Email marketing for ethical, eco-conscious e-commerce lifestyle businesses – part one: the why

Email marketing for ethical, eco-conscious e-commerce lifestyle businesses – part one: the why

Part One | What you need to know about email marketing for your e-commerce business

If you want to encourage repeat customers then email marketing is going to be one of your best strategies! Not only that sometimes people who aren’t YET ready to buy from you will subscribe so they can stay informed/reminded, and frankly this is better for you than hoping they will follow you on social media where they may or may not see your content.

E-mail Marketing has consistently been recommended as part of a marketing strategy for business

I’ve been creating for newsletters or email marketing as part of my work since 2010 whilst working at Jemma Kidd Make Up – I honestly can’t remember if I did the coding for them or not, but I certainly have been doing that a long time too. I used to code them in html as tables, which was as you can imagine quite restrictive sometimes.

Now for the most part I think businesses have moved on to using drag and drop email building tools (which have their own restrictions but probably in a good way!). This makes creating an email newsletter relatively simple particularly if you have a solid template in place. And for most businesses email marketing really should be a part of your marketing strategy.

Sending out a regular email with curated products as well as sale or new collection/range announcements will boost your chances of getting sales because someone might just see something they like, want or need. It’s also when done right quite an ethical way to do marketing as it’s so permission based and

This post will cover the why, the what and the how of email marketing for your e-commerce business. And I’ll cover some simple ideas for emailing your list.

FAQ

If you’ve been wondering any of the following, then read on:

  • How to add a sign-up form to your website?
  • Does your lead magnet need to be a discount?
  • How often should you email your newsletter list?
  • What’s the open rate for e-commerce newsletter?

 

Why you need to have email marketing as part of your marketing strategy

What if you could continuously get sales without having to be on social media all the time? How would that feel and how beneficial would it be for your business.

Your brand fans and ideal customers want to hear from your business. They want to see what’s new and they want to hear any offers. And possibly one of the best ways you have to reach them is to send an email.

The good thing about email marketing is that you own your email list, in comparison with social media your account could be blocked or removed at any point, your reach could be really low etc. Your email will land in your subscribers inboxes and of course they can choose not to open it, or maybe it will get filtered to the Promotions tab but it’s still one of the most direct ways to reach people.

If you haven’t already, then it’s time to start building your email list.

Sign up form strategy

Depending on your email marketing software they will each have different processes for creating forms ready for use on your website.

Usually it’s pretty simple and you can customise the fonts and colours, then you need to get the code snippets that they provide one will be a script which will need to be added into your website (again this depends on your website!) and the other is the html code which can go into the relevant page section.

Things to consider for your form:

  • A strong call to action
  • Make it clear that they are subscribing
  • A way to draw attention to it – eg. A different colour or an outline potentially
  • A lead magnet or reason why they should subscribe – will they be getting early sale access, discount codes, behind the scenes – what are your customers interested in and can you offer that?

Where can you put your sign up forms:

  • Footer – either in or above is commonly seen
  • Pop-up – controversial but they can of course work (if you do it be mindful of best practices like ensuring it can easily be closed on desktop and mobile, don’t have an immediate pop-up before people have even seen your site)
  • Landing page – you could create a specific landing page for sign ups that can be linked to from social media or other website pages
  • Pre-sale page – if you are launching something then collect those interested potential customers email addresses
  • At checkout – it is best if you can ask people if they want to opt-in to your newsletter at this stage

Lead magnets or subscriber gifts/incentives

As mentioned earlier it can be helpful to incentivise people to hand over their email address in some way but this doesn’t have to be a discount code.

A common way to do this for e-commerce brands is to offer a discount code which could be a great move because if someone has a discount code they are more likely to then purchase rather than the alternatives below. However you don’t have to offer a discount if you don’t want to or for whatever reason your brand does not do discounts!

  • Could look like a guide of some form such as to styling artwork in your home, Seasonal fashion style guides
  • Quiz: what skincare do you need, what’s your winter style, how eco are you? Etc

Should you do a welcome sequence?

This is one of those questions that entirely depends on your brand and business.

So if you are a maker then yes I think you would benefit from having a sequence of emails following the subscribe that introduce who you are, what you do and why, values, behind the scenes etc. Some brands might do a few emails introducing the brand and ethics or mission. And others wouldn’t need to at all, I’d say especially if it’s a well established brand they don’t tend to do this.

Consent Marketing

DOUBLE OPT-IN, GDPR, CAN-SPAM

(caveat that I am not a legal expert!)

I encourage you to look into the legislation that will apply to your business with regards to email marketing. However the main point for everyone is get permission to add people to you list, let them tell you that they want you to email them, be clear about what they are signing up for and ensure unsubscribe links are in your email (most email marketing platforms will add this in as default / probably wouldn’t let you remove it either) and easy for people to unscubscribe.

So when you create your form it’s good practice to say something akin to you will receive news and promotional emails for example. You can say it will be weekly, monthly etc if you know that it is going to be a consistent time that you send it.