Email marketing best practice for retailers

Email marketing is a key component of any successful marketing strategy and is one of the key ways to attract, inform and retain customers.

Email marketing is not rocket science but there are a few helpful tips and tricks that can push your email marketing over the edge.

As a general rule of thumb, an email marketing campaign should be 80% informational and 20% promotional.

Email marketing is a consumer journey that starts well before the actual email, it starts at the signup page. Expectations about the frequency of emails should be set to your subscribers when they sign up.

Once a customer has signed up setting up an automated welcome email is always a good way to get engagement with the customer and draw them to your website all through a personalised welcome email.

Depending on the information customers need to provide when signing up for your emails, you can look to create and schedule birthday emails for all your customers to make them feel special and unique.

Email marketing today is full of creative templates that can be used to get your message across. Event emails are always a great place to start, you can get creative with colours and fonts and draw your customers in.

Many retailers will send out weekly, fortnightly or monthly newsletters to keep customers informed. According to Constant Contact, just one of the many online marketing companies, a newsletter should have no more than 3 topics covered.

Although 3 topics sound like nothing, providing a smaller amount of tailored information is more likely to capture a customer's attention and retain it.

With any email marketing, the subject line should be 4 to 7 words and personalised with words such as you and your. 4 to 7 words does sound like nothing and that is because it is, but if you think about how so many of your customers will be reading these emails on their phone the subject line needs to short enough to capture their attention.

In retail, you might find that you are getting the same sort of questions day in and day out, if this happens a great way to engage with customers is to create email marketing content surrounding these frequently asked questions.

There are two formulas you can use when creating email marketing content

You should be answering these three questions within your email if you are trying to sell something.

1. What are you offering?
2. How will it help the reader?
3. What should the reader do next?

If you are trying to inform readers you should answer these three questions,

1. What are you trying to accomplish?
2. Why should the reader care?
3. How can the reader get involved?

These are two simple three question formulas that will help to make your email campaigns more effective and bring you the results you want.

Useful links

• Find a shop
  
• Best Small Shops competition
  
• Jobs board
  

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