There are many ingredients to a successful eCommerce marketing and business development strategy. In addition to offering great products and listing them effectively on your website, you'll need to employ a wide range of marketing and advertising tactics to attract new people to the brand and encourage repeat business from your existing customers.
One of your best tools is email marketing. It's cheap, it's easy to automate, it has enormous creative flexibility, and you can measure and analyze it in great detail. But if you want to harness the full power of email marketing for eCommerce, you'll need to stay up to date with the latest trends.
These are some of the latest trends and developments in the world of email marketing for eCommerce.
Competition and Differentiation
First, understand that there are many different eCommerce companies competing in the email marketing space. Your customers are already receiving dozens, if not hundreds of marketing emails, and many of those emails may be coming from your existing competitors.
If you want your customers to open your emails, care about what you have to say, read your content, and ultimately visit your site, you need to find a way to get past this competition. You can't afford for your emails to blend in as white noise or get deleted the second they hit the recipient’s inbox.
To this end, you need to find ways to differentiate yourself. Fortunately, there's significant room for creative experimentation here. Offering more value, appealing to a niche target audience, providing more interactive experiences, and tapping into more of the trends on this list are just some of the ways that you can stand out. But rest assured, if you don't put effort into this area, your competition will overwhelm you.
Hyper-Specific Audience Segmentation
Audience segmentation has always been important, but thanks to the power of modern marketing tools, consumers are expecting more than ever. It's okay to send periodic generic emails that appeal to everyone in all of your conceivable audiences. But if you want to see better results, it's important to narrow your audiences into hyper-specific segments.
It's no longer enough to separate your audiences into a few age categories or only by gender. Instead, you should be gathering data points on many different audience variables, including their behavioral patterns on your website and their past purchases.
From there, you'll be able to create better content, achieve far more messaging relevance, and win higher engagement rates.
Personalization and Custom Content
Along similar lines, it's going to be more important to personalize the content you offer to your email recipients. Email personalization has been around for a long time, though most brands still only use it to provide a customized greeting with the recipient’s name.
These days, eCommerce brands are tapping into more creative implementations of personalization. They're generating entire emails, including embedded videos, with content that is based entirely on descriptive aspects of the person receiving them. When your messaging is targeted to a single individual, you're likely to see far better results.
Embedded Videos
Speaking of video, eCommerce brands are starting to include more video content in the body of their email messages – and it’s paying off for them.
Video has several advantages:
- Videos are easier to process and understand. Human beings are visual creatures. We understand language and can process it effectively, but we tend to process visual information much faster and more efficiently. This is especially important in an era of gradually declining consumer attention spans.
- Videos are more engaging. Most people find video content to be more engaging than written content. It's more pleasant to see and is less likely to end up deleted.
- Videos offer differentiation. Despite the other advantages of video, many eCommerce brands ignore video, continuing to rely on traditional written emails. This presents a critical opportunity for you: embedding videos in your emails instantly differentiates them, and gives you a unique advantage over your competitors.
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Additionally, it's easier than ever to include automatically playing videos in your emails. With Viewed.video, you can generate a unique code that you can copy and paste into any email platform – and instantly earn higher audience engagement.
Quick Surveys
We all know that customer feedback is important, at least when it comes to reviewing products and making improvements on those products. But it's increasingly important to get customer feedback on your email marketing campaign. Only through customer feedback will you learn which of your emails are most effective and what kind of content your customers would want to see in the future.
The trouble is, most people barely want to spend a few seconds opening an email in their inbox. They certainly don't want to spend an hour filling out a customer survey. That's why many eCommerce companies are now including very short surveys in their emails; with enough responses, even a handful of questions can help you determine the best ways to improve your email marketing effectiveness in the future.
AI and Automation
It’s hard to overstate the power of automation in email marketing. Through automation, you'll be able to greatly reduce the number of hours you spend on email marketing campaigns. You can streamline efficiency and ensure consistency in your delivery. You can even cut down on mistakes attributable to human error. With the help of AI and machine learning, you can automate your email campaigns even more effectively. If you want to stand a chance in this competitive landscape, automation is an absolute must.
User Generated Content
What if your audience generated your content for you? It's a legitimate question. User generated content is becoming more popular for eCommerce companies because it reduces the need for internal content development and it improves audience engagement at the same time.
Are you ready to trounce the competition and provide more value to your email subscribers? You’ll need the power of auto-playing, embedded video to help you do it. That’s where Viewed.video comes in – sign up today, and get access to all the tools you need to make better, more effective email blasts.
