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Email marketing for e-commerce

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Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#41

Post by Animats »

chadash wrote: 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, right. I wonder how they got that number.[1] The people who immediately hang up on robodialers and block phone spam using caller ID probably weren't included in the survey.

[1] https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/chart/how-customers-...

Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#42

Post by mercer »

louisswiss wrote: post #32
chadash wrote: 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 ba…

I wouldn't have thought I'd ever agree with you, but I recently had exactly that kind of experience. I'd received a product, wasn't entirely happy with it, and if not for a 'are you satisfied?' email I wouldn't have gone through the 'effort' of finding a way to reach the company.

As a result, the issue was promptly resolved and both me and the company are happier.

Sending me more than one email, or automatically subscribing me to some kind of newsletter I find more problematic, though.

Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#43

Post by vorpalhex »

freeflight wrote: post #24
vorpalhex wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the same boat as you. I use a unique email alias for every single sign-up, so I know who sells my email address or sends me marketing cruft accidentally. I'm very aggressive in reporting bad actors to their mail provider if they don't honor or don't have unsubscribe links. But I think I'm the exception, not the rule, in this case.

Not using aliases I've become very skeptical of unsubscribe links in general, even if they are in emails of "reputable" and established brands, as scammers are now spoofing regular marketing emails like that in the same way they've been doing with PayPal/Battle.net/Banks for years. Tbh often it does not feel like it's worth the effort, due to the sheer amount of spam you end up getting the older an email address gets…

The vast, vast majority of spam that I get is from otherwise perfectly reasonable companies who don't understand the law.

To that end, my steps are:

1. Try their unsubscribe, give them a few days for it to "take effect" (which is nonsense, but, so it goes)

2. Send a polite, but direct email to `postmaster@`, and usually cc `webmaster@` - it usually goes to somebody.

3. If none of the above works, pull the full email headers and `dig` around some to find their MX provider, and file a claim with `abuse@` on the provider.

That being said, again usually it's an ignorance problem. I have a friend who helps run a company that does escape rooms, and I had only provided my email on a release form. However a few months later, I started getting marketing spam from them to that email - oops. A lot of small companies don't understand the regs around marketing emails and treat them the same as all other emails.

Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#44

Post by QasimK »

ams6110 wrote: post #10
chadash wrote: 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…

Seriously, hit spam. You think it’s spam; I think it’s spam; is there anyone who thinks it’s not spam?

Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#45

Post by QasimK »

louisswiss wrote: post #32
chadash wrote: 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 ba…

You and parent are talking about different kinds of emails.

Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#46

Post by chimen »

lvoudour wrote: post #29

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…

BMW is sending me an SMS every month - how many cars do they think I need? I can't even call the number that sends the messages - it just says BMW.

Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#47

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

louisswiss wrote: post #32
chadash wrote: 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 ba…

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

Ha! This line was off the page when I read your post. I immediately upvoted it because (a) I agreed and (b) I knew it would be downvoted.

Scroll down one line and ta-da, I was right.

Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#48

Post by patmcc »

chadash wrote: 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, I want to hear from companies in super limited ways. As an example; Hasbro makes one product I'm interested in (dropmix cards). If I could sign up to a list that sent me an email if (and only if) that product was on sale for 20% or more, I'd be very happy to do that. But I can't, I can only sign up for the mass mailing list. So no thanks Hasbro.

Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#49

Post by jaccarmac »

ams6110 wrote: post #10
chadash wrote: 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…

Most places are pretty good about sending unsubscribe links these days. However, I ran into a truly awful exception late last year with TaskEasy. For those who don't know, TaskEasy coordinates lawn care and similar services using independent contractors. I was happy with the service I received, and didn't even have to sign up for an account to order it. Then marketing emails started showing up. The unsubscribe link takes you to a login page, but since I never registered this means I have to create an account purely to opt out of spam emails. It's a really dark UI pattern and I'm disappointed in TaskEasy for implementing it.

Re: Email marketing for e-commerce

#50

Post by maximegarcia »

dandare wrote: post #11

As an aspiring SaaS founder, I was surprised how hard email marketing (EM) is. My questions so far: 1/ ROI - how much of a difference can good EM make as opposed to bad EM or no EM? Should I not rather focus on improving my product? 2/ What is the low hanging fruit? 3/ What are some of the tools I should be using? If my payment management is in Strip, how do I integrate it with the CRM? [answer: https://stripe.com/wo…

The difficulty is that your emailing strategy, the content, etc... change over time. So you don't want to tie it to much with your product code. Decoupled is better. That allows A/B testing without touching your code.

A marketing automation tool allows you to centralize marketing emails as well as transactional emails in one thing, decoupled. Your product emits events with some attributes, and the tool react to it.

Examples with "user_registered" and "user_ordered" events:

- confirmation of order (at "user_ordered")

- ask for a review (at "user_ordered" + 3 days)

- welcome process (drip emails starting at "user_registered")

- wake up campaigns (no "user_ordered" events since 1 month)

- sending a notice for a new product Z to users having bought product X or product Y (segment on users having "user_ordered" for product_id IN (product X id or product Y id))

- ... there is no limit to imagination, I love that!

Shameless plug if I may, I'd like to know your interests in such a tool: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc5J5BuP_dEfXPEtXV0...

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