Email is cheap, email is fast, email is still kicking and will keep thriving in the future. The bottom line is it is an important marketing tool that is accessible by any marketer for promoting, pushing, and broadcasting the company’s words to the millions.
But before that, you need the email addresses of your target customers to contact them. How would you get their email addresses?
The wrong way
Purchase email data from an agency !?! That I wouldn’t recommend. The email data collected by these agencies consist of a huge pool of email addresses that might not even be relevant to your business. If you use these data, you have a 99% chance of ending up in the spam folders of those users.
The best way
The best way would be to use your own online store to collect the data. The data collected from your own store would be more relevant as these users are interested in your business, that’s why they are there on your site.
There are several ways to collect the email address on your online store. I have chosen the 5 surefire ways that never fail and when combined, provides enough pool of relevant data for your email marketing campaign.
1. Use an efficient email marketing tool
You are going to collect, keep, and use thousands of email addresses, you need a tool that can organize your collected email data and keep them all safe at a single place.
Obviously, you need an email marketing tool to send thousands of emails and run your email marketing campaign. Some email marketing tools that are popular in this category are:
These email marketing tools have hundreds of servers that ensure your mail sent through them avoid the spam filters and is delivered to the right inbox on the right time.
The best thing is that the tools can be integrated right into your eCommerce platform by installing respective modules or extensions.
For example, the PrestaShop Mailigen and MailChimp Integrator module is used to connect your PrestaShop store with your Mailigen and MailChimp account’s email data repository. That is, all the email data that will be collected from your store would be synced and saved in your email marketing account.
So, you need a third-party email marketing tool for:
- Saving the collected email data
- Launching an email marketing campaign
2. Collect Email addresses from the checkout
Checkout process would be the most obvious and straightforward place to collect the email addresses. Despite this many marketers make a huge mistake. They collect the email addresses of only those users who create an account. There are no means to collect the data from non-registered users.
A simple newsletter opt-in box could be really helpful to collect email data from even the non-registered users. In fact, there are newsletter extensions that are capable of creating opt-in boxes that directly sync the email data with your email marketing tool.
For example, Opencart Newsletter Integrator plugin can do the same job on your OpenCart based store. It syncs the email data with your MailChimp, Constant Contact and iContact account if configured.
3. Use motivations as a lead magnet
By default, people feel reluctant to sign up for the newsletter subscription or fill any registration form. You won’t be able to add new email addresses to your data unless people are motivated to sign up for your newsletters. These motivations can actually convert your boring subscription forms into an exciting opportunity to grab.
You can use several motivations. For example:
Search engine watch asks the users to subscribe to get free daily updates from the SEO experts.
Mensuas uses exclusive coupons and offers as a motivation to push users towards newsletter subscription.
You can use various other lead magnets to attract the customers towards your email collection interface. That too without using a newsletter opt-in or subscription form. I am talking about other means of collecting the email data on your store:
- A free giveaway contest can provide you thousands of entries in a comparatively lower time than the newsletter opt-ins. Deploy a giveaway contest on your store and provide the contest entry through a simple registration form.
- Use a self-coupon generation form that would send the coupon codes to the user’s email address after the user provides it in the form.
For example, PrestaShop Scratch coupon module shows a virtual scratch coupon which users can scratch using the cursor to see how much discount they have won. After that, they need to provide their email address to receive the coupon code.
4. Use exit intent tracking & entry pop-ups
Most of the marketers think that pop-ups annoy the customers and they highly oppose the use of pop-ups on their sites. But I have found that this thought is one of the orthodox beliefs, they have never tested it on their own stores.
For example, we thought the same until we tested an exit pop-up on MockingFish. The results were surprising. We received the highest sign-up rate after implementing the exit intent pop-up which looks like this.
So, if you are still up against the idea of using pop-ups to collect the email data, you should once test a similar pop-up on your shop. You may start with something of less risky- like on the blog page for example. Just test it and see how it does.
Another type of pop-up that could be tried is the entry pop-up. Well, this idea is not supported by many. Showing a pop-up just after visitor lands on the site could be risky. Perhaps something of great value to the users might not irritate them. Something like this could be less risky:
Don’t be afraid of using the pop-ups and pop-up promotions. Use them wisely and provide some value to the users, they will certainly convert and provide quite relevant and more likely to convert users.
5. Use auto-subscriptions and email address capturing-
For all the ways that we have read till now in this post, you have to depend on the users to fill and submit a form for collecting the email address. Auto-subscriptions work a bit differently where email address entered by the user is automatically captured and synced with the repository without even submitting a form.
For example, Magento Auto-subscribe extension is capable capturing the email address of a user from the checkout page without even letting the customer know about it. As soon as the customer comes out of the email field the extension triggers the capture event that copies the email address to your MailChimp or Constant Contact repository even if the customer does not click the submit button.
The same process can also be followed in several website forms that you use- exit pop, newsletter pop-up, etc.
Conclusion
Once you have the email address, the main work begins- sending the emails. With a personally collected email data on your own store, you have the permissions of the users to send them the targeted emails. Moreover, as they already expect an email from the store, you have more chances of high open rates. Use the email marketing tools to plan the campaigns and schedule emails at different time lines.
Sending regular emails remind customers that we exist and have stories to tell and offers to give. A more engaging relationship can be created with email conversations. Just remember to send some different types of emails occasionally apart from the marketing emails. Perhaps a monthly news update, free e-book, or a loyalty coupon, could be a great occasional change.
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