Email marketing might not sound like the most glamorous way to promote your dropshipping business. But any expert marketer knows just how effective this tactic is in making your online business successful.
For one, it lets you connect with your prospects. Second, it helps you nurture your existing customers. That's why it is crucial to have a robust email marketing strategy.
Benefits of Email Marketing
Before we get into our email marketing for dropshipping guide, let's list down the benefits you can reap from this tactic.
First of all, email marketing makes it easier for you to market to your customer base's specific segments. This can come in handy if you sell various products. That's because email marketing platforms let you segment your subscribers' lists.
You can base it on different parameters like products they bought, age and gender, location, and more.
Another reason why email marketing is beneficial for your dropshipping business is that it's measurable. Unlike traditional marketing, you can acquire data about your campaign. This gives you an insight into how effective your tactics are.
If you think that email is an old medium, you're entirely wrong. After all, email is something that most people on the Internet, if not all, should have. That's why there are plenty of opportunities to connect with your client base there.
Aside from that, it's a very affordable marketing strategy that can potentially generate a massive return on investment.
Finally, email marketing can help you increase traffic and sales. If your customers abandon their cart, you can email them to remind them. If you have upcoming sales, email is also a great way to share that.
Do not underestimate the power of a well-timed and well-written email.
Start an Email Campaign
Now that you what email marketing can do for your dropshipping business, here's how you can start a successful email marketing campaign:
Build an email list
Before you can start email marketing, you still need to work on your email lead generation to have an actual email list.
Your email list would be a list of prospects or current and previous customers you can talk to via email. This list is valuable when you're dipping your toes in email marketing.
There are many ways you can start building your email list. One of them is creating a call-to-action or CTA on your landing page or homepage that invites people to your email list. It's advantageous if the CTA is personalized. You can also add a pop-up or slide-in that encourages website visitors to sign up for your email list.
Choose the right tools
Several tools will help you power up or make your email marketing improve. If you want to level your email marketing up, you should consider using some of these tools to help you. However, much like any tool that you use for your business, you have to make sure that the device that you're using is right for you.
You have to check whether these tools are right within your budget and have all the features you need. Many email marketing tools offer a trial version so you can feel whether the device is right for your business. Make use of these trials before buying into the entire thing.
Salvage abandoned carts
One of the biggest reasons you should do email marketing for your dropshipping business is to recover abandoned carts.
There's nothing more frustrating than getting a customer to finally want to buy something only for them to leave it in the cart. That's where email marketing could help.
Reminding customers that they have something in their shopping cart can nudge them into completing the purchase. These opportunities can come about in the email where you can send an abandoned cart straight to checkout.
Drive customer engagement
Getting a person's email address out of them is excellent to have but quite challenging. However, what's even more challenging is getting them to engage with the emails you're sending them.
The more customers or prospects that look through and engage with your emails, the better it is for you overall. That's why you want to drive customer engagement.
What's great about email engagements is that it's much easier to push a sale via email when customers are engaging there than anywhere else.
The key to driving customer engagement is simply by creating engageable content that resonates with them. If your stats say that your customers aren't engaging, it might be time to shift gears on your content.
Send post-purchase emails
Another type of email that you should include in your email marketing strategy would be a post-purchase email. Even when you finally have a customer that purchased something from you, your job isn't done yet.
A post-purchase email is essential to ensure that a customer has a positive experience with your business. The post-purchase email should contain necessary information about their purchase. This includes pricing, payment method, and the product's expected time of arrival.
Once they get their product, you can also send an email confirming that you've already delivered their product.
Encourage customer loyalty
It's much harder to invite a new customer into your email list than it is to re-engage and keep a previous or current customer, not to mention more expensive. That's why email newsletters are an excellent way to encourage your customers to keep you at the top of their minds and promote customer loyalty.
If some customers haven't been engaging with you recently, you should start a re-engagement email newsletter. Doing so can help you reel them back in rather than treating them as a new customer.
Email marketing is quite adaptive, so you can connect with your customers no matter what relationship you're currently in them with for now.
Send Promotional Emails
Of course, the best way to get conversions from your email marketing is through promotional emails. Promotional emails are precisely what they are, which is an email that promotes your product. The promotion can come in many forms, but the most common ones are through sales or discounts.
However, you can also do it through exclusive content or pre-sales for your email list. Either way, the purpose is to promote your product to your customers.
When doing promotional emails, the key is not to send them every day. Otherwise, it sounds like you're spamming at this point. Plus, no one wants someone who only talks to them when they're selling something. You have to have built enough rapport and proven your value for promotional emails to work as much as possible.
Up-sell and cross-sell products
When you're upselling or cross-selling a product, it's best to do it to a previous or current customer. That's why it's great to do it via email since you can easily segment your email list to people who used to be or currently are your customers.
The key to upselling or cross-selling is learning your customers' past purchases. That way, you can make a sensible upsell or cross-sell. Otherwise, you might not succeed with selling your existing customers on it.
It is established that email marketing is an effective marketing tactic. So it would be a massive loss for your dropshipping business not to engage in it. That said, you should give the tips mentioned above a spin or two and see how they can impact your dropshipping business.
