5 strategies to grow your eCommerce email marketing list

Despite the current pandemic situation, eCommerce stores around the globe have seen a massive bump in growth and revenue. However, this recent boom has led to an incredibly competitive marketplace. So, in order to stand out, you need your marketing strategies to be spot on.

The modern-day marketing scenario is flooded with various digital channels where you can market your services. But using an email marketing list remains the first-choice for eCommerce, and beyond, despite being more than two decades old.

The graph below depicts how email marketing not only survived but dominated as a massive growth driver for eCommerce sales in 2019.

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eCommerce and email marketing go hand-in-hand. But to reach your target returns, you need to have a solid email marketing list. However, despite its importance, many of us are using broken techniques to grow our email marketing list, which creates a string of setbacks and failed approaches. Broken and bad email marketing techniques also carry a risk of bothering consumers and damaging your brand’s online reputation and credibility.

Creating leads from your email marketing list is no rocket science, It is the most tried and tested method available in the market. So why are things not working out for you?

We have to understand that today, a consumer has more choice than ever. Our inboxes are so flooded with random low-quality emails that we somehow tend to miss important offers in it. 

To avoid being relegated to junk mail, you need to follow certain strategies to grow your eCommerce email marketing list. 

Here are 5 top strategies to grow your eCommerce marketing list steadily and substantially.

1. Make content your top-priority

What’s the most crucial thing in an email? 

Besides all the fancy banners and visual aesthetics, the quality of your content will always stand out as the primary key factor to your email marketing list’s health. It’s easy to focus on your site’s content strategy and forget to invest the same effort into email content. But this is a mistake.

An e-commerce mail stuffed with catchy sales phrases and product descriptions that are often of no use to the customer. And an unwanted consequence of this process is a massive unsubscribe rate on your email marketing list.

Improve your content with numerous templates on websites, such as Canva, which helps you create beautiful newsletters for free. Canva is a graphic design platform that helps you create newsletters (and other social media graphics), and is loaded with numerous visual templates for you to A/B test different newsletter layouts. 

2. Show opt-in forms with the right pop-ups

Your popups should not be intrusive, but instead, be triggered by certain user behaviors. For example, include “exit-intent popups” to show a relevant, time-based offer to customers whose desktop viewing behavior signals that they are about to bounce from the site.

These pop-ups are your best friends to grow your eCommerce email marketing list organically. Software like Poptin helps you create engaging and creative popup offers to grow your marketing list by showing the right offer at the right time.

3. Follow a consistent sending frequency

While it may seem straightforward, following up on your current emails can slowly help you build your marketing list from the ground up.

You need to constantly tweak your content, analyse your open rates and clickthrough rates,  and experiment with sending different offers to different consumer segments in your email lists.

You can even improve your open rates by simply resending your emails.

One of Neil Patel’s case studies, MailGen, managed to increase their email rates from 20% up to 29% by resending emails to folks that did not open the initial email. 

Resending emails can be very efficient and provide a better ROI. For better understanding, you can check out this article and the graph below.

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Email Marketing Gold’s study (as shown above) showed that email marketing ROI can be up to 40x its initial investment, far outweighing the benefits reaped from other forms of marketing, such as SEO and banner ads.

4. Make your motive crystal-clear

Your viewers haven’t got all day to read your emails, so you have to make your point crystal-clear from the moment-go. Write crisp content, in a concise and sharp manner. 

You need to also make sure the subject line is short and catchy — and try to convey your motive in the first line itself so that the customer doesn’t have to scrap for value.

A good example of this is the promotional email for a contest mentioned below. This template directly jumps to the conclusion of how you can save up to $150 by saving your sizes. Besides that, you will also notice a saving code placed strategically above the header which adds value for the first-time viewers as well.

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You can also engage your audiences by directly asking them, “What would you like to see next?”. It has been shown this query in the form of a poll in an email can help improve clickthrough rates drastically.

5. Let your customer know what’s new

Sending the same-old email template with changed graphics isn’t going to help you grow your marketing list. So you need something new and fresh every time you reach out to your customers. And there is nothing better than the “What’s New” factor.

Whether it’s a new product launch or that Black Friday sale reminder, you should let your customer know about everything new in your company to make him a part of the family.

Below, we’ve mentioned some email ideas to keep the buyer hooked to your content:

• Discount Codes: Notifying your prospects of the most useful or trending discount code will surely help you add numbers to your marketing list. Plus, most of the discount codes are only valid for a short period of time. So you get to change the content every now and then.
• Free Shipping: While this may not be applicable to everyone, but if you are willing to offer free shipping of your product, it can certainly increase your email viewership. 
• Hot Deals: Just like discount codes, emails focused on hot deals like “clearance sales” and “festive offers” can create an instant impact. These emails are usually sent in quick intervals within a period, while the given event is live.