5 Reasons Email Marketing is Super Important for eCommerce

Just like other online marketing tactics, email marketing is constantly under speculation of being dead. But also like other tactics, it’s very much alive and super important for the success of your eCommerce business. In fact, I would say that email marketing is the most important marketing tactic you can possibly deploy. Here are 5 reasons why email marketing should be a staple marketing tactic for your eCommerce business.

eCommerce Marketing strategy should be paramount to driving repeat business for your online store.‍

Email marketing is permission based‍

There should be nothing cold about the traffic you attract from your email list on a consistent basis. Because email marketing is permission based, your audience is pre-qualified to want to hear from you. Whether you are speaking to your prospect list or your existing customer list, these are customers who have expressed interest in your business, one way or the other. 

But it is important not to damage the trust your email list subscribers have placed in your hands. They have given you permission to email them on an ongoing basis, but they can just as quickly remove that permission, and once they are gone, they are typically gone for good. This is why it is so important to craft an email marketing strategy that contains desirable content, designed to keep your audience engaged. Constantly sending promotional emails that do nothing but try to sell your products will quickly turn off your audience and is the quickest way to lose subscribers. Mixing in a great deal of content that offers valuable content they can use in their everyday lives like tips or tricks associated with the products you sell is key to maintaining a strong list that is far more likely to buy from you.‍

The ROI on email marketing is huge‍

On average, email marketing performs nearly twice as well as the next most effective marketing tactic (which happens to be SEO), seeing an average of 40x return. It’s pretty easy to see why this is the case. Email marketing involves a mix of speaking to an audience that has already been warmed up to your products. Your prospect list members are in the nurture phase of their customer journey, which means they are further down the funnel than most any other push or pull marketing tactic. Your customer list have already purchased from you and are in the retention stage of their journey. If your products are as great as you say they are, and you have provided a good customer experience, these customers are more likely to return to buy from you upon receiving an email designed to drive them back for another purchase.‍

Email marketing enables simple personalization‍

Personalized experiences are one of the fastest emerging trends in eCommerce today. Email makes it super easy to personalize the message right from the start. If you are conducting email marketing properly, you are segmenting your audiences based on their demographic profiles, user browsing behaviour, content consumption or products purchased. This allows you to send emails that speak specifically to the criteria that landed them on your subscriber list in the first place.

Personalization allows you as a marketer to offer content you know will be more engaging to your various subscriber segments. It also allows you to build specific funnels and flows to drive your customers to a first or repeat purchase since the content or products being offered are based on an expression of interest made by those subscribers when they joined your list. ‍

Marketing automation‍

Email marketing allows you to easily automate campaigns to help reduce shopping cart abandonment, drive repeat orders, reduce churn, and win back dormant customers.

A simple email that goes out to a would be customer who left your store before checking out can bring them back to complete their purchase - whether by offering additional support or by sweetening the deal with an exclusive offer. 

Other forms of marketing automation through email can drive repeat business. Any email marketing automation schema should also include post-purchase and winback flows. Always remember the golden rule for eCommerce success: Lifetime customer value must always be greater than customer acquisition costs. Email marketing is the quintessential part to making that happen.‍

100% email subscriber ownership‍

Your email marketing list belongs to you and only you. There is no other traffic source available that you completely own. With social media marketing, the audience is owned by the social platforms and their algorithms control who sees your content. Google and other search engines determine what search results their users see. Email subscribers belong to you. As long as you are not being spammy with your content, you will avoid most spam filters and deliver your message directly to your subscribers’ inbox. If you follow the rules of permission based marketing, maintain that trust between you and your subscribers, you will keep your open rates high and your deliverability near 100%. You control your own destiny with email marketing. You are not subject to the algorithms of third party platforms to decide who sees your content.

Anyone telling you email marketing is dead is very likely not running a successful eCommerce business. It remains and is in fact even more an essential part of any eCommerce strategy than ever before. Do it properly and your email subscriber list will be one of your greatest company assets.