Each week, we publish a mishmash of ecommerce related, insight infused articles for you to smash through. Just as we collect business information across all of a merchant’s channels in a single place, we’re doing the same for ecommerce related content from a variety of top tier content creators.
If you find the material filling your appetite for knowledge, feel free to share this post, as well as any article you see here. This week, you’ve got email. Nobody disputes that it’s a tried and true form of marketing that can beef up your sales and branding, but it’s important to constantly measure and better your email’s performance. Check out these posts to begin building up your lists, compare yourself by industry, and see how email effects mobile traffic.
Grades are in
Q3 has ended, and MarketingProfs has collected email marketing grades by industry to help you see where you stand compared to your peers. It’s all based on data from IBM company Silverpop, and it covers open, click through, and unsubscribe rates by various markets. It’s also interesting to note that the retail and ecommerce markets tend to have a harder time getting customers clicking their emails.
Which came first, the list or the email
Obviously, before you begin to consider sending out emails, you need to have a list. Any free space on your site is an area for opportunity to collect email addresses, and Eliv8’s awesome infographic has 21 ways to do just that. Consider creating landing pages, implementing a pop up when visitors are about to leave, or gathering feedback on your site to optimize it as a lead generating tool.
CTA: craving that attention
We live in an age of distractions, where there’s always something to grab our attention. That’s why it’s important that everything you write or market includes copy that drives an action, otherwise known as a call-to-action (CTA). Whether it’s email or site copy. ClickZ elaborates on how to increase each CTA’s effectiveness. For email marketing especially, a subject line persuading customers to click “open” is critical. Your product descriptions should also include CTAs that stress limited time or supply to kickstart customer action.
Is it alive, thriving, or dying
Time and time again, email is viewed as a channel whose future ranges anywhere from thriving to dying, but, at the end of the day, most agree it’s reliable. eMarketer’s research on retail email marketing pretty much backs this up, and it’s clear that email is a cornerstone of any business owner’s arsenal of marketing tactics. Not only does email consistently reach a broad spectrum of ages, but it still remains a tool with excellent ROI.
Email and mobile
Adobe Digital Index analyzed where retailers’ mobile traffic was coming from, and it seems that search holds a massive share at 42.9%, up from 24.4% in 2013. But email did account for a tenth (10%) of traffic, indicating that email marketing efforts do help to get consumers clicking toward your site. It’s also important to note that email is the leader of every channel in terms of how many mobile visits were by a previous customer.
Photo: Dennis Skley, Flickr
