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How Email Marketing Helps E-Commerce

This column gives you 12 insider insights on how to use email to boost e-commerce sales. It's written by someone who eats, sleeps and breathes e-commerce. That would be "Web Digest For Marketers'" Managing Editor, Eileen Shulock.

In addition to her duties at this newsletter, Eileen Shulock is the Creative Director for www.IntermixOnline.com, a fashion forward retailer with 14 stores in 9 cities, including NYC, Las Vegas, Miami, DC and Dallas.

Eileen is responsible for their smash hit e-commerce website. Much of that success comes from the expert use of email to boost sales at the site. Below are her top 12 ways to do exactly that. -Larry Chase

1. Grow Your "House List" If You Haven't Already: In the world of traditional direct mail, a "house list" is a list that the "house" or company has created (and owns) of people to whom the company can market. In email circles, your house list is your list of opt-in subscribers who have agreed to receive marketing messages from you. Some of these people may be customers; most probably are not. (Just because someone has purchased from you does not automatically mean that you can email to him or her forevermore; you must get permission.) Your house list will quickly become your most valuable email marketing asset. If you're like most email marketers, you will soon become obsessed with the care, feeding and growth of your house list.

2. Make the Relationship Valuable to the Subscriber: If your house list now has 10,000 email subscribers, that doesn't mean that you just have a big pile of faceless people who receive your emails each week. Think about who they are and what's going to be valuable to them. You need to make your email marketing program so compelling that anyone with an interest in your company or your products would feel like they are really missing out if they don't sign up for your email newsletter. You need to talk to your audience, not "at" then. In some cases this means creating compelling content and in other cases this means creating really compelling deals that they will want to take advantage of. Sometimes it's a mix of both.

In our weekly tranmission of our email newsletter, which we call the Intermix "Lust List", we're apt to write about the newest and hottest fashions from Gwen Stefani or Stella McCartney. Sometimes you can buy them right then and there, other times not. There are other instances where we offer fantastic, time-senstive deals that really work for us to clear out inventory. Along with a celeb iPod playlist we might also tell the reader when something is out of style, ie., what's "hot and what's not". We think of our list as a hybrid of products, deals, content and a lifestyle beyond fashion.

3. Promote Relationships Before Sales: In my experience it is much easier to get people to sign up for your email newsletter than it is to get someone buy a product right off the bat, especially if that product is pricey or a considered purchase. In the world of fashion retailing (and probably in your world as well), people want to know who they are buying from and that those vendors that they do buy from are making the correct picks of what is worth buying. In a very real way, we're fashion editors, helping our customers make the right purchases. You can't instantly trust our judgment (or any else's) in a PPC ad or some other quick hit impression that cannot possibly fully convey who we really are. Being comfortable buying from us requires an experience had with us over time, and that spells "newsletter".

4. Spend Money To Build Your List: Not only is our email newsletter actively marketed on our website; we also put marketing dollars behind it by running email subscriber acquisition ads in other newsletters, on fashion blogs and by sending solo emails to appropriate third-party lists. In fact, most of our marketing budget is devoted to promoting the newsletter. (Very little is devoted to promoting the store name, and some [several thousand dollars a month] is devoted to PPC advertising, which uses brand name keywords of the merchandise and designers people are looking for.)

Note: People who buy something as a result of our PPC program have the option of subscribing to our newsletter at the point of purchase. About 50% of them convert. So in a very real way, part of our subscriber acquisition is a byproduct of people who elect to subscribe at the time of their online purchase which came as a result of their original intention of looking for a brand name to buy.

If you want to grow your email list, create a marketing program dedicated solely to enticing new subscribers to join your list. And don't overlook adding a little incentive. Sure, your email newsletter is great, but there's nothing wrong with making a subscription even more compelling by giving potential subscribers a chance to win a product, a shopping spree or something else very related to your product or service offering. (Don't offer an out-of-the-ballpark promotion that has nothing to do with your product or service because your subscriber list will then be full of people looking for a gazillion dollars rather than what you have to sell.)

In our case, we often offer a shot at winning a $3000 shopping spree which we call the "Lust Fund". Our marketing budget is a zero sum game. That $3000 has to come from somewhere, and it comes from our media budget. So yes, it means that we spend that much less on ad placement. But let me tell you, it lifts response rates and subscription acquisition rates megafold. And while it's true that there are people on our house list who will never buy a thing from us, there are people on our list who have bought $30,000 in merchandise from us - and I can tell you that the average lifetime customer value of a subscriber on our list is in the mid three figures.

5. We Don't Push the Deal: In much of the fashion business, the merchant doesn't push the deal. In our emails to our subscribers, we rarely say there are discounts on various items. We're more apt to tell subscribers about the hot new merchandise that has just hit the racks. Your business might run differently. Your target audience may be very price sensitive and not care so much about the manufacturer. But in the Internet marketing service arena, for example, you don't push price either. You push credibility, and that, too, spells "newsletter".

6. The Law of Unintended Sales: You already know that you can't just shove product down people's throats. This is especially true in email e-commerce marketing. Naturally the impulse of any good retailer is to keep selling and never stop selling. But really, you have to know when to stop. What I do to avoid "overselling" my audience is break down each weekly email campaign into little baby steps:

1. The subject line needs to be as compelling and relevant as possible so that people open the email.
2. The content of the email itself needs to be creative, well-written and well-designed in order to get people to click through to our website.
3. The actual selling takes place at our website.

Remember, your emails will be going out week after week. People need to look forward to your emails and want to open them every week, and then click through to your site. Benchmark and track all these metrics. You will soon be able anticipate a specific revenue with each email that you send.

For example, about 40% of the people who open our email newsletter wind up getting involved and clicking through to our website. At the end of the day, between roughly 5-10% of the people who open the newsletter wind up buying something at the site. We think that most of the people who wind up buying something at the site had little or no intention of buying anything when they opened the newsletter back in their IN box. Every week, we have an email marketing program that helps people purchase something they didn't know they wanted when they opened the email. We count on people who have no intention of making a purchase to make a purchase - and we can tell you just how much we think each of them will spend.

7. Direct Sales Works In Some Industries, Not Others: Face it, some industries have target audiences that simply want you to cut to the chase and present them with a deal right up front. Or maybe they want you to romance them a little bit (or a lot) before selling them, but by the end of that email it is hoped, in these cases, that the reader who's still reading is a very qualified prospect who will buy something that you are selling. In other industries, the sales lead time is not 90 seconds, it might be 90 days or nine months. Whatever the time frame, at least A/B test different approaches to see what gives you the most bang for the buck.

8. Trash Offline Is Trash Online: Say you've got a network of twenty retail stores out there and there's a line of merchandise that turns out to be a real dog out on the floor (or on your website). I mean it just isn't moving at all. If you're the Internet marketing manager, it wouldn't be unlikely for the company to say to you, "Hey, why don't you blast this dog out to your email list and get rid of it for us?" It's your job to protect the list and make the rest of the company understand two things:

1. If it's a dog on the floor it will most likely be a dog on the list.
2. If you abuse the list in this way you'll not only lose subscribers, but also credibility with the ones who remain, and you will make it more difficult to sell to them thereafter.

9. Treat Your Subscribers Like Gold: You spent money, time and effort to get them to join your email list, so it stands to reason that you should spend money, time and effort to make them feel special and keep them on your subscriber list. Offer subscriber-only specials, first dibs on new or newly marked down merchandise, private offers and the like. Don't you hate it when you've been a longtime subscriber to a magazine and you see countless marketing messages from them offering all kinds of goodies to new subscribers but nothing to you? Your subscribers do, too.

10. When To Send: It takes trial and error to discover the best day and time to deliver your email marketing message. However, you will see a substantial difference in open rates, clickthroughs and sales based upon when you deliver the email - and your results may defy common wisdom as to best emailing days. The IntermixOnline.com subscriber likes to receive her email from us late Friday night. We've figured out that she likes shopping online on Saturdays and Sundays and they are, as a result, our best sales days (our average site visitor looks at 15 pages on our website during her visit and she needs some time to do so).

There are many weeks when our all-out focus on prepping the site and getting as many new products up on the site as possible for Saturday selling means we work late on Thursday and Friday nights. My life would be much easier if I could send our email newsletter on Wednesday afternoon, for example. But it just doesn't work as well. You might have the same experience, especially if you have a female audience. Women tend to get online on the weekends and do things for themselves and their families such as vacation research and yes, shopping, whereas the research I've seen show that in the B2C arena men do more shopping from work. B2B newsletters like Web Digest For Marketers go out early in the week so people can read them over the course of the next few days, maybe during a lunch hour or during the time of the week when people take a look at what's in their Read folders.

11. Segment, Segment and Segment Again: Once you're satisfied with your overall email marketing program, it's time to get fancy. You will find that if you segment your list and send special mailings to specific groups of people, those emails will be very relevant and as a result will most likely perform very well. The emails that we send to specific segments of our list or customer base offer us the best response rates and resulting sales. For example, we have emailed people who returned merchandise to us recently and offered a special discount to them. We've also emailed those people who ordered things from us and did not receive it because we ran out of the item and offered them a discount. We've emailed those people who have spent the most with us and offered them a gift certificate to apply to their next purchase. Segments are only limited by your creativity (and your technology). In all of these segmentation campaigns, and others, we have found gold. In fact, one of the games we play in the office is to answer the question "How else can we segment this list?"

12. Long-Tail Marketing: Depending upon what you are marketing, you may need to leave that email creative, landing page or product page and the like up and active for your subscribers longer than you think. In my case this is not an issue because we're selling trendy fashions that are out of stock in two to three weeks. However, if your sales lead time is lengthy or you always have a particular product in stock, don't be surprised if people continue to open and clickthrough on your email and go to your website to look at the products you've marketed for weeks or even months after your message went out.

13. BONUS TIP >> Look For Epiphanies: If you want to stay a step ahead of your competitors and your subscribers' boredom levels, you need to constantly review your efforts and test new email marketing waters. I look for "aha" moments in three specific areas:

1. Design, layout and clickthrough review: We test new layouts, designs and copy for all of our messages based on how and where people are clicking on our emails. Had I not looked at where people were clicking on a new welcome email sent to all new subscribers, I never would have noticed that most people went all the way to the bottom of the email to the text information to actually click through to our site. The entire HTML email was clickable, but we never indicated where to click with a word or a graphic or a link. (Duh. Even the most seasoned of us do make mistakes.)
2. New technical/media opportunities: We've been collecting our subscribers' cell phone numbers and carriers for eight months. Haven't done anything with them yet, but I will, and soon. (Remember, when you look at cutting-edge media you're often in uncharted waters. Therefore, you can often get really good deals and find out for yourself if something works or not on the cheap.)
3. Competitive analysis: If you see one of your competitors trying a new tactic, you need to try it as well and then try something even better. Don't even tell me that you are not subscribed to every single one of your competitors' email lists for both visitors and shoppers - which means you must buy something from each one and soon. Had I not been subscribed to one of our competitors' lists and tagged as a shopper as well, I never would have received their holiday catalog which they mailed (like, in the real mail) only to shoppers. As a marketer, you can't afford to miss that kind of competitive intelligence and resulting ideas and opportunities.

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