With so many strategies to grow your business with, determining which ones will do the best can be frustrating and time consuming. There’s countless of variables to take into consideration. Regardless of business size, industry, or even audience, if your marketing strategy doesn’t include email marketing already, it may be time to reassess.

Email marketing has become part of a dominant force in everyday life. It’s not shocking that man businesses have migrated in into their ongoing strategies. Back in 2010, a social media executive said email was dead. In 2016, it is very much alive.

Email Marketing is Alive and Well
According to data collected by Custora E-Commerce Pulse, a free dashboard for US eCommerce statistics, email marketing became the primary channel on Black Friday 2015 and dominated online sales that day, driving more than 25% of all orders. The decline of email marketing in conjunction with the rise of social media is nothing more than a memory.

When customers are asked to provide a phone number or email address, the majority of people will share their email. The rise of smartphones allows the consumers to carry their email in their pockets, purses, or briefcases! Email is everywhere and consumers can’t seem o live without it.

Multi-disciplined Alternative
Implementing email marketing is an easy decision. Did you know that email marketing can pave a way for your businesses’ communication with existing and potential customers, lead generation, customer acquisition and customer retention for businesses of all sizes? Why wouldn’t you want to email market! Email marketing has shown great results from small mom-and-pop shops to large international retailers.

Business-to-business retailers and business-to-consumer retailers have the same goal in mind, making money. Although, they typically have different ways of using email marketing. Business-to-businesses email communications that generally focus on sales and promotions. On the other hand, business-to-consumers employ email to build and engage community in addition to occasional sales-oriented promotions.

With contrasting strategies, its important to find your audience and spend time and money capturing them. As an eCommerce retailer, you’ve more than likely developed a database of potential customers. These are the consumers that have subscribed to your newsletters by proving their email addresses. Congrats, you’ve just bypassed the finding-your-customers phase! The longer your business is in up and running, the more likely you are to continue growing this database. And the larger the database, the wider a new you can cast!

Why Email Marketing Is Great
Email marketing is one of the few marketing strategies it takes minimal skill, training, or knowledge.There are a variety of email marketing platforms you can use that makes it extremely simple to develop and automate innovative email campaigns. There are many platforms you can select a pre-designed template, drop in your text, and upload your database of email addresses, and schedule when they’re sent! These four easy steps can increase the exposure of your brand and will make your business grow – without breaking the bank!

Take it a step further and complement alternative strategies such as social media activities. With these two strategies at work, your business will be able to simultaneously from their community of followers; identify methods to categorize or segment their community; more effectively communicate with their audience; increase their brand presence; AND build brand loyalty!

Put Email to Work for You
Email is right for eCommerce businesses. The audience is already there so the potential of email marketing is huge. But don’t start downloading your list of contacts and crafting your first email quite yet. Consider these 5 points:
-Include opt-in languages where email addresses are collected and opt-out language in all email deliveries.
-Avoid making a band name for you and your business. Avoid Spam!! Before creating the content for your emails, consider the emails you receive, open, and actually read vs the emails you immediately delete.
-Remember to add value- don’t send an email for the sake of sending an email. Add something that will motivate the recipient to complete an action.
-Segment you email lists to ensure that recipients receive relevant communications. For example, don’t send an email highlighting the current sale on heels to a group of men.
-Most importantly: Respect you recipients’ time.

Email Marketing and Volusion
If you have a Volusion store, you’ve got some options once you’re ready to launch your first email marketing campaign. Did you know there’s a built-in newsletter subscription and delivery functionality in your Volusion platform? Check it out and determine if it’s exactly what you need to reach your goals.

Alternatively, Constant Contact and MailChimp are Volusion Email Marketing partners and are both great options to take your email campaign to the next level. They’re very similar but each solution has its own pricing model and benefits so check them all out before deciding which one will help your reach your goals. One offers a free plan and the other offers a free trial period. Use them to your advantage and test drive them before making an executive decision on it. You never know, you may end up liking one more than the other!

Will you integrate email marketing in your business this year? The Volusion Knowledge Base is a great resource to help you get started. Go try it out now and begin growing your business via email!

Written by Becky

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