Despite the proven benefits of welcome emails in building your brand and connecting with your subscribers, plenty of businesses still don’t take advantage of them. If you’re among those who have yet to implement a welcome email as your first point of contact with a new subscriber, take a look at these reasons you should add one to your email lineup.

It boosts open rates.

Most people will be more likely to open a welcome email than a standard marketing email. And if you can demonstrate superb value with that initial contact, you may see a difference in your open rates for future emails as well.

It increases deliverability.

Asking subscribers to add your email address to their address book right from the get-go can ensure better deliverability rates down the road.

It gives you a chance to show appreciation.

Whether the subscriber is a new customer, a business contact, or just someone interested in your company, they deserve a sincere thank you for signing up. And while just saying the words can go a long way toward building a relationship, you can also sweeten the deal by offering a discount or other gesture of appreciation.

It’s automatic.

When you use automatic triggers or email auto-responders to generate your welcome emails, you don’t have to worry about adding any extra steps to your email campaign. Just set up your trigger/ auto-responder to send an email upon completion of a purchase or registration.

It reinforces the opt-in.

That first email can act as a reminder to the subscriber that they’ve opted in to receive communication from you. This is a smart move when it comes to decreasing the number of subscribers who hit the spam button or opt-out when they receive your messages.

It gives you a chance to up-sell and cross-sell.

If your welcome email is responding to a purchase, you can suggest other items of interest or highlight special deals the subscriber might be interested in. You can also remind customers of items they may have added to the shopping cart without completing the purchase.

These are just a few of the benefits a welcome email can bring to your online business. Can you think of any others, please share them with below? As you start work on the design of your welcome email, you’ll find all the tools you need in your eConnect Email account. Set up automatic triggers, monitor open rates, and use our custom design templates and tools to make sure your subscribers receive compelling messages from the very first day they register.

Statistics show that roughly 7 out of 10 online shopping carts are abandoned before a purchase is made. Crazy. 7 out of 10.

It takes too much time and effort to get someone to your site, get them to shop, put items in their cart to only walk away with nothing 70% of the time.

Obviously, physical stores rarely have this problem.  Of course you can walk in and walk out with nothing if you don’t find what you are looking for at the price you are willing to pay.  However, if you grab a shopping cart and start filling it with things you need or want, you are not going to just leave the store without paying for and taking those things home, it just doesn’t happen.

Now there are a lot of people who can go beyond these simple statistics and give you reasons why ecommerce shoppers do this, we just want you to know that through email marketing there is a way to increase your abandoned cart sales.

Fickle Shoppers

Of course, there are many things you can do to convert more visitors into paying customers such as the design, price pointing, special offers, etc. But with all that said, clients are fickle and may change their mind and walk away.

So by all means, do everything in your power to provide an optimal shopping and check out experience. But regardless of why they didn’t complete the transaction – you’ve got a secret weapon that doesn’t care and it’s called email marketing.

The eConnect Email solution to making your cash register go cha-ching!

eConnect Email has a solution to this cart abandonment saga.  Our email system triggers real-time, automated email follow-ups to your potential buyers, helping to convert abandoned shopping carts into money in the bank. By delivering timely follow-up messages, cart abandonment emails can remind, gently push and motivate lost sales to come back to you. Here’s a few simple examples of how customers use cart abandonment:

• Remind customers of the products they left in their cart
• Cross-sell/up-sell complimentary products
• Offer discounts or incentives to complete the sale
• Run surveys to ask why they didn’t complete the purchase
• Trigger special messages after purchase that entice new sales

Recovering lost sales with the help of email marketing will be worth the time and effort.  I would highly encourage you to use the technology at your fingertips and statistically speaking you can recover 50% of those lost sales.  Do the math yourself and ask why you’re leaving money on the table.

To learn more about email marketing automation, and specifically cart abandonment services, connect with us. We’d love to hear about your business and e-commerce goals and how we might help.

I recently subscribed to Entertainment Weekly and naturally gave them my email address when I created my profile online. Not long after, I received an email from Entertainment Weekly that said I could register for the Advance Screening Program and see new Hollywood movies before they hit the theaters.

Unfortunately, the email was too good to be true. After reading the first paragraph it was pretty clear that this email was not recently updated as it referenced Shrek The Third, which came out in 2007 and Dreamgirls, which was released in late 2006. Rush Hour 3 which is pictured in the movie poster was also released in 2007.

It appears that this email was set up as an autoresponder but was later abandoned by Entertainment Weekly. Do they still offer advanced movie screenings to their subscribers? Do they even realize that their subscribers are still receiving these emails? Surely, if they realized that the emails were still being sent they would take the time to update them every few months with more recent movies. It’s just good advertising.

If you have autoresponders and triggers set up, think about their content. Will any of it become dated? How quickly will your autoresponders become irrelevant? How often should you update them? Do you need to set up a system to remind you to update that information frequently to keep everything in your triggers fresh?

Updating your triggers and autoresponders won’t take much time and it will keep your content from looking as dated as last summer’s top ten list.

I wish there was more we could do to get email marketers to use the tools available to them to help increase reader response. So much effort is put into making campaigns look beautiful but often the technology to help increase reader statistics are never used. So, on your next campaign, please consider the following tools to help make your emails a success.

1. Split Testing

This one is a no-brainer.  How awesome would it be to be able to test which headlines or titles would be most successful before sending a newspaper or book to print?  I guarantee if an author could do this he would because more purchases equal dollars in his pocket.  With email marking, this is easy and it’s called split testing. With split-testing, any reputable email platform will allow you stage a few options, hit send and let the system pick the winner based on the criteria you choose (opens and click-thru’s) and then delivers the remainder of your campaign to the winner. We’ve seen open rates at 20% spike to 45% and click-thru rates jump from 4% to over 10%, just by trying two different subject lines.

Benefit? Find out quickly what works and get a better response rate.

2 . List Segmenting

OK- another no brainer: Targeted emails are obviously more well received so let’s stop batching and blasting those emails to the entire mailing list and take a minute to segment that list.  By importing contacts into a single list with relevant fields of data for your market you can then search for specific criteria within that one list.  For instance if you would like to send an email to everyone on your list with a 92009 zip code you can, or even what products or services a group purchased previously and so on.

Benefit? Cleaner management of data, more targeted mailings, greater response rates.

3. Triggered Mailings/Auto-responders

Let your email marketing go to work for you…and forget about it.  It just takes a little time to set up a series of timed emails but once it’s done you can put your feet up and know that your customers are being informed or reminded of your services automatically.  Scenario: Someone visits your web site and requests a white paper or a trial of your software or perhaps they made a purchase.  Connect that information to your platform and stage mailings to “auto” deploy based on the criteria you set.

Benefit? Let technology go to work for you and keep the right (timed) communication in front of your audience.  Multiple touches and BAM!  They take action!

4. Personalization

This is email marketing 101, but do it in a creative fashion.  Think outside the box and work with the data you know about your subscribers.  Why not personalize an email with some details you know that wouldn’t be what you’d typically store in an email database.  Here’s one, “Hi Brett – we feel horrible.  Your birthday was yesterday and we were late.”  How clever.  Now, I may know intuitively you automated this somehow, but you cleverly spin it to sound human (we made an error!).  Have a purchase history on your customers stored somewhere?  Why not use that to merge the last product purchased or the last interaction with you.

Benefit? Email is all about relevancy.  You must know who your prospects and customers are, right?  Why not demonstrate that?  You’ll keep them engaged MUCH longer.

5. Social Follow & Social Sharing

At this point, if you are not working your email marketing and social networking together, you’re probably living under a rock.  You have to go where the eyeballs are and email/social is a powerful one-two punch.  If you have a Twitter feed or a Facebook fan page like us, you need icons in your emails to not only prompt your customers to follow you, but also to share the content inside your emails with their networks.  Forward to a friend is still a standard and many subscribers will use this, but the NEW forward is really the share feature.  It allows folks to connect this with their personal and professional networks quickly and easily and may garner you some new subscribers.

Benefit? Everyone knows hundreds, sometimes thousands of people you or I don’t. Why not tap that? Let them remarket on your behalf.

So there you have it.  These things are within your grasp today, and as always, the eConnect Email marketing platform lets you set these things up quite easily.  If you need help setting any of these things up in your account, as always, you can reach out to us at anytime.