Running an eCommerce store requires a wide skill set. In fact, you’ve probably been wearing so many different hats for so long that you probably have more skills than even you know. One such skill is sending out emails to your customers. Creating a nice newsletter is a real pleasure, and one that certainly generates a lot of traffic and business for your store. But sending a newsletter is really just the tip of the iceberg of what you could be doing with your store’s email marketing, and this blog post is designed to illuminate a few eCommerce email areas you may not have thought about and that can drive increased sales to your store.

1. Personalize, personalize, personalize

Customers are of course the lifeblood of your business, but emailing them as if they were one mass group is simply not good email etiquette. Instead, make sure all email marketing originating from your store is personalized*, starting with the customer’s name, purchase history, right down to unique offer codes built solely for them. Once you start hitting this level of service you will begin to engender a greater feeling of customer loyalty to your store, and that can only be a good thing.

*Mailbeez users already take advantage of this level of personalization in their eCommerce emails

2. Sending post-purchase product review requests

If you don’t send after sale product review requests to your customers, well, you might just as well turn off your store’s inbuilt product review system, because you won’t be getting regular product reviews anytime soon. Actually, we are sorry to be so blunt, but it really is the truth, so please don’t throw a banana at your screen in a fruit related protest.

What you should be doing is automating your product review requests using something like the Mailbeez Review Advanced module, which runs right from within your store’s admin area, and fires off review requests a pre-determined time after your customer has received their order.

More reviews, more content, more sales, the list of benefits in harvesting regular product reviews is simply huge.

3. Contacting inactive older customers with an incentive

It’s a fact of eCommerce life that your store will see a large proportion of one time sales from customers that do not return to purchase again. Whilst you can never completely eradicate this pattern, you can give yourself a helping hand and email older customers with an incentive to return. If your store is not doing this, the bottom line is that you are missing out on some easy to catch ‘low hanging fruit’ – customers that already know your store, have bought before, but are now inactive.

Using a simple tool like the Mailbeez Winback Advanced module, you can set and forget an email marketing campaign that will email older inactive customers with a personalized, time limited coupon. Knowing that this campaign is constantly running in the background is a great feeling, especially when you start to see new orders from previously forgotten customers arrive in your inbox!

4. Following up customers who created an account but did not order

Like reactivating older customers, if you are not following up on customers who created an account but failed to order, you are not only losing extra sales, but also the ability to find out why some customers didn’t order in the first place; all of which is vital information if your aim (which it should be of course) is to try to raise your store’s conversion rates over time.

Once again there is a handy and fully automated Mailbeez module for this, called the No Purchase Advanced module. Once set, it will email every customer who did not order a predetermined time after their account was created, offering them a personalized discount, which of course is fully configurable.

This useful email campaign can also be a great way of finding out why a customer did not complete checkout in the first place. For example, you could use the email as a chance to ask the customer directly their reasons for not checking out, and offer a coupon for your store if they provide you with feedback.

5. Rewarding loyalty with a personalized coupon code

Most eCommerce stores exist in quite ruthless marketplaces. From the mundane work of price matching competitors, all the way through to enhancing site SEO, getting a customer to order is not as easy as it once was. Therefore, when a customer doesn’t just place one order with you, but a whole series of orders, they are clearly giving the signals that they are happy with your service, and are pleased, despite the existence of other online stores in the same marketplace, to return to shop with you. These customers are often subject to the Pareto principle (a useful business rule discovered in the 19th century that states that 80% of your business will come from 20% of your customer base), and what better way than to reward their loyalty than with a voucher code for a future order?

As in other areas, the Mailbeez Reorder Advanced module can help here, fully automating the voucher creation process and email delivery to take the admin out of your hands, and the reward into the customer’s inbox.

We hope you’ve found this post useful, and remember, please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or comments about the Mailbeez platform or eCommerce email marketing matters.