A newsletter or e-zine is a great tool for an e-commerce business. Studies have shown that the main reason customers will stop buying from you is due to a lack of communication. In order to keep the customers you currently have, you need to strengthen your relationship with them using a newsletter program as your form of communication. Once you have a continuous relationship with your customers, it becomes much easier to continue selling to them again and again.
There are many elements you need to include and a variety of factors to keep in mind when creating your own newsletter program. Here is a list of some key features a good e-commerce website newsletter should have:
- Include announcement of brand new products
- Provide customers with special promotions or discounts
- Make sure the layout of your newsletter matches that of your site, including header and tabs
- Keep it concise, the less content the better
- Have consistent delivery of your newsletter, avoid sending out too many or too little
- Give important information that coincides with your products such as consumer reports or recent news
- Add numerous calls to action such as banners, text links and buttons that will send the subscriber directly to specific pages on your website
- Add an 'Unsubscribe' link in the footer area of every newsletter and make sure a form is added on the unsubscribe page asking for feedback
There are several advantages for having a website newsletter to supplement your e-commerce store. The main purpose of having a newsletter program is to develop customer loyalty and achieve repeat business. Recent studies show that existing customers on average spend 33% more than new customers and those that participate in customer loyalty programs generally will spend 4x as much. Your website newsletter does a great job of constantly reminding people of your brand and getting new products in front of them. Unless you have a newsletter, people tend to forget about your online store almost immediately after they make a purchase. Don't count on your customers to actively return to your site on an ongoing basis to learn about new product offerings or promotions. This is the reason why it's so important to have a newsletter program, it is one of the best communication tools that an ecommerce business can have. Your subscriber list contains the most targeted market available. They have bought from you once, they know and trust your business, they clearly have an interest in your products and they are more likely to buy from you over a new customer. Your subscribers should also appreciate the fact that they are among the first people to be informed about new products, promotions or discounts.
A good ecommerce solution should be able to offer basic features for setting up a website newsletter program for your online store. Here are some of the most important things to look for:
- Have a newsletter program built into your store admin which lets you create and send newsletters directly from your site interface
- Gather names, emails and other information that you specify
- Have the ability to doublecheck whether or not emails are valid
- Be able to customize the design of your newsletter
- Allow subscribers to unsubscribe at any time
- Have a special newsletter sign up feature built into the checkout area
Besides having your website newsletter opt-in box front and center on your homepage and included in the checkout, there are many other ways to build your subscriber list. It's important for visitors to be able to see your newsletter sign up information on every page that they land on. This can be done by displaying either an opt-in box, banner, image link or text link on the header, footer or sidebar of your ecommerce site. You can also include a 'Tell a Friend' page or have that feature show up after checkout to collect names and emails of your current customers' friends. Other ways to build your website newsletter program mailing list include creating contests where contestants have to enter their emails and the winner receives a prize from your ecommerce website. This is a marketing technique used by a lot of well known online retailers and it really does help grow your list quickly. You can market your contest on blogs, forums and other social media websites.
Choosing the right e-commerce solution with a built-in newsletter program is crucial for opening up channels of communication with your existing customers. You must have a solid newsletter feature to simplify the process of creating and sending it out to your email list.
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