12 Top Email Marketing Tactics

Email is one of the best digital marketing channels for personalisation. It offers you many opportunities to keep in touch with customers and website visitors and to encourage them to purchase.
There are many tactics to implement as part of your email marketing strategy and I’ve listed some of the major ones below:

1. Regular newsletter

For businesses of all sizes and sectors, a regular newsletter is an effective way to keep in touch with customers, employees, suppliers, investors and other target audiences. You can create a targeted newsletter for each of these stakeholders to keep them engaged and build relationships that will be profitable for your business.
Creating a newsletter is easy and you can add an opt-in form on your website that has a good incentive and then create newsletter templates in your email program (Constant Contact, Mailchimp etc) and send a news letter once a month, once a week or whenever is best for your target audience.

2. Customer survey

Survey programs like Survey Monkey help you to easily create a survey with multiple questions that you can add to your website or email to your customers or contacts. It has features that allow you to email your survey directly to your contacts.

3. Welcome message

A welcome email is a standard tactic to send out when a visitor has registered and/or placed an order on your website or via telephone. This is usually automated to speed up the process and to send the recipient a summary of what they have purchased, when to expect their order and as a reference for the order they have just placed.

4. Limited-time offer

With an in-house list, you can quickly promote offers that have a limited time and increase sales for a very low cost. Emails are cheap to send out and they are able to grab the recipient’s attention and lead to a high conversion rate especially if they offer great value to your target customers.

5. Purchase confirmation

This is another standard email communication which is essential to customers who have just placed an order. It helps to build trust and confidence with your business and customers can use the details there to contact you if they have a query or need to update their order.

6. Winning back lapsed customers

Some of your loyal customers will from time to time lapse, and it’s important that you keep in touch with them and encourage repeat purchases through incentives. You can segment these customers and send automated messages reminding them of the benefits of shopping with your business and incentivise them with a voucher to encourage a purchase.

7. Newsletter segmented by purchase habits

For automation purposes and for efficiency, you should segment your visitors and customers to ensure that you are sending targeted messages to each segment. Segmentation is not as advanced with a standard email list as it is with a database of customers. The two are different and it’s important to understand how you will manage each and how you will segment customers and subscribers.

8. Top performers

Your website should highlight the top performing products based on past purchases and you should email this to your customers to encourage purchases for products that they are likely to be interested in. You can have a top sellers list for each category or a list of top products in the category based on their purchases and send this to your customer base. Amazon does this effectively and this type of personalisation leads to higher sales and is an effective cross-sell strategy.

9. Birthday/Anniversary greeting or offer

Show your customers that you appreciate their loyalty to your business by sending them a greeting card or offer on important dates like birthdays and anniversary. This ensures that you are always top of mind with your customers and it reinforces the relationship.

10. Product replenishment

Offer your visitors and customers an option to be alerted when a product comes back in stock. Then send them an email when the product is in stock so they can place an order.

11. Warranty renewal

Email is effective and cheap to remind customers to renew their warranties, compared to telephone and snail mail. However, it is less effective than telephone and response rates are generally lower, but you can target many customers for a very low cost.

12. Abandoned cart

People abandon carts for many reasons including delivery charges too high, too many steps to checkout, saving it for future purchase, or as part of product and price research. So it’s often difficult to know the reason, however, you can email your customers to remind them of items they’ve put in the cart and even send them a discount to encourage them to complete the order.