Grow Your Business with Email Marketing

Email marketing can be one of your most effective tools to promote your products and services. Like any marketing effort, email marketing can use a number of common techniques to fulfill a wide variety of marketing goals. The goal of this article is to introduce you to, or remind you of these techniques and the goals for which you should be leveraging them for your e-commerce business.

Autoprint software provides email marketing tools that you, and your staff with permission, can use to grow help grow your business. To find the tools, visit the CONTACTS area in your admin main menu, click the CONTACT BLASTER link.

Marketing Goals

This list could be endless and a quick internet search will reveal a virtual plethora of ideas if you need some. But here are a few to get you started.

Brand or business awareness
Promote a specific product or service
Introduce a new product or service
Lead generation
Target new or retain existing customers
Increase sales or revenue

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Email Marketing Techniques

There is both an art and a science to effectively leverage email marketing to grow your e-commerce business. Here are a few:

Email Newsletters - this is perhaps the most common technique thought of by business owners when thinking about using email to promote their business. However, it may also be one of the greatest factors hindering business owners from using email marketing effectively. Why? Because a “newsletter” conveys a more robust publication than is really necessary to effectively use email to grow your business and let’s face it, you are busy enough without adding managing a robust regular email publication. So, while email newsletters can be useful depending upon your marketing goals, you don’t have to expend all that energy to be effective with email.
Email Blasts - Think of these as a one-off email sent to fulfill some specific purpose with your contacts (leads or customers):
- “Hey, we need to let all our customers know we’re going to be closed for Christmas on Dec 24th and 25th.”
- “Let’s send out an email to our 10 best customers to thank them for their business last year.”
Email Campaigns - Think of these as a series of emails released with some pre-determined frequency designed to accomplish some marketing goal. For example:
- New Lead Campaign - when a new lead is added to your contact list, weekly for 4 weeks, you send a succinct email designed to introduce the contact to your storefront and essentially “training” the contact to understand how to get the most from your store.
- Abandoned Cart Campaign - daily, send an email to all contacts who abandoned items in their cart in the last 24 hours offering to answer questions about something that prevented them from checking out, and offering a 10% discount coupon if they complete their order by an established deadline.
- New Product Promotion - schedule a series of emails to go to all customers who have bought brochures from you in the past to introduce them to a new capability your shop has with brochures and enticing them to order with a discount coupon code.

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Good Email Campaigns…

Learn by intentionally evaluating the email campaigns you get from others
Keep it short
Have a specific “call to action”
Begin with a measurable purpose and measure it
Are always improving based on email response data
Should target a specific segment or segments of your contacts for a specific purpose
Pay attention to when you schedule your email to be sent

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Email Marketing Legal Awareness

Email is the most common, effective, and often abused form of communication with leads and customers. Because of that various laws have been passed to prevent abuse. It would be wise for each person in your organization who is authorized to create and send email marketing to be knowledgeable about the various laws. Here are some links which you should review and communicate to your staff as appropriate:

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Do It!

Take a minute right now and:

List three customer segments or groups to which you want to send an email blast or campaign series.
For each group, define a purpose for your blast of the campaign.
Look at your calendar and holidays/events coming up and add a to-do to your task list to create and send each blast or campaign to coincide with your schedule or some upcoming event.