Are you ready to take your email marketing for eCommerce to the next level? 🔝

Email campaigns have the power to engage your audience, showcase your products, and drive traffic to your online store. With effective segmentation and automation, you can deliver personalized experiences that boost customer loyalty and revenue. It's time to harness the true potential of email marketing in eCommerce! 💡

🗣️: What's your ultimate funnel flow for email marketing for someone who's a course creator?

💬 Michal: I believe that every marketer and course creator needs to start by offering value to their audience before they can ever think about converting them.

That’s why my ultimate funnel would start with free content materials that’ll help you establish yourself as a thought leader and an expert in your field. These could be the first two lessons of your course, downloadable materials complementing the course, or a live webinar with a free demonstration. The last one may work well, especially if you sell live courses.

Once someone’s entered your list, you should continue to deliver value and overcome your audiences’ hesitations one message at a time. Put your case studies, testimonials, and use cases to use. The key thing here should be that your lead nurturing cycle should now already guide people to your paid offer.

To increase the sense of urgency, consider adding a one-time-only time-bound offer within the first 24 hours of people joining your lead nurturing flow. When doing so, be sure to use unique promo codes so that people don’t share your discount with others, and you can properly track people who’ve converted.

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🗣️: In the B2B space, we deal with various personas, from end users to decision-makers. What are the latest practices for segmentation that you have seen successfully applied, ensuring that our messaging is personalized and resonates with these varied personas?

💬 Michal: A couple of things are useful if you’re dealing with multiple personas. The first one is tracking how people interact with your website – which pages they’re visiting, what content they’re reading – and feeding that into your CRM. The second one is to use data enrichment to form an even better profile of those who engage with your brand.

Once these two things are covered, you need to analyze your website’s content. Try to understand which persona would use which information and create your segments around them.

Naturally, this approach will never be ideal. Sometimes the end-user will download relevant materials and share them with their internal sponsor to justify the acquisition of a product. Sometimes the end-user is the decision-maker and will check out everything. And other times, people will already come with a made-up mind due to recommendations from external parties, like consultants or other entrepreneurs.

The key thing here is listening to the conversations with your prospects and customers. And where automatic qualification is possible, use it, but know that it’s not going to be ideal as we’re all different as individuals.

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🗣️: What are some effective techniques for crafting compelling subject lines that encourage recipients to open emails?

💬 Michal: There are a number of things you can try to motivate people to open your emails more often.  My preferred approach is to keep your subject lines short, intriguing, and relevant. If you know your target audience well, you should be able to identify topics they’re interested in, stories they want to read, or questions they need answering. Use that as a base for your subject line, and make an effort to test your subject lines to learn what approach works for your audience best.

We recently published an article that tackles this exact issue, i.e., how to craft compelling subject lines, but I’d also like to highlight that it’s not always the email opens you should optimize for. Due to Apple’s MPP changes, it has become a rather unreliable metric and my best recommendation is to optimize for clicks, conversions, or responses.

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🗣️: What are some common pitfalls to avoid when executing an email marketing strategy?

💬 Michal: Here are a few I think are critical:

1. Not caring about people’s consent and your data hygiene. Bad data will make it difficult for you to make good business decisions. And having angry people who never wanted to be on your list just means legal and deliverability trouble.
2. Not taking time to automate your communication or develop a sending schedule. You may think you’ll remember to send your emails regularly, but often other projects will take away our attention. If you develop a good sending schedule that includes automated scenarios, you risk ghosting people genuinely interested in your brand.
3. Thinking only about what you have to say. Emails should be two-way communication. Use surveys, watch your metrics, and always think about what your audience needs or wants to hear about and not just about what you want to tell them.

🗣️: What are some effective approaches to re-engaging subscribers who have become inactive?

💬 Michal: Want to learn how to engage your subscribers effectively? Pay attention to how publishers do it. Their whole business relies on the size and engagement of their email lists, so they’re often the ones who’ve figured it out best.

So, how do they do it? In multiple ways, but the main concept is this – follow up. You’ll want to follow up with your audience and not just once. Start your re-engagement campaigns as soon as you’ve seen the first signals of people becoming inactive. Don’t wait till day 180 or 360 to check their engagement.

Share your best content with them, ask them to participate in a survey, share your testimonials, remind them why they’ve opted in the first place, tell a joke, or try any other relevant angle to your audience. Automate this process, and be mindful that a single email won’t do the trick. Recipients are busy people, and their inboxes are the same.

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🗣️: How can you reduce the number of subscribers who unsubscribe from your email communications?

💬 Michal: Let me just say that the fact that people unsubscribe from your emails isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Yes, it’s a missed sales opportunity. But at the same time, it’s proof that your emails are being delivered well. And it’s better than the two alternatives – people staying on your list, ignoring your communication, or marking your emails as spam. These two actions would have a negative impact on your deliverability while unsubscribing doesn’t.

That said, I suggest that you follow the advice I shared above regarding re-engagement campaigns. Make sure to keep in touch and respond to your audiences’ needs as early as possible.

At the same time, try to answer yourself – Is there a way to make my email subscription more of a community? Use surveys to learn more about your audience and share the results with them. Feature their emails, questions, and comments on social media. Show them that they’re being heard and that they’re part of something bigger.

Also, look at what the best content creators do. They entertain, educate, and engage their audience. Whether you’re a B2C or B2B brand, there are ways for us marketers to replicate what best content creators do to become their ‘favorite corner of the Internet.’ We just have to be receptive and open to feedback from the audience.

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🗣️: B2B emails often compete with many other professional communications in an individual's inbox. How are successful brands managing to stand out and improve open rates, particularly in a crowded, competitive B2B environment?

💬 Michal: B2C brands often resolve to sending more communication, more frequently hoping that they’ll always at the top of their recipients minds and inboxes.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), B2B brands can’t do that. So what they need to do instead is to ensure their every email’s worth their recipients’ time and attention.

Don’t try to optimize for message opens, because that may lead you to using click-baity tactics that offer no value to your audience. Focus on metrics like click-throughs or click-to-open rate, which are more accurate and provide a better indication if your message was valuable.

Naturally, there are foundational things you can do. 

Like establishing a consistent From name that people immediately recognize and trust. Authenticating your domain with BIMI and adding your company logo to your emails. Creating a consistent subject line structure that your recipients will always recognize. Sending your emails at a more-suiting time, when your B2B recipients are most active. And keeping your email list hygienic, regularly removing contacts that are bouncing or becoming inactive.

But beyond that, it’s the content of your emails that will have the biggest impact on your metrics.

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🗣️: What are some innovative ideas for creating engaging and valuable content in email newsletters?

💬 Michal: Some tried-and-tested tactics include embedding videos into your emails, adding personalized images created with tools like Niftyimages, and using images that showcase social proof.

But one of the trends I’m foreseeing will pick up more in the future are gamified emails that truly engage your audience. Think about emails were you can fill out a quiz, play a game, or check out your favorite products in various variants. The technology is there, but it’s not yet fully supported across all email service and mailbox providers.

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🗣️: What emerging trends are shaping the future of email marketing, and how can businesses adapt to stay ahead?

💬 Michal: Definitely using generative AI is the hottest trend right now. Email service providers, including GetResponse, have started adding generative AI solutions into their platforms simplifying the process of creating and sending personalized emails at scale.

Although they’re still at an early stage, these solutions can help you speed the process of developing your email campaigns. But soon enough, I’m foreseeing that they’ll also be able to help you identify the most promising customer segments and help you target them with truly personalized messages. And I’m not just talking about AI generated recommendations, which are already available. I’m talking about truly personalized messages based on all the information you’ll be able to gather and feed into your CRM or CDP platforms.

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🗣️: As a B2B business, we understand the importance of account-based marketing (ABM). Are there any email marketing tactics DTC brands use that could be applied to ABM, such as tailored content or specific follow-up strategies?

💬 Michal: Tailored content is the most important one, for sure. Personalized copy, offer, but also videos inside your emails can make your communication more relevant and engaging for your audience. There are already AI solutions emerging that can help you create personalized videos automatically and at scale.

Another thing to consider is the shift toward multichannel or even omnichannel approach. Consider email as only one element of the puzzle and try to reach your audience via other means as well. Think of using emails along with live chats, chat bots, web push notifications, SMS, or phone calls.

Just like D2C brands would remarket their audience and send triggered communication when a visitor leaves their site, B2B brands should also look out for ways to use their first-party data to communicate with their audience more timely and effectively.