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Email marketing for e-commerce

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31–40 of 108 posts

Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#31
post #7

> 91% of customers want to hear from the companies they do business with. It’s unavoidable in the modern e-commerce marketing world. The quote is referring to email marketing. This seems pretty misleading. I can believe that 91% of people want to hear from some companies. But I'd bet that most people are not interested in hearing from most of the companies they do business with. There's a simple solution to this. It'…

I could believe that 91% of customer want to receive transactional emails from the companies they do business with.

But not marketing email.

Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#32
post #7

> 91% of customers want to hear from the companies they do business with. It’s unavoidable in the modern e-commerce marketing world. The quote is referring to email marketing. This seems pretty misleading. I can believe that 91% of people want to hear from some companies. But I'd bet that most people are not interested in hearing from most of the companies they do business with. There's a simple solution to this. It'…

> But I abhor being automatically signed up for emails just by nature of the fact that I made an online purchase.

Three years ago (before I started an ecommerce store with my girlfriend) I'd have vehemently agreed with you. It took a lot of convincing for me to even consider sending emails to our customers in the early days.

But now I realise that, like with most things in life, aftersales emails aren't inherently bad - most companies just do them poorly. With generic marketing/promotional emails or shudder the dreaded weekly/monthly newsletter...

I would now go as far as to say it's my duty to reach out to customers via email after purchase and ask them whether they are satisfied with the product and if they need any help. The way I see it, if someone has entrusted me with their money, it's my duty to make sure I fulfilled my end of the deal.

In that email, I'll also give my customers a choice of different opt-in options. From "please keep me up to date with any interesting news", through "only email me if there's an amazing deal I really need to know about for {{PRODUCT_CATEGORY}}, to the extreme "I don't wish to receive any further communication via email".

Very, very few people choose the latter - and they are almost exclusively customers who are buying a gift for someone else.

EDIT: If you're downvoting to disagree, please explain why...

Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#33
>> Once your customer has made that purchase (and you've actually delivered the product) it's time to ask for a review. Of course, you don't want to be the waiter who asks how the food tastes when the diners haven't dug in yet so you'll want to wait until they've had time to use your product.

Pretty useful overview. Have to disagree with the above quote though - if you're running an ecommerce company and have shipped your customer a product, you absolutely don't want to wait before reaching out with a short, friendly, aftersales email asking for feedback and/or a review.

The main reason being that you want to catch any potential problems/unhappy customers early and funnel them into a private feedback channel where you can sort out their problem in private. If you wait three days to ask for feedback from an unhappy customer, that's three days where the customer is potentially writing negative reviews, sharing negative feedback on social media and just telling their friends that your company sucks.

A secondary reason is that people are nearly always most excited by their new purchase when they've just received the package. That's why you're almost 2x as likely to get someone to leave a review/share with friends if you email them on the same day the order arrives vs. a week later.

Lastly, if you're running an ecommerce brand selling physical products, here's a shameless plug for my new tool - www.postperk.com

PostPerk is an aftersales tool for ecommerce to help brands reach more customers. Referral and loyalty programs don't work well for upmarket consumer brands, so we built a tool just for these companies - nudging customers to post on Instagram with tailored rewards. Our first customers are seeing results 2-10x better than comparable tools - increased revenue and repeat customers, fewer negative reviews, and a data-driven community of a brand's most engaged and valuable customers/brand ambassadors.

Happy to chat with anyone thinking about how to improve their aftersales marketing game :)

Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#34
post #10
post #7

> 91% of customers want to hear from the companies they do business with. It’s unavoidable in the modern e-commerce marketing world. The quote is referring to email marketing. This seems pretty misleading. I can believe that 91% of people want to hear from some companies. But I'd bet that most people are not interested in hearing from most of the companies they do business with. There's a simple solution to this. It'…

Yeah, that's how I feel too. When I get an email such as: > Hey {{ first_name }}, "Hey" isn't a salutation I want as a customer. We aren't friends. > We miss you. Bullshit. This is an auto-generated email. Computers don't "miss" people. > It's been a while since we've seen you. We know you get busy ... Yes, and now you're interrupting my busy day > ... but we'd love to see you again soon. In fact, come back and visit…

50/50?

100% for me. If they don't do double-opt in, then they are spamming me.

Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#35
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's how I feel too. When I get an email such as: > Hey {{ first_name }}, "Hey" isn't a salutation I want as a customer. We aren't friends. > We miss you. Bullshit. This is an auto-generated email. Computers don't "miss" people. > It's been a while since we've seen you. We know you get busy ... Yes, and now you're interrupting my busy day > ... but we'd love to see you again soon. In fact, come back and visit…

"I'm sorry for interrupting your day..." No you're not. You wouldn't have interrupted me if you were sorry!

It’s just like “sorry are you busy, I just have a quick question”

Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#36

>> Once your customer has made that purchase (and you've actually delivered the product) it's time to ask for a review. Of course, you don't want to be the waiter who asks how the food tastes when the diners haven't dug in yet so you'll want to wait until they've had time to use your product. Pretty useful overview. Have to disagree with the above quote though - if you're running an ecommerce company and have shipped…

Love the idea! My only concern would be to ask them in 2 separate emails to post on IG and then post a review for our website, but overall its a great idea. Unfortunately we are still too small to afford that (my website is Cambio & Co.) but hopefully we can one day!

Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#37
post #7

> 91% of customers want to hear from the companies they do business with. It’s unavoidable in the modern e-commerce marketing world. The quote is referring to email marketing. This seems pretty misleading. I can believe that 91% of people want to hear from some companies. But I'd bet that most people are not interested in hearing from most of the companies they do business with. There's a simple solution to this. It'…

The quote sounds like wishful thinking to me (reminiscent of drum-beating realtor-speak).

100% of this customer wants to hear from 0% of the companies with whom he does business.

Then there's this common unsubscribe strategy: "Okay, we've unsubscribed you from all messages pertaining to (some narrowly-defined topic)."

Web 2.0 killed popups and unders and overs for the most part, but these sprung back to life once Mom and Pop were told they could make money blogging and pimping other peoples' products (the new Amway or Avon).

Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#38

It's been a while since we've seen you. We know you get busy but we'd love to see you again soon And I absolutely love spending an hour deleting a flood of auto-genetated e-mails from my inbox every month or hunting for that tiny low saturation "unsubscribe" link (which sometimes doesn't work/exist at all). The worst offenders are the airlines and travel agencies IMO. I mean I understand getting monthly e-mails from…

How about credit card companies, who refuse to allow opting out?

Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#39
post #10
post #7

> 91% of customers want to hear from the companies they do business with. It’s unavoidable in the modern e-commerce marketing world. The quote is referring to email marketing. This seems pretty misleading. I can believe that 91% of people want to hear from some companies. But I'd bet that most people are not interested in hearing from most of the companies they do business with. There's a simple solution to this. It'…

Yeah, that's how I feel too. When I get an email such as: > Hey {{ first_name }}, "Hey" isn't a salutation I want as a customer. We aren't friends. > We miss you. Bullshit. This is an auto-generated email. Computers don't "miss" people. > It's been a while since we've seen you. We know you get busy ... Yes, and now you're interrupting my busy day > ... but we'd love to see you again soon. In fact, come back and visit…

>> come back and visit us in the next 5 days and take 15% off your order

Ugh, I hate this tactic. I understand why it's done - a customer is expensive to acquire, and it's cheaper to give a discount to an inactive customer than to acquire a new one. Yet it effectively rewards non-loyal customers, while loyal customers who provide a steady stream of repeat business are taken for granted. How many businesses who use this strategy also email their best customers with "Thank you for your loyalty - here's 15% off your next order within [some reasonable, non-manipulative, number of days]"?

Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#40

Email marketing is a rabbit hole, I remember this one particular instance where using a discount to re-engage abandoned carts would trigger a purchase, marking the campaign as a success..only to find out the customers had learned that they could get away with it and abuse this system to get discounts every time. Now that's great, they re buying..but we were in practice losing money on every transaction. That's when w…

Only times I ever use a discount code is for stuff I have every intention of buying anyway.

The amount of profit some companies throw away because of some half-assed split-testing experiment is unbelievable.

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