Email Marketing Advice: Double Your Revenue with These 5 Email Tweaks

E-mail is one of the most powerful and effective marketing channels in today's day and age. In fact, the Direct Marketing Association reports that you can get a $38 ROI for each $1 investment that you make in e-mail marketing. In addition, statistics show that 25.1 percent of 2015 Black Friday sales were driven by e-mail, while only 1.6 percent of sales were driven by social media.

While those numbers are promising, you have to change your overall approach in order to achieve results via e-mail marketing. Here are a few tweaks that you need to make with your e-mail marketing campaign in order to get that revenue boost you'd like to see:

Tweak #1: Develop an Abandoned Cart Strategy.

For online businesses, there can be many struggles. However, one of the biggest that you have to face is that you will have customers that will add items to their shopping carts, go to the checkout, and then leave your website. Statistics show that nearly 69 percent of individuals will abandon online shopping carts.

Now, there are many reasons why this happens, but there are ways that you can recoup some of those lost sales. E-mail is one of those ways. In fact, one company was able to recoup almost eight percent of its lost sales by sending an e-mail, while Boot Barn was able to recoup 12 percent of its sales.

With those kinds of numbers, it would make sense to develop an abandoned cart strategy so that you recoup some of those lost sales. You can integrate an e-mail marketing system into your checkout system so that you can follow-up with your cart abandoners with ease.

Tweak #2: Cross-Selling and Upselling with E-mail.

Do you know what cross-selling is worth to your individual business? For Amazon, it's was worth nearly $37.5 billion in 2015, which was about 35 percent of their entire revenue.

Their cross-selling system is their recommendation engine. However, what most people don't realize is that e-mail is a huge component of it. On-site recommendation can be as much as 60 percent; however, with e-mail, it can be even higher.

So, take cues from Amazon and add e-mail into both your cross-selling and upselling efforts by introducing offers and following up on them with your customers.

Tweak #3: Use a Segmented E-mail List; Don't Use the Batch-and-Blast Approach.

With e-mail marketing, there are two primary approaches that you can take:

1. Segmented Approach: This approach consists of segmenting your subscribers into categories based on their interests and/or other relevant data.
2. Batch-and-Blast Approach: This approach consists of lumping everyone into a single category and e-mailing them together.

So, which one of these are the most effective? Looking at research, the numbers show that segmented e-mails have the ability to boost conversion rates by e-mail by as much as 208 percent.

When segmenting e-mails, you can segment by age, gender, interests, purchase behaviors, interaction with your site, activity on your site, and a number of other categories. The more you actually personalize/segment your e-mails, the more effective the approach will be in the long run.

Tweak #4: Time Your E-mails Just Right.

It may be hard to believe, but there is the perfect time of day when you should send out your e-mails depending on what it is that you want to achieve. Here are a few facts to familiarize yourself with:

• The most effective time of day to send e-mails is between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m.
• The most effective day during the week to send e-mails for successful transactions is Monday.
• The most effective day on the weekend to send e-mails for successful transactions is Sunday.
• The most effective day to send e-mails for successful open rates/click-throughs is Tuesday.

Keep in mind that all of your customers are not on the same time zone, so it is important that you optimize your e-mails accordingly.

Tweak #5: Don't Overlook E-mail Automation.

For the most part, the aforementioned tweaks can be performed with e-mail automation, which makes your job a lot easier.

The majority of e-mail services will permit you to automate the timing of e-mail sending, which allows you to send e-mails to customers in different time zones at different times throughout the day. They will also let you configure your e-mails so that one event will automatically trigger another one and the overall experience can be personalized and different for each and every customer based on the individual action that they take. They'll allow you to split test multiple elements of your e-mails. Ultimately, you will need to become familiar with the features that your e-mail system has and take advantage of them.

There are some services, such as SendPulse, that have started to introduce artificial intelligence (AI) for e-mail marketing that can do the above and much more. Full e-mail automation is quickly becoming e-mailing marketing's future. Some other popular services include Ontraport, Infusionsoft, and Active Campaign.

If you aren't comfortable setting up your own e-mail marketing campaign, or feel that you need more information, don't hesitate to get in touch with our team at WebDetail. We will happily provide you with the information or assistance that you need to boost your revenue and grow your business.