like to ask if there is a possibility to sent Email through Magento to my customers with some questions, and then make statistics about the number of customers that open the Email (but didn't respond to the Email) and the total number of customers that answer the questions?
Kind Regards,
Barak
Hello, First of all, Your work is very useful for me. And Your Article information about email marketing is very amazing. Keep it up and Thank you very much.:)
Hello Ujwal, great to hear that. Thank you!