Marketing is the fuel of your business, it keeps your business running. And profit is just the byproduct of your marketing effort. You won’t make any significant sales if you lack marketing skills. It doesn’t matter even if you have created the best product in the world.
One can sell ideas under a proper marketing campaign, let alone actual products.
There are many types of popular digital marketing, one of them is email marketing. Even in the age of numerous social media, emails are still relevant. Those in the professional world understand the ever-growing importance of email.
In the year 2020, the number of sent and received emails per day worldwide was 306.4 billion.
That gigantic number shows the importance of emailing and helps you estimate the reach of email marketing.
In this article, I will explain what email marketing is, its importance for eCommerce businesses, and show you how to set up email marketing for WooCommerce stores.
If you are already familiar with email marketing, then here is the table of content for you. Please proceed to the section you would like to read first.
What is Email Marketing?
According to HubSpot, email marketing is the process of targeting your audience and customers through email. It helps you boost conversions and revenue by providing subscribers and customers with valuable information to help them achieve their goals.
That’s the idealistic definition of email marketing, but it is much more than that. Email marketing is a way to build authentic relationships with your customers, leads, and prospects and nurture them through the buyer’s journey.
The first email was sent by Ray Tomlinson in the early 1970s. The intended purpose of that first electronic mail was to establish “communication” and that communication is the backbone of email marketing.
Email marketing is a form of inbound marketing. So, the plan is to establish communication between the business and the buyer because there is a human being on the receiving end of an email.
It plays a crucial role in developing brand awareness, earning customer loyalty, increasing engagement, and retention.
Remember that consent must be obtained before you start sending emails to individuals and should always give them an option to unsubscribe from your emails.
Nobody likes receiving an email they didn’t ask for. It’s like having a salesman ringing your doorbell to sell a product you don’t need.
Bottom line: Do not be annoying.
Now, I will discuss the role of buyer personas and buyer’s journey in email marketing. Also, I will further emphasize the importance of email marketing.
The Role of Buyer Personas and Buyer’s Journey in Email Marketing
The essence of a targeted email marketing campaign is segmentation. And without segmentation, you will just be shooting in the dark. It is crucial to target your customer through segmentation.
But segmentation is not possible without creating buyer personas and mapping out your customer’s journey.
Buyer personas are a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. It helps you segment your customers based on demographics, behavior, etc. You can target those buyer personas through your email marketing and lead them through the sales funnel.
Nurturing your customers through the buyer’s journey via email is a sound strategy. On each stage of the buyer’s journey, you can suggest blogs, products, product comparisons, best offers, white paper, ebooks, to your customers through email.
Both B2B and B2C customers can be targeted and nurtured with email marketing.
The Importance of Email Marketing
In research by the content marketing institute, it was seen that 87% of content marketers use email marketing to distribute their content. Making it, the 3rd most popular content distribution channel.
Email marketing is popular because it helps businesses connect with consumers. As I said earlier, email is a major part of our life. Consumers like receiving emails from their favorite brands.
The approach is simple; marketers try to reach out to their quality leads, prospects, and customers through email and provide exclusive deals, limited offers, gift cards, coupons, new products, product trials, ebooks, etc.
In the US alone, there are over 250 million email users, just imagine the scale of the usefulness of email marketing.
I know some of you might want to stick to your old methods of marketing. So, to emphasize the importance of email marketing, I will give you five compelling reasons.
1. High Rewards
The importance of email marketing can be understood from the amount of profit it yields. For every dollar you spend on emails, you can expect an average return of 42 dollars. You can make big bucks with email marketing.
2. Better Customer Acquisition
In February and March 2016, WBR Digital and Emarsys surveyed 254 retail professionals in the US at companies with annual revenues under $100 million.
According to the data, 81% and 80% of respondents, respectively, said email marketing drives customer acquisition and retention.
Remember that acquisition is easy compared to retention. Email marketing helps nurture buyers at the retention stage and encourages them to shop again from your store.
3. Personalization and customization
In email marketing, you can easily customize and personalize your emails according to your customers or buyer persona types.
Personalization is a game-changer when it comes to email marketing. In fact, 55% of Consumers Like Email messages containing relevant products and offers.
Learn More: Top 10 Ethical Email Marketing Hacks
4. Measurable
The best thing about email marketing is that your efforts are measurable. You can accurately calculate every aspect of your email marketing campaign like email-open rate, Click-through rate, unsubscribe rate, etc.
Everything can be studied and used later to improve the email marketing strategy. Evaluating campaign performance at such a level increases your ability to understand customers’ interests.
Here is a sample email report:
5. Works on Mobile Phones
There are 3.5 billion smartphone users in the world. So, creating and sending mobile-friendly emails should be a priority, and companies who do send mobile-friendly emails have an advantage because 38 percent of people open their emails on smartphones.
All emailing services have adapted to a responsive design and are reaching out to customers without any hiccups. So, email marketing works on smartphone users too.
Bottom line: Using mobile-responsive email templates is a must for your email marketing campaigns, it will do wonders for you.
These were the five compelling reasons that display the significance of email marketing for your eCommerce store.
And as we are talking about eCommerce, I would like to draw your attention to the most popular eCommerce platform ‒ WooCommerce.
WooCommerce has a 28.24% market share and it powers 628,765 eCommerce stores. Thus, it is crucial to discuss how to set up email marketing for WooCommerce stores.
In the next section, I will tell you how to set up WooCommerce email marketing. (roll credits)
How to Setup Woocommerce Email Marketing
WooCommerce email marketing is a tough task and should be automated as much as possible. Moreover, we do have plugins and emailing services that automate the process of email marketing. It increases your responsiveness, saves time, and boosts sales.
I will show you how it’s done.
WooCommerce Email Marketing With MailChimp
Mailchimp is an American marketing automation platform and email marketing service. You can connect your WooCommerce store with MailChimp With MailChimp for WooCommerce free plugin.
1. Go to your WordPress dashboard, navigate to Plugins>Add New, download the MailChimp for WooCommerce plugin, and Activate it.
Also, you need a Mailchimp account. Good if you already have one, and if you don’t; please create one.
2. Next, you need to connect your WooCommerce store with MailChimp. So, go to WooCommerce>MailChimp>Connect Account. (If you already have one)
After that, add the following details.
4. Fill in the details and click on Next Step. On the next page, you need to provide more details to start the Sync.
5. Under the Add WooCommerce audience settings, choose the audience you want to sync. Configure the other audience settings and click on Start Sync.
6. The plugin will start syncing your WooCommerce store with MailChimp. It will take time depending on your store data. You can see the progress in the Overview tab.
Syncing is complete. You are one step closer to WooCommerce Email marketing.
7. Log into your MailChimp account, navigate to Account>Profile>Integrations.
Under the list of all available Integrations click on WooCommerce.
8. On the next page, click Manage Your Sites.
You can add additional audiences, add another website, and different kinds of email. In the next sections, I will explain how to add them to your WooCommerce store.
Abandoned Cart Emails
An Abandoned Cart email is a follow-up email that is sent when customers add items and leave the online store without purchasing. Its main purpose is to remind customers of the products they wanted to purchase.
The Average Cart Abandonment Rate Across All Industries is 69.57%. Customers abandon their online carts because of high taxes, slow website, lengthy checkout process, lack of payment methods, etc.
A follow-up email encourages customers to complete their purchase. In fact, 43% of emails on cart abandonment are opened.
And average cart abandonment email conversion rates are 2.9%.
So, let’s see how you can send cart abandonment emails from your WooCommerce store using MailChimp.
Follow these steps carefully:
1. Click on Automations from the side navigation bar, then click on Recover abandoned carts.
2. Now you will see two options; Single Email and Customer Journey. Select the Single Email option.
3. Here, you will see two more options; Single email and Email Series.
The single email will notify customers only once and the Email series will enable you to send a series of emails. I am choosing a single email. I will not edit the campaign name but you can edit your campaign name when you want to.
Design an Abandoned Cart Email in MailChimp
Edit any information you want before you go further.
By default, the email is sent after 6 hours of cart abandonment, but you can increase and decrease the timing of your email.
You can also edit the Subject line and From email address.
1. After you have confirmed everything, click on Design Email.
2. Select the first email template for the sake of learning.
Now you can design the abandoned cart email template.
3. Move the cursor over the logo block and click on Edit block, then click on replace to set the logo of your WooCommerce store on your email.
4. You can also edit the text of the body and also select how many products you want to display.
You can also choose to show or hide the price of the products in the abandoned cart email.
5. Now, time to take a quick preview. Click on Preview and Test>Enter preview mode.
Here you can enable live merge to show products from your store.
And also see how your email looks for smartphone users. Inbox preview allows you to see how your email would appear in the different email clients, so you can feel extra confident before you send.
8. Test your email and After that, click on Save And Continue.
9. Click on Start Sending to start the abandoned cart email service. Then click on Start to send the email and start the automation.
This is how you automate the process of abandoned cart emails.
All the other kinds of the email will follow the same process of design. You can add welcome emails, Product recommendations, Order notifications, Promote new products, etc.
The services provided by MailChimp will take your WooCommerce email marketing to the next Level.
WooCommerce Email Marketing Services
I showed you how to set up WooCommerce email marketing through MailChimp but it is not the only email automation service. There are plenty of email marketing services available for Woocommerce.
1. MailPoet
MailPoet is a native WordPress plugin for email marketing and it supports integration with WooCommerce. More than 300,000 websites are using MailPoet to keep in touch with their subscribers.
Some Key Features of MailPoet
- Automated welcome emails
- Schedule your emails
- Personalize your emails using customer data
- Use segmentation to target customers
- More than 50 email templates
- Send email notifications of new products or special offers
- Monitor email open rates and click-through rates.
2. Omnisend
Omnisend is an all-in-one email marketing automation platform. It automates your email marketing campaign and increases your conversion rates. Omnisend works with WooCommerce and other well-known eCommerce platforms.
Some Key Features of OmniSend
- It has WooCommerce integration
- It has pre-build eCommerce workflows
- Drag-and-drop automation editor for emails
- Different types of email templates
- Drag-and-drop content editor
- Easy email personalization
- Create pop up forms
- Monitor the growth of your campaign
- Manage multiple store accounts
So, these were some of the best email marketing services. Now, you have to decide for yourself what kind of WooCommerce email marketing service you need.
Final Words
In this article, I have explained email marketing and its importance for eCommerce businesses. Also, I have shown you how to set up WooCommerce email marketing.
Now, you can use WooCommerce email marketing services to connect and communicate with your customers and boost the revenue of your WooCommerce store.
And hey, check out our blogs if you want to learn more about the best eCommerce practices.