Email marketing for DTC brands can be simple (when you cut corners in the team you hire for it). Or it can be rewarding (when you hire the right team for it).
And if your ecommerce business has a team of less than 15 people, then you'd be smart to hire an agency for it because for the price of 1 employee, you will get the expertise and a team of 4 via the agency.
And email marketing is NOT the job of one person. Neither is it the job of one person you hire who can coordinate with your graphics team that you anyway have. That simply doesn't work.
Anyway, we've killed it with the email / retention marketing we have done for this sneakers brand in the US and you can learn some key lessons from it. So here goes:
Refresh your pop up before you refresh your first welcome email
Your pop up is what gets people in and sets the right expectations.
Set it up right. Don't be cheesy in it. Don't be pushy. Go ahead and give 10% off if you want - doesn't hurt. And then your welcome emails HAVE to be BEAUTIFULLY designed. They cannot be simply typed out grandma-nonsense. Let them see your stock, let them see your product categories. Be fun. Be refreshing. And be seen. We reset their welcome flow every 60-75 days to keep it nice and fresh.
Repurpose the recent top performing campaigns into flows.
Yep. Do not set it and forget it when it comes to your email flows. Any flow - be it welcome or abandoned cart or winback - whatever. Keep refreshing them. And the best way is to use the analytics of your recent campaigns, seeing what resonated best and simply repurposing them.
Abandoned Cart flows are key
I mean all 3 - abandoned cart, abandoned checkout, browse abandonment. These are your high intent flows. The key is to do them without being cheesy.
And what we did awesome was we integrated SMS flows at the right points within these flows. Which brings me to my next point.
Integrate SMS / whatsapp flows - don't just blast them
Ok this is really important. If you are collecting data for SMS or whatsapp, then don't treat them independent of your email marketing flows. Integrate them instead. Meaning, email flows and SMS flows should work together. One example is, adding an SMS after 3 welcome emails if there is still no conversion. Or sending an SMS / whatsapp after 2 abandoned carts. Or, sending an SMS immedately upon abandoned cart and then if there is still no conversion following it up with an email. If you set up customer agents, then whatsapp automated flows can be a goldmine for abandoned cart situations. Or even welcome flows where you get people to tell you right away which products they are actually interested in. Imagine the conversions!
Do not set a time for your flows
Nothing grinds my gears worse than seeing new clients who used to have another agency before and that agency, for some godawful reason, set up 9 am as the set time for every email in the flow to go out. What?!
There is absolutely no intelligent reason behind it. People work on their own schedules. What if someone has a night shift and usually shops / checks email around 6:30 pm? In that case, your 9 am email is already buried under 500 other emails and that was a waste I get too anxious to even talk about! So no, set up the email flows to go out based on hours - like 12 hours after, 24 hours after so that every customer sees the email on THEIR OWN time. Isn't that the one major advantage email marketing has over social media?! That we can talk to people at THEIR time…
Anyway, hope this inspired you to up your email marketing for your e-commerce business. And if you need help, we are always open to new clients.
Love,
Reema
