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At What Point Does Your Ecommerce Store Need an Email Newsletter?

Email newsletters are a great way to drum up enthusiasm about your brand and alert customers of hot deals, limited sales and new product launches. Despite impractical predictions about the death of email, email marketing campaigns are still one of the best ways to connect with shoppers.

Ecommerce Store Need an Email Newsletter

In fact, every dollar you sink into email marketing has an average return of $38 with an open rate of 30 to 50 percent! That some serious ROI. In comparison, social media marketing (while very popular) has an engagement rate between 1 and 5 percent.

Still, there are questions regarding the best time to launch an email marketing campaign. Do you start a mailer right when you launch your enterprise e-commerce site? Do you wait until you have thousands of customers and a high rate of regular traffic? Or do you hold off until your brand is actually a brand, regardless of your customer count?

Below we will discuss a few approaches to e-commerce newsletters and the different steps to take for implementation.

All Up in Your Inbox

From a consumer’s point of view, email newsletters are a wonderful thing because they are optional. Customers would rather have a gentle reminder about upcoming sales appear in their inbox than intrusive and obnoxious advertisements littering every webpage they visit.

For this reason, some enterprise e-commerce stores, especially located in Yiwu launch marketing campaigns right at the get go; which is fine but it might not be practical for everyone. If you own an e-commerce site, you might want to think about the amount of time you have available to stock your store, manage payments, set up a delivery system and write a weekly newsletter… Not to mention that if you are juggling a full or part-time job and family, this can be a little overwhelming. Of course, there are people who do so successfully. So, follow your gut.

However, we wouldn’t recommend starting an email newsletter before establishing a brand identity. A common refrain in the world of marketing is that you aren’t necessarily trying to sell a product, but rather an idea or identity that the product represents. For example, if you sell shoes you’re just another shoe store; but if you sell ‘designer kicks for the nouveau-chic fashionista,’ well, now you’ve got personality.

It’s not uncommon to change the name, logos or overall design of your site via an enterprise e-commerce platform, like Shopify, during your first few months. After all, it does take a little tinkering to get just the right fit. But once you’ve settled on a site design, personality and style, you should probably launch your mailer to get subscribers excited about your brand.

Should you wait until you have thousands of active shoppers before launching your newsletter? One of the benefits of mailers it that it turns your one-off buyers into return customers. The other perk is that mailers help you to build an audience, so it’s not really necessary to wait until you have an audience.

You may also want to supplement your newsletter with links to your social media pages. While mailers are perfect for marketing, they are only a half of a conversation which is why successful brands are so active on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. These platforms provide spaces for consumers to talk back to brands, ask questions and spread the love to their friends and family.

Finally, it is important to develop a reasonable cadence for your email messages. Consider sending out weekly, biweekly or monthly updates on deals, sales and product launches. Try to steer clear of daily mailers, as shoppers usually see these as excessive spam.

Now that you have the knowhow, go ahead and take your first steps into email marketing. We wish you the best of luck engaging your audience and growing your business!

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