Before I joined Ecomail as a Sales Manager in 2019, I sent about 5 newsletters for za5dvanáct through Mailchimp. When I started, we agreed that I could use the Ecomail platform for za5dvanáct free of charge. This motivated me not only to quickly understand the product I would be offering, but also to start working more with e-mailing. Now this channel accounts for 15% of our turnover. And it could account for much more.
Where to start: Welcome campaign
When I was thinking about where to start with e-mailing for za5dvanáct, I decided on automation – automated campaigns that you set up once and then work for you. You just need to change the content occasionally so that people don’t get bored with the same thing and don’t get the impression that you’re not paying attention to it.
I set up a welcome campaign linked to a pop-up where we offer the customer a 10% discount. This campaign alone could pay for Ecomail for a year and a half (if I had to pay for it). The welcome campaign has great results, with an open rate exceeding 50% and an average click rate close to 25%, which is an excellent result for these proportions.
Bring customers back to the abandoned cart
Another campaign that I quickly needed to learn and master was the abandoned cart. This was mainly due to getting to know and understand the Ecomail environment and its advanced functionality. The abandoned cart, like the welcome campaign, reacts to user activity, so it’s quite likely that the content will be of interest to the user. That’s why this campaign has almost twice as good results as the welcome – the open rate averages around 85%. Of course, the CTR is also very high, but here too I see room for improvement. I’m constantly working on that. The important thing in e-mailing is to understand your customer’s behavior and find out what interests them, so that you can then motivate them to make a purchase. In e-mailing, this is much more important than in any other channel, because it’s more or less a substitute for 1:1 communication.
1:1 communication in e-mailing?
Of course. It’s just a matter of mastering personalization. Nowadays, I consider it very important to show my contact that I know them and know something about them. It’s not just about their name and greeting, but also about their previous purchases, the last products they viewed, the branch/store based on their postal code, or their interests. I also use personalization in mass e-mails – for example, with Ecomail you can send an e-mail to a hundred thousand database that will give the impression that the user received it only for themselves – and that’s what they expect and what motivates them to open your newsletter. And that’s exactly how I work with newsletters at za5dvanáct.
Regularity helps improve customer relationships
In the context of mass campaigns, I went from about 10 campaigns per year in 2019 to an average of 4 campaigns per month. This regularity is also reflected in the results – in the long run, this brand building can help you significantly. It also allows you to learn more about your database and work with it better.
The beginnings were certainly difficult, with almost no purchases and motivation at zero. At the moment when I started using newsletters regularly at za5dvanáct, the conversions also started to increase, and now I don’t know of any of my campaigns that wouldn’t be converting, as was the case at the beginning.
E-mailing for every e-shop!
E-mailing is certainly a channel that every e-shop should use, because it can become the most profitable and above all the cheapest channel you use. And the best part? It’s a channel that’s completely yours! You have a database and data that no one can take away from you. When Google Ads ends, your sales end, but when the platform you use to send newsletters ends, you can simply find another one, which you can’t do with Google Ads.
To support my claims with data, let’s look at the results of the za5dvanáct campaigns from the perspective of Google Analytics. After about a year, I found that e-mailing is not the most profitable channel I use, but it has the best conversion rate. It is on average 3 times higher than other channels. But even better – it’s a channel that also has the lowest bounce rate. Why? Because you communicate with people who know you.
Are you going for it?
This is just a small glimpse into how I’m handling e-mailing for za5dvanáct. From 5 campaigns I sent at the beginning, there are now more than 30 campaigns in the last 9 months. I certainly don’t have the best e-mailing results in the world or even in the Czech Republic. But I already have experience with several clients that I have helped with e-mailing, and it is already generating great results for them. There are e-shops for which e-mailing accounts for more than 20% of their turnover. Nothing is stopping you from making this your case as well.
So if you want to start working with e-mailing but don’t know how, let me know. We’ll take a look at your strategy together – and either I’ll help you directly or I’ll refer you to a more experienced senior e-mail marketing specialist in your area. In any case, it would be a shame to let those percentages of turnover from such an effective channel slip away.
