Your company’s ability to grow your email list with valuable contacts will provide the foundation for all of your email marketing efforts. Many marketers struggle to determine the best way to get new email subscribers. Subscriber acquisition should be the number one priority of a strong email marketing strategy. By communicating the right way with your customers, your subscriber acquisition will lead to customer acquisition which will ultimately lead to revenue.

One channel that is often overlooked for subscriber acquisition is e-Commerce. Companies should not let users visit the website and make purchases without providing the customer with more opportunities to connect and engage with your brand. There are 3 simple steps to mastering subscriber acquisition with the help of your e-Commerce platform.

 

 

1) Create opportunities to connect

On your website, there are several places where you can call out users and get users to become a part of your mailing list. The header and footer of your webpages are primary locations for registration and subscription points. You can also provide opportunities for the user to subscribe during checkout or on content pages for special products or promotions.

Popups are also a growing email collection tactic. Typically popups are tied to a promotion or a special incentives. There are 3 main triggers for popups:

• When the user enters the website (for both mobile and desktop)
• When the user attempts to exit the site (for desktop only)
• When the user loads a particular page on your site (for mobile and desktop)

You can get creative with providing opportunities for your users to subscribe to your list. Best practice recommends that the form should have as few fields as possible – for example, asking for a name and email – since users are often more responsive to a simple form. Once you have the customer’s email, the next step is to get to know the customer.

 

2) Respond to customer behavior

Personalization is a hot topic in e-Commerce. Being able to provide each individual visitor with content that reflects their interests and shopping behaviors has been proven to boost likelihood of purchase.

With little development effort, tracking can be added to every page of your site to capture what each customer is browsing, clicking and purchasing. To go a step further, if you have the email of that customer, you can build a deep profile on that customer to help you better market products to them. You can send them an email that reflects the product category they recently browsed or you can remind them that they still have items left in their shopping cart.

The information you are collecting will allow you to respond to the actions of the customer and position your company to engage in a deep conversation with them.

 

3) Engage in conversation

Arguably, the most important step is to continue your engagement with the customer and build your reputation and relationship with them. Often, companies treat marketing emails as one-way communication to the customer, but engaging the customer in a conversation often leads to better results.

Think about how your customer may interact with your website. There are many opportunities for your customer to “enter a conversation” with your brand. The simplest example of this is the Welcome Email Series. This email is not just one email that says “thank you for subscribing.” This email is your first opportunity to get to know your customer, introduce them to your products, encourage them to browse other parts of your site and ultimately make their first purchase. The Welcome Series is often 3-5 emails that are sent a few days a part that ask the customer to engage further with your website.

With analytics and monitoring, you can discover the conversations that best suit your customer and lead to the highest purchase rate and retention.

 

Source: startupstockphotos.com

 

At Dunn Solutions, we want to ensure that you create a holistic online experience for your customers. Whether you are a B2B or B2C organization, your company should empower your email marketing team with marketing automation tools that integrate directly to your eCommerce platform.

Our partner, Listrak, is a digital marketing automation platform that can do all the steps above and much more. It takes the data from your eCommerce site and allows your company to create personalizes email marketing campaigns and initiate conversation with your contacts. It can help drive traffic to your websites and ultimately lead to purchases and higher customer retention. With Listrak, your company can start on the journey to making your e-commerce platform an even more valuable tool for your marketing team.