The ultimate email marketing handbook
Curious about all the ins and outs of e-mail marketing? In this article, we take you through the world of email. We answer the following questions, among others:
- What is email marketing?
- Why should you add e-mail marketing to your marketing strategy?
- How much does email marketing cost?
- What are examples of email marketing?
- How do you set up an email strategy?
- What are the trends within e-mail marketing?
- What is the best e-mail software for my web shop?
- What if you don't have time to do e-mail marketing yourself?
- E-mail marketing definitions
What is e-mail marketing?
When you think about e-mail marketing, you most probably think of the newsletter you receive in your mailbox every month from that one company. Or maybe the daily personalized offer from your favourite webshop. In both cases, you are right! E-mail marketing is in fact sending a commercial message via e-mail. This message can be anything. Think offers, an ultimate temptation to make the recipient proceed to purchase or a guide to a previously ordered product. Anything to make sure it stays in the customer's mind.
Why email marketing? 8 reasons
In a nutshell: e-mail marketing is always a good idea. By sending e-mails, you show yourself to your customers. Your customers don't have to take immediate action based on your mail. With your mail, you make sure you stay in your customer's mind. That way, they will think of you again as soon as they need you again. Still not convinced? We list eight reasons why you too should start e-mail marketing.
Reason 1: You push for retention and retention is cheap
With e-mail marketing, you persuade existing customers to make new purchases from you. In other words, you are betting on retention marketing. Why would you do that? Growing thanks to new customers sounds much more interesting. There is one big drawback to bringing in new customers: it is very expensive. More expensive than targeting your existing customers. Targeting existing customers is not only cheaper, it is also easier. After all, you already know each other.
Reason 2: Email marketing converts
Besides the fact that retention marketing is cheaper than bringing in new customers, e-mail is one of the best converting marketing channels. To put it in numbers, the average ROI with e-mail marketing for E-commerce is 45:1. This means that for every euro you spend on e-mail marketing, you earn back €45 on average (source: constantcontact.com). Count your winnings!
Reason 3: It takes little time
The third reason why you should do email marketing is simple: email marketing takes little time. Stop sending separate emails and instead set up automations. Set up an automation like an abandoned cart email once and then let your email software do the work for you. Your orders will flow in while you no longer have to do anything for them.
Reason 4: You have complete creative freedom
With email, you don't have to deal with set patterns. You have complete creative freedom, both with the design and the content. A GIF? A collage of photos, or a colourful palette? Anything goes. Also in terms of content! Sprinkle with (unique) discount codes, fill your mail with offers or use e-mail as a kind of personal blog. You can make it as crazy (or simple) as you want! Nothing is compulsory; you decide for yourself what you put in your e-mails. Wonderful right!
Reason 5: You establish a personal bond with your customers
How does e-mail marketing help you establish a personal bond with your customers? Simple: you provide them with emails completely tailored to their needs. Over and over again. Your customer notices that you really know them and appreciates this. How do you send personal e-mails? First, collect data from your customer. Think of purchase behaviour, but also personal data and even behaviour on your website. With all this data, you can find out what your customer needs. Are you missing information? Just ask your customers for it! If necessary, reward them with a discount code. Everyone is happy.
Reason 6: Your customers can indicate their preferences themselves
A second way to best address your customers' needs with email is to simply ask them what their preferences are. Do they want to be kept informed about your business? Do they like to receive more information about their purchased product? Or are they satisfied with just emails with offers? Let your customers indicate their email preferences and watch your bond improve.
Reason 7: Emails are good for brand awareness
Sending e-mails ensures that you appear in your customer's mind. Even if your customers don't need anything from you right away, they will see your name come up again for a while. Chances are they will think of you again at a later time.
Don't focus on just the customers who open your e-mail. The customers who do not open your e-mail will also see your name. If only for a few moments, before they delete your e-mail. The brain unconsciously stores a lot of things, including your company name!
Reason 8: Email marketing is for everyone
To get started with email marketing, you don't have to be a marketing expert. There are plenty of examples of web shops that have set up successful campaigns. You put these automations live in no time.
What does e-mail marketing cost?
Email marketing prices vary. With many e-mail programs, you have a choice of several packages. These packages are often about the number of e-mails sent per month, but also about the number of features available. Do you want to use all the features and/or send a lot of e-mails? Then you are often already in the most expensive package.
Email marketing costs
Reloadify is different. You pay a fixed amount per month. This amount is based on the number of active profiles in your database. These are the customers who have subscribed to your newsletter and/or made a purchase from you.
You are in charge of your monthly amount. Do you see a group of customers invariably not opening your emails? Then exclude this group by deactivating them. You no longer pay for this group of customers and your monthly fee goes down.
Curious about how much you pay? On our website you can easily check your monthly fee based on active profiles.
Email marketing examples
Everyone knows a newsletter. But, as we explained earlier, e-mail marketing is much more than just a newsletter. Examples of e-mail marketing are:
- A welcome email for new newsletter subscribers
- An invitation to leave a review
- An email full of (personalized) offers
Need visual inspiration? See our article with the 10 essential email campaigns for every webshop for even more examples!
Setting up email marketing strategy
E-mail marketing consists of more than a few isolated automations. To avoid shooting with hail, you need to set up a strategy. With a strategy you set goals for your e-mail marketing and keep yourself sharp. Not entirely unimportant! Setting up such a strategy is not complicated at all. If you work out the following points, you will come a long way:
- Step 1: Define your email goal
- Step 2: Determine your customers and customer journey
- Step 3: Determine how you will achieve your goal
- Step 4: A plan of action
Step 1: Setting your email goal
The basis for a good e-mail strategy is a goal. Without a clear goal in mind, you can keep emailing all you want, but have no idea what you're actually accomplishing. What a waste!
- Every email goal can be categorized into three topics:
- Acquiring new customers and their dates;
- Retaining current customers;
- Driving traffic growth on your website and more sales.
Good to know: email marketing allows you to focus on multiple goals. But, know that one email or campaign is not enough.
Setting up an email goal (or several) is one thing. The second is determining when your goal will be met. How many new customers is enough? When is there a nice growth in traffic on your site? And when do you actually retain a customer? After establishing the goal and the metrics of this goal, you can move on to step 2 of your strategy.
Step 2: Mapping your customers and their customer journey
In order to achieve your goal, you need to know who you are going to approach in order to do so. Who is your target group and in which step of the customer journey is this group located? Using this information, you will later sharpen your strategy.
What is a customer journey? The customer journey maps out all 6 steps that every customer goes through. We explain them for you:
- Awareness. The customer gets to know your webshop for the first time. Provide a warm welcome. After all, you only make a first impression once!
- Consideration. In this step, your customers are orienting themselves and studying your shop. What do you have to offer?
- The actual purchase. Yes, you got the customer! Thank him or her for the purchase. The more personal the better.
- Retaining the customer. Your customer has ordered from you once, but how do you make sure he or she comes back to you in the future? Maintain your relationship.
- Upsell. Time to encourage a new purchase. Give your customer a nudge in the right direction and send an email with products that perfectly match the previously purchased product.
Step 3: Determine how you are going to achieve your goal
So, your goal stands and you know who you are going to approach. With this third step, you determine how you are going to achieve your goal. How will you approach your target audience? What will your message be? How will you spread your message? To help you, we have listed a few e-mail marketing examples for you, matching the different phases of the customer journey.
1. Awareness:
- A newsletter sign-up page on your website
- A pop-up on your website to attract newsletter subscribers
- A reference to your newsletter subscription on socials
- A welcome campaign
- A profile enrichment campaign
- Refer-a-friend campaign
- Newsletters
2. The consideration:
- An email with a discount code
- A welcome campaign
- A profile enrichment campaign
- An abandoned cart campaign
- Newsletters
3. The actual purchase:
- Transactional emails
- A profile enrichment campaign
4. Retaining the customer:
- A win-back campaign
- A profile enrichment campaign
- A questionnaire campaign
- An abandoned cart campaign
- Newsletters
5. Upsell:
- An upsell campaign
- A cross-sell campaign
- A repeat purchase campaign
- VIP campaign
- Newsletters
6. Ambassador:
- Anniversary campaign
- Anniversary campaign
- VIP campaign
- Newsletters
As you have seen above, a number of campaigns overlap with different phases of the customer journey. To approach customers from different phases separately, you can segment your target audience. After all, you don't want to approach new customers the same as existing customers you want to keep. Want to know more? In this article we give you tips on segmentation.
Step 4: A plan of action
The basics are in place! Step 4 is all about completing the execution of your email marketing strategy. How are you going to set up your campaigns? Will you do it yourself, or will you outsource it? Who is responsible for what? All these arrangements, among other things, determine the success of your email marketing strategy.
💡 Tip: Don't wait to activate campaigns until your entire email marketing strategy is in place. Already have inspiration for a campaign? Get started right away and don't be afraid to put the campaign live. In the meantime, keep thinking about new campaigns. With the data from your live campaigns you can keep adding to and fine-tuning your email strategy until it is complete.
Email success factors
There are a number of factors critical to the success of your emails:
- Your email must be relevant;
- Your email must be written for your customer (rather than just from yourself);
- Your email must land in your customer's inbox at the right time.
The third point seems complicated. How do you always land in the inbox at the right time? For this, you can send multiple emails at different times. This way you test what the optimal sending time is. AI can also give you a hand with this. With AI, you no longer have to run tests yourself. Based on previously sent e-mails, an AI model checks what the best time to send is. All you have to do is schedule your e-mail at the right time. Easy, right?
Email marketing trends
In today's world, one event follows another at lightning speed. The influence of important and special events seeps into marketing as well. A good example of such an event is the pandemic. Corona has caused us to need personalized marketing more than ever. We are not all the same anymore and want to be approached uniquely. With e-mail marketing, you can respond perfectly to this important need! There are many more trends like this. We would like to show you all email marketing trends of 2024 in a row. Take a look and get inspired.
What is the best email software for my web shop?
After drawing up your (new) e-mail marketing strategy, it is time for perhaps the most difficult choice. Which e-mail software will you use? There are many different software packages, each with its pros and cons.
Reloadify offers email marketing software specifically for e-commerce web shops. Our entire system is set up based on enticing customers, recognizing them, personally addressing them and, of course, achieving conversions. Thanks to our plug-and-play integrations for the largest e-commerce platforms, you can run successful campaigns in no time.
Wondering what Reloadify can do for you? Try the package for free for 14 days. Want to see what we can do first? The webinar for beginners is ready for you.
What if you don't have time to do your e-mail marketing yourself?
There can be numerous reasons to outsource your e-mail marketing. You don't have the time, you don't have enough knowledge or it simply doesn't fall into your remit. To support you we at Reloadify have set up a reliable partner network. This partner network includes (online) marketing agencies from all over the Netherlands. Each agency has its own experts who can take your email marketing to the next level. Want to know more? Check out our partner page.
Email marketing terminology
Within e-mail marketing, technical terms are flying around your ears. We list the most important terms that every email marketer needs to know:
Email list growth ratio New signups minus unsubscribes, bounces and spam notifications.
Profile lifetime value. All the revenue a customer has converted with you (from all the orders they've ever placed with you).
Segment Target group you create within your overall audience. For example: the segment "brand loyal customers - Apple".
Open Ratio The percentage of customers that actually opened your newsletter compared to the total number of customers that received your email.
Click through rate The percentage of customers who clicked on a link in your newsletter compared to the total number of customers who received your e-mail.
Click-to-opens The percentage of customers who clicked on a link in your newsletter compared to the total number of customers who opened your e-mail.
Conversion rate The number of visitors who proceed to transaction.
Bounce A bounce means that your e-mail did not arrive at the recipient. This can have several causes. Mailbox is full, mailbox is inactive, e-mail message is too large, the e-mail message is blocked because of its content, the e-mail does not meet the anti-spam requirements of the recipient's server and so on. There is no way to tell in advance how often your e-mail will bounce. However, it is important that, if your e-mail bounces, you actively monitor which e-mail addresses are bouncing. Do these e-mail addresses bounce off your e-mails too often? Then it is wise to remove these e-mail addresses from your database. Too high a bounce rate can actually cause you to be flagged as spam.
In conclusion
As you have read above, email is the perfect tool to reach all your customers in different stages of the customer journey. Questions about our software, or need help setting up your campaigns? Our helpdesk is ready to help you.
