Valentine’s Day is a celebration of romance and love and has consequently become a highly meaningful day for many couples across the world. A largely important aspect of this day is exchanging gifts - something that has been traditionally employed as a kind gesture to express love and appreciation to one another 💌

Here are some ideas on how you can utilise the gift-giving nature of this occasion to encourage customers to purchase gifts from your store for their significant other and consequently boost your sales!

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A Curated Collection of Valentine’s Day Gifts

Finding the perfect gift for a loved one can often be extremely tricky - many people will have no idea what to get for their partner. With the abundance of product offerings available online, gift options can become confusing and overwhelming for potential buyers.

Offering a curated collection of gifts and/or gift sets particularly for this occasion can make Valentine’s Day a lot easier for customers and hence make your store an attractive option for individuals on the hunt for the perfect gift 🛍

You can utilise phrases like “Our Exclusive Valentine’s Day Collection” and “The Perfect Valentine’s Day Gift” to effectively promote your store’s offering!

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Special Deals and Promotions

Encourage potential customers to buy from your store by offering deals and promotions exclusively for Valentine’s Day. Sometimes, people will need a small incentive to encourage a purchase and more than often, special deals can be enough to prompt individuals to purchase. 

You can do this by providing discounts from your store, offering free shipping or including special gifts with purchases. Taglines like “Share the Love with 20% Off!” can be used to effectively advertise your promotions 🛒

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Personalised Gift Packaging Options

Adding an element of personal touch always adds to the gift giving experience, where the recipient will feel more special when unboxing their present 🎁

Gift wrapping, cards and even handwritten notes are all amazing components of a thoughtful and personalised gift. By offering these services during the Valentine’s Day period, it can incentivise people to shop from your store and can be advertised by saying this such as “The Perfect Gift With a Personal Touch”

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Offering Express Shipping

Individuals may forget to purchase a gift for Valentine’s Day and if they’re not quick enough, standard shipping may mean that their gift won’t come in time.

Something that you can do to attract these potential customers is offering express shipping to ensure that their gift will still come before the day. This can be promoted with a tagline like “It’s Not Too Late for the Perfect Gift!” 

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If you run an eCommerce store, email marketing is an important part of connecting with your customers. Although you have other marketing options, email marketing allows you to build more meaningful relationships to grow your business. 

Even though social media has become a crucial part of our daily lives, platforms like Twitter and Facebook still can’t replace good old-fashioned emails. Research shows that email marketing is significantly more effective than social media in attracting customers. 

Utilizing email marketing in conjunction with other marketing strategies, like a customized landing page, can even increase conversion rates by up to 25%.

When you look at all of this, you can see why email marketing can be crucial to your eCommerce store. Whether you’re just starting out or want to expand, you’re going to need some email marketing ideas. In this article, we’ll explain how you can use an eCommerce email marketing strategy to grow your business. 

Why Email Marketing for eCommerce?

It’s important that you build credibility and brand awareness as an eCommerce business owner. If you want to generate leads, you need to find sustainable channels to reach your target audience. Email marketing makes this possible. Let’s look at a few reasons why email marketing is important for eCommerce.

Impressive Reach and Open Rate

According to recent reports, emails reach about 79% of the people you send them to. Reports conducted by Mailchimp also show that, on average, 21.33% of the people that get your emails actually open them. This is most likely because people generally consider email content important, while social media is mostly visited for pleasure. 

Emails are More Personal

When you’re building an eCommerce brand, sending emails lets you add a personal touch to your marketing. This can make your customers feel connected to your business in some way. You should also consider customizing these emails because some customers say they only engage with customized emails and messaging. 

Easy to Measure

You’re going to spend on marketing when you’re building an eCommerce store, so why not consider marketing options that help you easily measure the results? With email marketing, you can track details like open rate, bounce rate, click-through rate, and unsubscribe rate; all of which help you know where you stand with your customers.

Email Marketing Statistics You Should Know About

It helps to know a little more about email marketing statistics to understand how to best reach your customers. Below we’ve gathered some important statistics you should know to help you make informed decisions when you’re creating your email marketing strategy.

Over 4.2 Billion Email Users

Email marketing offers you limitless opportunities to reach potential customers. With over 4.2 billion email users, you can rest assured that the market is there. 

You can technically send emails at any time, but it’s a good idea to use a planned email campaign because it can help you perfect your eCommerce email marketing strategy. One report shows that the best day to send email marketing campaigns is Friday, which was found to have a high click-through rate. If you didn’t know plan out your email campaign, you wouldn’t know that and may not think of the day you’re sending the email.

Impressive Returns on Investment (ROI)

More than 59% of marketers say that email provides the largest ROI for them. With more than 340 billion emails sent every day, it’s a great idea to get in on these high returns by using email marketing for your business. 

Email marketing, unlike social media content, also allows you to customize messages to your customers. This feature makes your audience feel valued and can influence how they see your brand.

A Great Content Marketing Channel

Email marketing is a great channel for content marketing. In fact, email marketing was the most automated digital marketing channel in 2021. As a brand owner, you’ll probably want to pay attention to this channel. You can market a variety of content to your customers without boring them. 

People Read Brand Emails in Under Ten Seconds

The average consumer’s attention span is vital for you to factor into your email campaign. A Statista report shows that people spent less than ten seconds reading brand emails in 2021. 

This means you either grab their attention or lose them in the first few seconds after they open your email. Make it good—you’ve got no time to waste! 

5 Key Emails to Set Up

Here are five key types of emails you should write as an eCommerce store owner.

The Welcome Email

Will your audience continue to open your emails? Your welcome email will determine that. Your job with this email is to make a good impression in the shortest time possible. Make sure it’s memorable because this will make for a soft landing for the rest of your campaigns.

If you get your welcome email right, you might just win some returning customers. A good welcome email should welcome your new subscribers, thank them for subscribing, and let them know what to expect. You may even want to consider adding some appealing, simple graphics to help get their attention.

The Engagement Email

Even though email marketing has a wide reach, you still have to make sure your emails engage your readers. Your goal in this email is to get your audience to take action. You can tell them you offer free shipping or some other incentive that would interest them. Getting them to claim incentives helps to keep their interest.

The Upsell Email

As a brand owner and marketer, your goal is to build relationships and make it easier to upsell. Upselling is ultimately getting a potential customer to buy a more expensive product. One of the most popular ways to do this is to suggest more expensive items or services that go well with what they’re already buying.

When a customer thinks, “Wow! I do need a [insert expensive product] to go with my [purchased product]!” it improves their average order values and is good for your bottom line. 

The Cart Abandonment Email

Everybody has done this at one point or another.. You add tons of items to your cart and leave them there. Sometimes people forget to check out because of distractions. It could also be because of high shipping prices.

A cart abandonment email is a way to check on your customers and remind them about their items. You can also use this email to advertise cheaper shipping options.

The Win-Back Email

Eventually, someone is going to unsubscribe for whatever reason. A win-back email is your chance for them to tell you how you can address any issue they might’ve had. It lets you re-engage previous subscribers to see how you can get them back. It might not work 100% of the time, but why not give it a go? 

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How to Write for Your Audience

The biggest lesson in email marketing is understanding that it’s not generic. The best brands create a specific tone and style to address their audience. To have a meaningful relationship with your customers, you need to know how to write specifically for them.

Start by understanding their needs as customers. When you write emails that resonate with your customers, you sell to them indirectly by sustaining their interest. If they stay interested, your follow-up campaigns will most likely be well-received.

We’ve discussed that most emails are read in under ten seconds, so you don’t want to waste any time by writing long, boring emails. Keep it short, warm, and friendly. Don’t forget to use your emails to introduce new offers and specials to your customers. This shows them you have their interests in mind, which is a great way to strengthen your relationship.

Final Thoughts

Email marketing is a journey. If you want to be successful, you’ve got to learn the tricks of the trade. Knowing important eCommerce email marketing statistics like the ones we shared today will help you create more effective campaigns. 

With sustainable campaigns, you can improve your conversion rates and ultimately get more sales. Remember, you can’t always capture 100% of your audience. Start small and celebrate each win.  

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If you have an eCommerce store full of great products but you’re having trouble increasing your sales, you may be wondering what more you can do. We’ve got some tips you may not have tried that can significantly improve your store’s conversion rate and bring in more sales. Here are our top seven tips to improve the conversion rate of your store: 

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1. Implement a Chatbot

Consumers shop online because it’s fast and convenient, and they expect to have their questions answered right away. If it takes too long to get answers, they might go somewhere else where they can get faster service. Responsive customer service is right up there with low prices and great products in terms of importance to customers.

Sometimes it’s just not possible to be available to your customers day and night, but you don’t want that fact to cost you potential customers. Fortunately, there’s a way to provide 24/7 customer service without sitting at your computer all night just in case a customer has a question. Using a chatbot can help your customers get their questions answered quickly.

With advanced natural language technology, customers receive personalized attention from chatbots, which increases the chances of them completing their purchases. The quick and customized service improves customer satisfaction so your customers are more likely to return to your store and recommend it to their family and friends.

2.A/B Testing UX and Design Elements

User experience (UX) is the experience users have when they use your website and it has a lot to do with what your customer thinks about your store. UX design is purposely mapping out how your site looks and how it functions. The design elements of your store should be visually appealing, easy to use, and accessible to everyone.

So how do you figure out how well your site design is performing or if there’s a better option? A/B testing will help you find the answer and choose the most effective UX design to increase your store’s conversion rate.

With A/B testing—also known as split testing—you choose which element you want to test and how you’ll decide if it’s effective. For example, you could test two different versions of your product page to see which one gets the most conversions.

An A/B testing tool will help you run the test and analyze the results so that you can use the site design that’s most satisfying to your customers.

3.Website Personalization

Personalized sites sell more products. In the past year alone, eCommerce businesses lost $756 billion because of shabby website personalization. With so much competition in the online shopping world, you’ve got to find ways to set your site apart. Personalizing your site is an effective way to stand out from your competitors.

To personalize your site effectively, you have to understand your customers by using analytic tools, cookies, and geolocation features. You can then personalize your website to the kinds of people who are most likely to visit your store. You can even create unique home pages for different customer groups.

Use cookies to learn if a visitor is new or returning, then direct them to the pages that will be most helpful for them. It’s best to personalize landing pages to where customers are coming from to provide a smooth transition and personalized touch. Don’t forget to keep your site updated with each season of the year, the latest trends, and upcoming holidays.

4. Video Content

Videos capture a customer’s attention in a way that text and pictures just can’t. Especially with eCommerce businesses, where customers can miss out on the human interaction part of in-person shopping, video content shows customers that you care and fosters an instant sense of trust.

When creating video content for your site, be sure to keep it short and get to the point quickly. As with everything else related to online shopping, customers want speed and efficiency and they can lose interest very fast.

Add a video to your landing page to associate a human face with your business. Or add video content to your email marketing to bring more visitors to your site and increase your shop’s conversion rate.

5. Pop-Ups

Pop-ups can increase your conversion rate if you use them the right way. Delayed pop-ups that don’t appear until a visitor is on a page for a certain amount of time are more effective than instant pop-ups. Make sure the user can easily close the pop-up window so they don’t get annoyed and leave your site.

Pop-ups can be used in a variety of ways to increase conversions. You could offer a discount using an exit pop-up when a customer tries to leave your site. Or you could try to instill a sense of urgency in your potential customer by using a pop-up to let them know a sale is almost over or that there are only a few of a particular product left in stock.

6. Review Plugins

People who shop online rely a lot on customer reviews when they’re deciding whether or not to buy something. In fact, a 2020 poll found that 94% of those surveyed were more likely to use a business that had positive reviews.

Review plugins can help you gather positive feedback so that potential customers feel more confident about shopping from your store.

7. Giveaway Plugins

Free gift giveaways are hard to resist. Whether you want to win a new customer, bring past customers back to your store, or get visitors to register on your site, tempting them with a free gift will probably do the trick.

Giveaway plugins let you customize the conditions that will add a free gift to your customer’s cart. Not only will a giveaway encourage them to take the action you want them to take, like making their first purchase, but it’ll also give your brand a positive image and turn them into loyal customers.

Final Thoughts

In the savage world of online competition, you need to make the most of every opportunity to set your store apart. Using our tips could help you make a name for your brand, increase your site’s conversion rate, and improve your store’s sales.

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