Although social media’s immediacy and popularity suggest it has the potential to be a great marketing channel, research noted by Forbes and elsewhere keeps finding email marketing an effective way to find and maintain a customer base.
Getting ecommerce pros connected with better marketing is the mission of firms like Soundest, a firm based in the UK and Lithuania that offers small- to medium-sized etailers focused email marketing services. The firm’s app is currently available to stores on the Tictail platform, with support for Shopify, BigCommerce and others in the works.
Soundest CEO Rytis Lauris provided some insights for EcommerceBytes in an interview, appearing here. Business to Business sellers take note – email marketing may be something presently underutilized:
EcommerceBytes: What common practices are you seeing from email marketers currently enjoying the best open rates on their campaigns?
Rytis Lauris: The key factor for better open rates is quality of your database. If subscribers really trust your brand they are more likely to open your promotional emails.
Second – it is long term quality of your newsletters. Subscribers are willing to open if they are sure that there will be value for them.
Sender’s recognition and subject lines are important as well. I would propose not to experiment with “from” field – subscribers have to identify your brand in a blink. The subject line is important as well, but being honest, there are no common golden rules – each marketer has to experiment and to find what is the best for his clients.
Segmentation and personalization are those practices which enable advanced marketers to reach best results.
EcommerceBytes: Which business segment do you believe could benefit greater from email marketing than they currently do?
Rytis Lauris: Email marketing traditionally used to dominate B2C market. As more and more B2B retailers move online and, according to a Forrester study, it will be a trend for upcoming years; the impact of email marketing for this segment will grow rapidly as well.
EcommerceBytes: When do you see mobile-friendly practices like time-based and location-based messages, which would vary based on what the message detects depending on the individual user, becoming truly fundamental for email marketers?
Rytis Lauris: Here we have a huge difference between small and large players. Large ecommerce sites already have deep personalization and new features like time-based and location based email will lift personalization to a new level. It will be the hottest trend for large players in 2014.
Small and medium e-shops have completely different behavior – they do bulk sending mostly. Any kind of segmentation or personalization is a rare practice. Good news for them that there are already some tools for small and medium ecommerce sites which enables to do smarter marketing with ease and less effort. Soundest is a great example of the solutions which makes email marketing easier to do and better to perform.
