Every year someone announces, with the air of a person who has just discovered fire, that email marketing is dead. First Facebook killed it, then Twitter, and now it is being killed by Messenger and WhatsApp. I have been hearing this for about ten years and, oddly enough, email is still there, in everyone’s pocket, and orders still come from it.
For a few years now I have been working at Retargeting with online stores of every size, and I keep seeing the same thing: the channel everyone declares dead is often the one that brings in the most sales relative to what it costs. Not because email is fashionable, but because it combines three qualities few other channels have together: you own it, it is cheap, and you can measure it down to the last cent. Let’s take them one at a time.
Rented audience versus owned audience
Your Facebook fans are not yours. They belong to Facebook, and you are renting them. Anyone who has run a page with tens of thousands of fans has felt it: year after year organic reach went down, and today you pay to reach your own followers. Someone else sets the rules, overnight, without asking you. I am not saying social media is useless, but it is rented land.
An email list is different. It is a list of people who gave you permission to write to them. You can move it from one provider to another, segment it however you like, and nobody can double the price of reaching it. For an online store it is the closest thing to an owned marketing asset, together with your returning customers.
A list is built, not bought
Everyone’s first temptation is to buy a database. “I found 200,000 addresses at a good price.” Don’t. Those people don’t know you, never asked you for anything, and will report you as spam. Email providers will close your account, and your domain will end up on blacklists that are hard to get off. On top of that, Romanian law already requires consent for commercial email, so this is not just a reputation problem.
And things are getting more serious. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR, was adopted last year and will apply from May 2018. Consent will have to be clear, specific and provable: a pre-ticked box will no longer do. My advice is not to wait for 2018. Build your list cleanly from now on, so you don’t have to throw half of it away in a year.
How to build it, in practice:
- a visible signup form with a clear promise: what people get and how often;
- a reason to subscribe, whether a first-order discount, useful content or early access to offers;
- double opt-in where possible, so you know the address is real and the person actually wanted it;
- a signup option at checkout, not pre-ticked;
- a visible unsubscribe link in every message; anyone who wants to leave should be able to leave easily.
Segmentation: not everyone wants the same email
The most common mistake I see is the single newsletter, sent to the whole list, with the same 20 products. Say you run a sporting goods store. The person who bought ski gear in December and the one who bought a tennis racket in May do not want the same email. Someone who has ordered five times and someone who subscribed yesterday for a discount are not the same kind of customer.
You don’t need dozens of segments from day one. Start with a few simple ones: customers versus subscribers who haven’t bought yet, recent customers versus those who haven’t ordered in a long time, and the product categories they care about. You will already see the difference. The next step is personalization with real recommendations, not just the person’s first name in the subject line.
Triggered emails beat bulk blasts
There are two big families of email. Bulk campaigns, the Thursday newsletter or the weekend offer, which you send whenever you decide. And emails triggered by behavior: someone subscribed, left a full cart, made a purchase, hasn’t visited in three months, has a birthday.
Triggered emails are almost always the most profitable per message sent. The reason is simple: they reach the right person exactly when that person is interested. The abandoned cart recovery email is the best-known example, but not the only one. A well-made welcome message, a series after the first order, a reminder when a product is back in stock. You set them up once and they work for you every day. And you no longer need to be a big store for this: marketing automation is within reach of small stores too.
Deliverability: if it doesn’t reach the inbox, it doesn’t exist
You can write the best email in the world; if it lands in spam, it never happened. Here are a few basics many stores ignore:
- set up SPF and DKIM for the domain you send from (and DMARC if you can); they tell the receiving server it is really you, not someone pretending to be you;
- send from your own domain, not from a free address;
- clean your list regularly: remove addresses that bounce and people who haven’t opened anything in a very long time;
- don’t suddenly send ten times your usual volume; mailbox providers look at consistency;
- watch your spam complaints; if they rise, the problem is on your side, not theirs.
A smaller, clean list makes more money than a big, dead one.
Subject line and design: the first three seconds
A subject line has one job: to get the email opened. Short, clear, specific. “Newsletter no. 47” says nothing. “Your winter boots now ship free” does. Avoid all caps, strings of exclamation marks and promises the email doesn’t keep; you win a click and lose trust. And test: send two subject variants to a small slice of the list and the winner to everyone else.
Then there is design. More and more people read email on their phones, and for many stores the phone is already the main screen. That means a single column, text you can read without zooming, big buttons you can tap with a thumb, light images and one main call to action.
Measure revenue, not just opens
Open rate is useful, but it becomes a vanity number if that is where you stop. An email can get plenty of opens and zero sales. What matters for an online store is how much it brings in. Connect your emails to Google Analytics with UTM parameters and look at the revenue each campaign generates and, above all, revenue per email sent. That is the only fair way to compare a newsletter sent to the whole list with an automated series that goes out to a handful of people a day.
Also look at what you lose: how many people unsubscribe after each campaign, how many mark you as spam. If you send three times a week and sales go up while the list melts away, you may be eating your future to look good this month.
Email isn’t dying, it is changing
Email is not a sexy channel. But it is where people receive their order confirmations, invoices and plane tickets. It is a place they visit every day. For an online store, dropping it because it is “dead” is like closing your shop window because people are looking at their phones.
How do you use email? Only for the weekly newsletter, or have you moved on to triggered messages and segments? I’d love to hear what has worked for you and what hasn’t.