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Peak trade may be over, but with that comes a ton of new eyes on your eCommerce store. Therefore, refining your email marketing strategy and retargeting your new batch of potential customers should be at the top of your list of New Year’s resolutions.
As a D2C eCommerce business, the new year shouldn’t be a time to let up on the gas when it comes to your email marketing campaigns. Although the major gifting holidays of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas may have passed, not only does the new year allow you to further capitalise on the success of this period, but it presents opportunities to talk about your brand in new ways, but you likely have a new sub section of your audience to engage. Equally, there are holidays and events within the first few months of the year that you can look forward to too, be it New Year's resolutions, Valentines day or even Galentines.
Nearly 70% of customers say that email marketing is their preferred method of hearing about deals and updates, so it should definitely become an essential pillar of your overall strategy if it hasn’t already. Furthermore, gifting season spending only seems to increase year on year, reaching heights of over 200 billion dollars in 2022. So if you saw success over this period, you now have a treasure trove of newer customers that you can tap back into in the new year too, so long as you master your email marketing in Q1 of 2024.
This may seem obvious of course, segmenting your email list has long been best practice, but if you’re starting your email marketing anew in 2024, it does need repeating. You’ve just been through your peak trading period after all, so you will have a ton of new leads. Therefore, you need to ensure that you are keeping your mailing lists healthy, and removing or retargeting those subscribers who have dropped off during this period.
Just like any other time of year, you should be tailoring which emails a customer receives based on a number of factors. This could be what products they bought, when they bought them, and whether they bought anything at all; or, conversely, whether they’ve been engaging with previous emails or visited your site. Segmentation based on factors like these allows you to further personalise each of your email campaigns, and it has shown great returns too. In fact, Lyris Inc. found that, of marketers who segment their email lists, a massive 39% have higher open rates, 28% have lower unsubscribe rates, and 24% have better deliverability and greater revenue, compared to marketers that don’t.
Furthermore, segmentation is especially important over the new year, as you will have substantially more customers who have bought from you, or visited your site, for different reasons and at different times. For instance, it might be too soon to retarget someone in the new year if they just bought from you over Christmas; however, if they bought from you over the Black Friday period, then enough time would have passed to potentially email them again.
Leading on from audience segmentation, whilst the new year is, really, just another set of days around the sun, it does represent an opportunity to reach back out to old customers. Maybe they shopped with you a year or so ago, but have forgotten how good their experience was. A re-engagement campaign in the new year is a fitting opportunity to let these customers know about your products and services once again.
You can use personalised subject lines, that reference their inactivity, to peak their interest. Therefore, they know that the email is meant specifically for them.
Re-engagement campaigns also give you an opportunity to purge your email list of inactive subscribers. Resetting your subscriber base to only active subscribers, will give you a more accurate reflection of how your email campaigns are actually performing. Similarly, this can reduce your email bounce rate, and prevent your email from showing up in your subscriber’s spam folders.
You may scratch your head at this, after all, you’ve just ran your biggest deal of the year for Black Friday, only to run another for those in the days leading up to Christmas, how are you supposed to run yet another one? Well, the profitability of running a promotion exclusively for those new customers gained over the gifting period indicates that it is a great way to increase your customer life-time value, and foster the client-brand relationship further.
And if you do think this will be damaging to your turn-over, it doesn’t have to be an out and out discount, you could instead opt for value added incentives such as free shipping, added gifts or even exclusive products for email subscribers.
As we’ve mentioned already, you probably got quite a few new customers over the gifting period. But, just think about how many people viewed your store, got so close to the finish line, but didn’t check out? Well, Statista research found that cart abandonment rate was as high as 70% across all devices in the retail industry throughout 2022, and this number is even higher on mobile. This means you average a purchase rate of just 30%. Whilst this cart abandonment percentage might lessen during Q4, as people are browsing with slightly more of an intention to buy, it should be enough of an indication that cart abandonment is a key opportunity to retarget potential customers.
Cart abandonment emails should not be downplayed as just a floundering, last ditch effort to capitalise on a potential customer, as these emails actually see an open rate of nearly 50%, and a recovered transaction rate of 8%. With some quick maths, that, on its own, increases the 30% purchase rate to 35.6%, so this should be an absolute no-brainer.
The most common reason for people abandoning their cart is due to shipping costs or the amount of time that an item might take to ship, so, like above, it might be best to offer these customers an additional incentive like free shipping or 5% off their order. This also gives you an opportunity to A and B test your audience. By splitting a segment in two and sending each half a version of the same email with a different promotion, you can see which promotion they respond best to and make use of that information going forward.
Whilst the most major gifting events in the year may have passed, it doesn’t mean that there are no more opportunities until Q4 rolls around once again. In fact, Q1 easily comes in second place in terms of the number of gifting opportunities. Whether it’s self-gifting for New Year’s resolutions or personalised gifts for Valentine’s day, there are timely opportunities that you can optimise your email marketing campaigns for.
So, whether you’re running a Valentine’s day sale, or launching new products ahead of these periods, it’s an opportunity to garner people’s attention, send them emails, and get them on your website. Plus, people have birthdays all year round, if you are tracking this information, there’s no reason not to send them a personalised discount for their special day.
Treating your email marketing like a series of standalone projects can turn it into a more reactive part of your brand, rather than a proactive one. This can lead to potential losses in customer lifetime value and prevent you from building strong customer-brand relationships. Working alongside a trusted partner to perfect your email marketing over an entire year, can help establish future relationships between you and the customer to ensure that the customers you are retaining are spending more with you. This, in turn, can give you more budget to invest in your brand.
The new year should not be seen as the end of a fruitful gifting season, but an opportunity to further capitalise on your new and existing customers and increased brand awareness. By harnessing email marketing best practice and establishing it as a core tenant of your overall marketing strategy, you'll find yourself, not just riding the wave of the new year, but carving your path toward sustained results that propel you into Q2 and beyond.
To find out how we can help you with your email marketing and customer relationship management click here.
