Email marketing is most certainly not dead, in fact, one UK study found that the return on investment (ROI) for email marketing can be as high as £32.28 for every £1 spent, and that’s since climbed. With the right support and email management, it’s not hard to see how this can be the case. Look at customer segmentation, simply by personalizing your emails and carefully organizing your audience, you increase the likelihood of conversion dramatically.

To help explain the importance of email marketing, Marsello has partnered with leading professionals from the retail world, helping give a full persepctive of the potential that email marketing brings.

The following contributors are leaders in eCommerce, POS, community management, and of course, marketing. Read on to learn how Email Marketing plays an important role in the success of their roles and businesses.

Brady Thomas – CEO, Marsello

How are highly targeted emails the key to email marketing success and how does that tie into automation and segmentation?

Perfecting your email marketing is vital. Tools like customer segmentation, automation, accurate reporting, and links to your other marketing (like loyalty programs) is the perfect way to master email marketing early. Marsello gives retailers the power to easily create email campaigns that target specific customer groups based on their shopping history.

How often do you receive an email and write it off as spam because it doesn’t cater to you as a customer? Gone are the days of assuming our customers are all one and the same. It’s no longer enough to write an email and send it to your entire customer list. Instead, make the most of reporting and customer segments created from shopping histories. This gives you the knowledge you need to perfect your email content. From there, you can start target those emails to exactly the customers you wrote them for by using specific customer groups.

If you shop frequently at a store, but you’re not really into any of their latest products so don’t shop with them for a month or two, what would be the best way to reel you back in? Perhaps all it takes is a sale or a discount code. Maybe it’s a reminder of why you love the store with clever product recommendations. Now those win-back emails are going to be far more effective with the intended audience than they would be with customers who shop with your best customers. Although they do love your products, they don’t need to be ‘won-back’ so much as kept up to date. Targeted emails show that you understand your customers and their needs, and that you respect and appreciate them.

Francesca Nicasio – Content Strategist and Retail Expert, Vend

How can retailers use email marketing to drive brick-and-mortar in-store traffic.

The key to winning in email marketing lies in two things: relevance and value. Retailers need to continuously come up with content and offerings that would appeal to specific subscribers. This means properly segmenting your customers and crafting campaigns for different groups. Let’s say you’re launching a new line of baby products in-store. If you’re using email to promote it, you need to properly target your campaign so it reaches the right audience (i.e., parents).

It's also important for retailers to actively encourage subscribers to visit their stores. There are several ways to do this. One idea is to hold events. Total Wine & More, for instance, holds wine classes and workshops at its stores and promotes them via email. What's great about the effort is that Total Wine segments their subscribers according to location, so recipients only get information about events that are happening near them.

You could also promote special in-store services. For example, when Target launched its curbside pickup service, they actively promoted it via email to encourage people to drive up their stores.

John Larsen – Content Writer and Community Lead, Storetasker

How can social media marketing support stores and drive sales and when tied to email marketing?

At Storetasker, we moderate the Shopify Entrepreneurs Facebook group which will soon reach 100,000 members. Our primary goals with it are to present important news within the retail community, provide a place for people to ask meaningful questions, and to help support all the amazing stores out there. On the Facebook group and via emails that we send, we seek to highlight insights and answers that offer important information to store owners through entertaining content.

Through our own experiences with email marketing and social media, we have witnessed the positive impact they can have on a brand. That is why at Storetasker, we focus on the importance of developing a strong social media presence and growing your email subscription list in what we write, what we post, as well as in our conversations with retailers. Remember, the shoppers who have liked and followed your brand or have joined your email list are already fans of your store, so it is easier to convince them to return often.

Alexandra Sheehan – B2B content strategist and copywriter specializing in retail and ecommerce

How can retailers use email marketing to maximize their co-marketing efforts with complimentary stores and influencer marketing?

Collaborations are a key way to get your brand in front of new audiences, and integrating email into these co-marketing campaigns can have lasting advantages. Find a brand which offers complementary products and services or an influencer who plays in your niche. Consumers are more likely to take the recommendation of a brand or person they trust.

A few years ago, I worked on a campaign with The Budget Savvy Bride to promote a new online store — we grew the email list by nearly 50% through this collaboration. We were then able to engage with these users long after the campaign was over. Email is one of the most intimate ways to interact with your audience online, and if you can leverage someone else's list, you'll reach new, targeted consumers.

Caris – Founder, Fashionpreneurs Lounge

How can retailers use email marketing to build community and loyalty?

We started our community via our email list before moving it to any platform. It was an easy way to create the "Know, Like and Trust" factor with potential customers who didn't know anything about us but got to know us via email.

It was important for us to create value before anything else and also get people to come out to our events and email marketing was an easy and affordable way to get connected with our audience. Even as a growing Community, we still rely heavily on email marketing to continue to encourage engagement, share value and nurture our community.

At the end of the day, if social media goes away; it's important for us to still have a way to interact and engage with our community.

Final words

It's easy to think that email marketing is being surpased by other tools such as social media and personal messaging services, but at the end of the day, nothing quite gets the message through as well as a good old fashioned email.

Whether your simply offering a deal, making an announcement, or building community, email marketing is a core skill that you'll need to master. If you're unsure where to start, Marsello's automated email campaigns are a powerful way to see results with emails that won't take you hours to design. They're already done for you, and any adjustments are easy with the drag-and-drop email builder.

Learn more about customer segmentation and Marsello's features, and learn how Marsello can take the stress out of tackling your email marketing.