By Omri Yacubovich | Head of Marketing @ Commerce Sciences
Email marketing has been around almost as long as the Internet itself, but it’s not dead yet (despite many declaring it so over the last several years). In fact, email is still widely considered one of the most effective marketing tactics — if not the most effective — around.
Even so, many marketers feel that email has become a bit stale. How can you breathe new life into your email campaigns?
Tapping into the power of e-commerce personalization is an incredibly effective way of growing your email list, not only in the number of new signups, but also as measured by the quality of your subscribers.
If you can make an emotional connection with your site visitors in that brief, fleeting time you have their attention, you’re far more likely to get them to convert. Robert Cialdini, professor of psychology and the author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, advocates that marketers use the psychological principles of reciprocity, social proof, and scarcity, among others, to convert consumers to take your desired action.
So how can you use these principles to build your email list? Here are three tips you can put into practice today:
1. Build Your List with Smarter Subscribe Buttons & Targeting
Most companies have an email signup button on their website, but few consumers will use it. Mobile users are even less likely to go to the trouble, especially if your site isn’t optimized for them.
The fact is, 98% of your site visitors will leave without ever making a purchase, so converting them to email subscribers becomes mission critical. Instead of buying expensive retargeting display ads to try to lure them back onto your site, focus on building that relationship with them from their first visit, by using smarter targeting and personalization to entice them to become email subscribers.
Using a desktop or mobile-specific pop-up for each user, you can get in front of your visitors with email subscribe offers that are compelling and tailored to their interests.
A beauty products retailer, for example, could offer tips and advice related to the page the consumer is visiting. In the above example, you could set the URL to match each of your makeup product page URLs, making the email subscribe offer 100% relevant to those visitors.
Simply change the URLs you’re targeting and change the subscribe button language to offer tips on the type of product matching those URLs, across your major product categories. You don’t have to make your entire site mobile-friendly to make these mobile-friendly offers, either.
2. Personalized Content to Drive Email Signups
Why would someone choose to receive emails from you?
By offering something of value, you can tap into the power of reciprocity I mentioned earlier. This is why free reports and e-books are so powerful; because people are more likely to do something for you when you’ve already done something for them. Sharing their email address doesn’t seem like a big give when a person has received valuable advice or information from you.
In the example above, you can see how easy it is to offer a free download and point people who convert to your gated download site. But you can also use these types of incentives to drive signups:
- Discounts on specific products, as determined by their on-site browsing behavior.
- Special offers for users with items of a certain value threshold already in the cart.
- Cross-selling your most popular products.
Of course, you choose which site visitors see which offers, using behavioral targeting. You can learn more about matching compelling content to consumer intent using behavioral targeting in this blog post.
3. Try E-Commerce Personalization Based on Timing
Timing is everything, right?
When it comes to converting your site visitors to email subscribers, timing and number of visits can tell you a great deal about what content might appeal to that site visitor. At the very least, you can begin by testing:
- Welcome offers for first-time visitors with incentives for email signup.
- Trust badges displayed in slideouts around the site for your late-night site visitors, who are more likely to be untrusting.
- Offers for visitors about to leave the site.
Or, you might find that phone calls are an incredibly valuable source of leads for your business. Try using personalized messaging to convert visitors to callers, who can then be converted to email subscribers by your phone team.
Finally, don’t overlook the importance of asking for the email of an existing customer. This may appear redundant, since they have already provided the information, but the solidified commitment can help increase your open rate.
Build Your Email List by Being Someone Your Audience Wants to Hear From
Let’s face it, it’s tough to get invited into a prospect’s email inbox. People are increasingly selective about who they choose to invite into their digital space. If you can make an emotional connection with a site visitor, they’re more likely to want to keep you around.
Take a tour of Commerce Sciences today to see how easy it is to get started with e-commerce personalization.