Email is Your Ecommerce “Silver Spoon”

As your ecommerce website continues to sell product, so to will it collect contact information of customers and prospects who did not buy. Gathering this information through a valid “Opt-in” method is a critical practice that an ecommerce website must perform.

Why? Because this practice will create a permission-based contact list of your customers and prospects that did not by from you. This practice will prove to be one of the most powerful marketing tools your company has in conducting successful ecommerce.

The reason for this is simple; permission-based email will finish the customer acquisition job started by Internet based marketing such as pay-per-click and rich-media advertising. Once the customer has been attracted to your website, permission-based email can move a prospect through the consideration and preference phases all the way to purchase – a task traditional marketing channels do not do as quickly or efficiently.

The reason permission-based email works so well is because it encourages customers to participate in a long-term interactive marketing campaign in which they are rewarded in some way for paying attention to increasingly relevant messages.

To support this strategy, sophisticated email systems that work in conjunction with a website to track customer-buying preferences should be utilized. Putting these preferences to work enables a system where permission-based email is specifically targeted toward customers based on what they like. This gives customers choices based on their preferences and will certainly increase their tendency to buy.

This is how email marketing for ecommerce works. First, collect email contact information and get permission to send email to those contacts. Then send email that is well thought out and targeted as much as it can be. Then review the results:

• Who responded?
• How did they respond?
• Did they buy or did they browse?
• And in both cases, what product(s) were involved?

In the case of a customer who purchased a product, send them a follow-up email suggesting a product that complements their initial purchase. In the case of a prospect that browsed, send them a follow-up email for 10% off the product they browsed, and turn them into a customer.

As you can see, the possibilities are endless and must be taken advantage of, as they will increase sales.

To become an ecommerce success you must use email marketing to your advantage.