Hi there, it’s Matthew Larsen from Ultra Growth Marketing, and the topic of this blog post is how to grow your email list for your eCommerce Store.
How to Grow Your Email List
This blog post is about the importance of building a mailing list for your eCommerce Store. Email marketing is one of, if not the most important tools for an eCommerce Store, and this will be one of the most important emails that you ever read. Let’s get started!
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The Importance of Building Your Mailing List
Your email list is so important because it allows you to get in touch and stay in touch with your customers (and potential customers) any time you want.
The important thing to realize is that most people are not going to buy anything from you the first time they visit your store. This is just a fact of life. If you have a 3% conversion rate, that means 3 out of every 100 people that visited your website ended up buying something. However, that also means that 97 out of the same 100 people did not buy anything. That is why our mailing list is so important, and why it is so important that we have a way to capture the email addresses of those who visit our website.
If we have a reliable and effective way to capture a visitor’s email address, we can send them follow-up emails to further educate them about our product(s) and bring them back to our website at a later date. This is very important because when we use email marketing effectively, we can begin to get 6 out of every 100 people to buy something, or 8 out of every 100 people to purchase over time. They may not convert into customers the first time they visit our store, but if we are able to maintain contact and build trust through our email marketing, they will convert over the following days, weeks, and months.
However, if we don’t capture their email address, we can’t do this, and if we can’t do this, those extra people are “lost” forever.
Effective email marketing can double and even triple your sales for this very reason.
Popups
The problem that most stores have is that they do not have an effective or reliable way to grow their email list. The only way they do so is through “abandoned carts,” or whenever someone purchases. This is fine, but it only accounts for a small percentage of emails captured compared to the total amount of people that visit their store. If 100 people visit their store, they may capture four or five email addresses at most, however, there is a better way to do it. This other way can help us capture eight, or ten, or sometimes even fifteen email addresses for every hundred people that visit our store, and these “extra” email addresses that we are able to capture can add thousands of dollars in sales over the course of time.
How do we capture email addresses in a consistent and effective way?
Popups.
We need to add a popup to our website. This popup needs to offer some kind of discount or special offer to our website visitors in exchange for their email addresses. Some stores will have a popup and it will say something along the lines of “sign up to our mailing list for updates.” This is not good enough. We need to provide some sort of incentive for people to give us their email address, otherwise, they won’t do it.
Using a popup, we should offer a discount on first-time orders such as free shipping, or 10% off. If we do this, we will get between 8-15% of all website visitors to sign up for our mailing list which will allow us to stay in touch with them over the long-term and get them to come back to our store to purchase, even if they didn’t convert the very first time they visited our store.
Your popup should be integrated into an email marketing software. When someone signs up for your popup, they should get the discount code that you are offering, and they should be added to an email list. This email list will be attached to your “Welcome Flow” which I will go over in the next paragraph.
Your “Welcome” Flow
A welcome flow is a sequence of emails that you send out to new subscribers in order to establish brand awareness and to educate them on your product(s). On average, a customer needs seven “touchpoints” in order to remember your brand. This is the purpose of our Welcome Flow. We are able to clearly communicate and connect with our customer through email marketing. Over time, they will begin to learn a lot about our brand, and this will “build trust” and make it far more likely that they come back to our store and buy something in the future.
In our Welcome Flow, we should include a bunch of different things about our brand. We should have a separate email for each “thing” that we want to talk about, and we should send out a minimum of seven emails over the course of seven days after they sign up for our mailing list. It is important that we include at least seven emails in our Welcome Flow because we want to educate them about our product(s) as quickly as possible.
When they came to our website the first time, that was the “peak” of their interest. As time passes, their interest begins to decrease more and more. It is important for us to contact them as much as possible while their interest in our product is still near its peak.
Here is a general guideline for what your Welcome Flow should look like. You can implement this for your own Store, or you can change it to fit your own needs and style:
Email #1: Send them their discount code and welcome email (Immediately)
Email #2: Send them your “About Us” email (One hour after Email #1)
Email #3: Send them your “Frequently Asked Questions” email (One Hour After Email #2)
(You will notice that if you follow these guidelines, you will be sending them three emails within the first two hours of them signing up. This is what you want. You need to send them all of the important information while their interest is near its peak. Don’t shy away from doing this).
Email #4: Send them an email about the main benefits of buying your product (One Day After Email #3)
Email #5: Send them an email that addresses any possible objections that they may have before buying your product(s) (One Day After Email #4)
Email #6: Send them an email showcasing some product reviews and testimonials (One Day After Email #5)
Email #7: Send them an email showcasing your three best-selling products (One Day After Email #6)
Email #8: Send them more information about how your products are made and why they are better than your competitors (One Day After Email #7)
Email #9: Send them another email going over the benefits of buying your product and how it will benefit their lives (One Day After Email #8)
Email #10: Send them another email addressing possible objections that they may have before buying your product(s) (One Day After Email #9)
If you follow this sequence, you will send them 10 emails over the first seven days. This is what you want to do. You want them to make a buying decision as quickly as possible. The longer they wait, the less likely it is that they will end up buying something.
Don’t be nervous or worry about sending too many emails. The truth is that if they are “annoyed” by receiving your emails, they were never going to buy anything from you in the first place, so you aren’t losing or missing out on anything. It is better if they unsubscribe because we don’t want people on our email list who are not going to buy from us. They just take up space, and we end up paying more for our email marketing software.
Offering a Discount Code From Your Popup Will Lead to More Sales
Another benefit beyond collecting and capturing email addresses is that by offering a discount or special offer in your popup, you will get more sales as well. People are more likely to buy from you and convert if they have a discount code for free shipping or $5 off, or 10% off, or whatever you choose to offer. We can expect our conversion rate to increase because of this which will lead to more customers. It is a win-win for us. We now have a reliable and effective way to grow our mailing list, and we are also converting more customers because we are giving them a discount code. As a result of these two benefits, we can get two to three times more customers than we normally would get if we didn’t have a popup.
Summary
This is the best way to grow your email list. I hope that you received some value from this and that you are looking forward to reading my future blog posts.. I aim to provide you with better information, strategies and ideas for free than other people will try to charge you for.
Email marketing is one of, if not the most important tool in your arsenal when it comes to eCommerce marketing. You need a popup on your website that offers a discount or special offer as an incentive to get people to sign up for your mailing list .This will allow you to capture the email addresses of 8-15% of people who come to your website, instead of the usual 3-5%. This is important because it can help you double or triple your amount of sales in a very short period of time.
Email Me With Any Questions About How to Grow Your Email List
Thanks, and if you need anything, email me at matt@ultragrowthmarketing.com
-Matthew Larsen
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