Turn Your Email List Into A Powerful Digital Marketing Strategy
By Leah McNally

Someone asked me recently, “What can you do with the paid/more expensive versions of an Email Service Provider (ESP) that you can’t do with the free/low cost versions?” Today, I’m going talk about what you can do and why it might be worth spending the extra money for your business.

You might think of email marketing as sending a message to a list, and I highly recommend getting started that way. And some of you may think, “I hate getting promotional emails, so why even bother with an email list?” Here’s why you may want to start one. 

Over the past few years, email marketing has been transformed into one aspect of a group of broader digital marketing techniques and part of a multi faceted digital strategy. Many of the ESPs have encouraged that transformation by offering services for Customer Relationship Management (CRM). A CRM system houses your customer data and allows you to use that customer data for more targeted and personalized marketing.

Some of you might already be doing these things, or have a list in place and be ready to take the next step, and for others, these might be goals to set to help you grow your business.

We’ll look at:

Drip Campaigns

Abandoned Cart Messages

Browse Abandonment & Retargeting

Purchase Triggers

Segmentations

SMS

Before we dive in, I’m going to touch on something we talk about all the time in Flourish- the importance of having more than one channel, and the importance of being able to reach your customers outside of the marketplaces.

Etsy and Amazon (and Faire) can be amazing for driving sales and traffic, but they are the ones that control the traffic and the customer data. You are always at the mercy of their rules and their algorithms.

Having your customer data allows you to market to your customers directly, at the frequency you want, and drive them to the sales channel that you choose. That is powerful when it comes to marketing your business.

Let’s get started.

Drip Campaigns
A series of messages with a purpose that are automatically triggered based on an event - a time lapse, date, link click or tag. These can be used in many ways to take your customer on a brand journey that builds a relationship. That journey could be a welcome, a thank you, a birthday offer, review request, suggestions of additional products, or a sales funnel, which is designed to win trust through acknowledging and providing a solution to a problem. Depending on your ESP you can often set up these sorts of drip messages with many of the free and low cost accounts. In some cases you may be limited to how many you can set up, which triggers you can use or how many steps they can contain. The important thing is that these campaigns can be woven into many of the techniques we will talk about next.

Segmentation
Dividing your list and targeting customers based on a set of criteria. It could be a product, and I’m going to talk about some ways to use purchase base triggers separately, but there are other ways to divide your list.

The big three of segmentation are referred to as RFM - Recency,  Frequency, and  Monetary Value. A number of the ESPs have this build in, even to the basic accounts if you are able to integrate with your sales platform. Here's how they work.

Recency - Who has purchased within set timeframe. Recent purchasers are more likely to be excited about the brand and purchase again. Create an automated email to encourage an add on purchase or second purchase a few days or a week later.

The companion to recency is your lapsed customers. These are customers who have not returned to purchase within a given time. You may want to try a win back campaign to see if you can get them to purchase again.

Frequency - These are your repeat customers, who purchase more than once, or who have purchased multiple times. Give them special offers and reward their loyalty.

Monetary Value - Your big spenders. How can you reward them and keep them happy and coming back for more?

Here are a few more segmentation ideas.

Location - You may have customers in a certain area or want to highlight a particular shop, if you are selling locally at markets or for pick up, or you have an item that you only want to ship regionally.

Social media - target content and offers to customers who follow you on social media.

Purchase Triggers
If you integrate with your ESP, you can use purchases made by product as a trigger for additional messages. You could suggest an additional purchase or upsell,  or a group of items that compliment the original purchase. “If you liked this…you may like that”. These are sometimes framed as a thank you. Consider a special offer for purchasing additional products in during a limited time that helps increase your order value. “Add on ____ in the next 30 min and get _____”.

A few more ideas on ways to use these are asking for a review on a specific product, or sending some bonus content or instructions for using the product.

These product suggestions can be super powerful, especially for generating repeat sales.

Abandoned Cart Messages
This is an awesome little incremental sales tool. These are triggered when a customer enters an email address, either through sign up or creating a shopping cart AND putting an item in their cart. The value of Abandoned cart messages doesn’t seem like a lot when you look at it in the short term, but over time, the sales add up to a lot. You can also test different messages to fine tune and increase the conversion to a sale. There is a feature within Shopify you can turn on that will send a simple abandoned cart message, or you can integrate with an ESP for more control over the branding and message.

Retargeting, Browse Abandonment & Look-Alike Audiences
These work by using data collected via a pixel and creating a cookie, or using your customer data (email or phone list) to advertise to customers on other sites and on social media. 

Browse Abandonment works similarly to abandoned cart, using cookies placed when a customer views a page to trigger an email to a recognized customer.

Retargeting can use either cookies to recognize customers that visited your site and advertise to them on other sites, or can be done on social media using a list of email addresses as an identifier.

Even better, as your list gets bigger, you can create a “look-alike” audience of potential customers to whom you can advertise, with similar demographics and interests to your current customers. With this one, the bigger the list the better. 500 is the minimum you need and you will get the best results with 1000 plus.

Text Messaging/SMS.

SMS stands for Short Message Service (or MMS Multimedia Message Service which is text plus images).

More and more often, we are seeing email marketing being combined with the ability to include text marketing on the same platform. The idea here is to talk to your customer in the way they want to hear from you and collect the data all in one place for messaging and retargeting. Some people may not use email as much and prefer text (or visa versa). If your customer base is on the younger side, text may be preferred.

Currently, text messages get opened and read 90+%, which is stronger than email, although this may change over time. They also work as great reminders for an email or other offer you may have sent. 

Keep in mind that SMS has a different rhythm than email marketing. While you can send emails 24-7, most people don’t expect to get promotional texts at odd hours. Have a light touch with this medium, send texts less frequently and during business hours instead.

Hopefully I've given you some ideas of why an email list is important and how you can use it for digital marketing.

You can find me on Flourish, and here on my website at vine virtual.com

Thank You