The problem with sending more emails

Guest Author

Let me start this post with two wide sweeping assumptions about you:

  1. You have suffered (maybe you still do) from email overload and struggle to get to Inbox Zero on most days.
  2. As an Ecommerce business owner or marketer, you have heard that email marketing is the best way to grow your business.

On the surface, these two things seem at odds with each other: Knowing how badly you (and most of us) struggle with email overload, you’d be reluctant to send your customers more email. But there are enough statistics about email marketing that shows you how profitable email marketing is, which makes a compelling argument for sending more email.

Mo’ emails, mo’ overload. OR. Mo’ emails, mo’ money.

The truth is that email marketing has never been about sending more emails; merely increasing your email volume will probably not have the outcome you desire.

Instead email marketing is about sending better, smarter emails. When you send emails that engages customers at the perfect moment (according to them) and you can give them a personalised route, they will likely take that next action you want them to take (like making another purchase).

Taking broad strokes, there are 3 key components to sending better, smarter emails:

  1. Great Content: Is the content good? Is it consistent with your brand? Does it look great in the email? And does it actually speak to every, unique recipient?
  2. Segmentation and Personalisation: Are you sending the right content to the right recipients? Does every recipient feel like they’re getting a personal email (or is it overly generic)?
  3. Timing: Getting recipients to read your emails when the time is right. This may be a case of getting their attention and getting the time of day right. Or it could relate to where in their journey (towards their next purchase) they are.

CM Commerce already has many of the tools to help you with this: from personalised product recommendations to an increasing library of clever sending triggers (enabling smart follow-up campaigns) to advanced customer segmentation.

Today we also have two new tools for you that will further help you with your timing and segmentation.

Find your customers in a better moment

Going back to what I mentioned right at the beginning of this post: email overload remains a challenge that we all need to solve. And the amount, extent or urgency of the emails we receive can differ from day-to-day too.

Add to that the everyday attention that social media demands and you can imagine that on some days, it’s possible to miss that one email newsletter. Even when it was sent by your favourite brand. Maybe you skimmed your inbox, but missed it because the subject line didn’t stand out. Or maybe you were just trying to violently get to Inbox Zero and archived it in an attempt to get ahead.

As a marketer, we want to give you another opportunity to grab your customer’s attention.

Starting today, we have activated a simple new mechanism to re-send a newsletter and only send it to recipients who didn’t open the first one. Doing so, along with a quick change of the subject line (here’s some tips on how to improve yours) gives you another shot at engaging your customers.

Stats suggests that doing this will give you a 30% higher overall open rate on your email newsletters. And while we can’t claim credit for this idea (Noah Kagan gets all our praise), we are still very chuffed about how easily you can make this happen in CM Commerce:

Timing matters. So why don’t you double your chances to find your customers in the right moment?

Locating your customers with more segmentation data

I’ll let Mailchimp share another truth: sending emails to a segmented audience will increase click rates by 100.95%.

CM Commerce already does quite a bit of segmentation out-of-the-box for merchants without having to set up anything. Just using default customer segments (differentiating between First-Time or Repeat Customers, or targeting Inactive / Idle Customers) will already improve your email engagement greatly.

Every business is different though and their segmentation needs will need to adapt to their customers’ unique characteristics. To this extent, we have continued to build out CM Commerce’s custom segmentation functionality to enable you to slice and dice their customers into whatever way you desire.

Today we are also making geographical data available: you will now also be able to segment your customers according to their country or continent. This is what that segmentation criteria looks like in your CM Commerce dashboard:

This is especially helpful if you sell across multiple geographies and you want to send specific promotions or offers based on where your customer lives. Another use would be to send different newsletters to different geographies to account for timezone differences and perhaps being the first email in their inboxes in the morning.

How will you be using these new tools to send better, smarter emails?

(Photo by JOSHUA COLEMAN on Unsplash)