12 ms·

Email marketing for e-commerce

189 points by charlieirish 9y ago

aogl 9y ago
"Email marketing lists naturally degrade by about 22.5% every year". I would have thought that it would have been much higher than this!
AndrewKemendo 9y ago
Honestly the most surprising thing to me was the study that is cited out of the gate: According to our latest research, however, conventional wisdom is wrong. A vast majority of Americans (91%) do in fact want to receive promo emails. While 86% would like to receive promo emails at least monthly, 15% would like to receive promotional emails every day. Is my personal experience of not wanting any email promotions just way off here? [1] https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/chart/how-customers-want-promo-emails https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/chart/how-customers-...
- byproxy 9y ago
  At this point I consider my general-purpose email address to be an opt-in advertising receptacle. I don't mind receiving marketing, especially when the coupons are good. However, getting the marketing when I want it for what I want at a particular point in time is tricky. Filtering through the emails becomes tedious, too, as I opt-in to more email lists.
- vorpalhex 9y ago
  I'm in the same boat as you. I use a unique email alias for every single sign-up, so I know who sells my email address or sends me marketing cruft accidentally. I'm very aggressive in reporting bad actors to their mail provider if they don't honor or don't have unsubscribe links. But I think I'm the exception, not the rule, in this case.
  - freeflight 9y ago
    Not using aliases I've become very skeptical of unsubscribe links in general, even if they are in emails of "reputable" and established brands, as scammers are now spoofing regular marketing emails like that in the same way they've been doing with PayPal/Battle.net/Banks for years. Tbh often it does not feel like it's worth the effort, due to the sheer amount of spam you end up getting the older an email address gets, it feels like trying to shovel all the water out of the ocean with a spoon. Are there any good resources out there as to where and how to report such actors? Does this actually help/change anything? I can't imagine there being much of a shortage of shady mail providers.
    - vorpalhex 9y ago
      The vast, vast majority of spam that I get is from otherwise perfectly reasonable companies who don't understand the law. To that end, my steps are: 1. Try their unsubscribe, give them a few days for it to "take effect" (which is nonsense, but, so it goes) 2. Send a polite, but direct email to `postmaster@`, and usually cc `webmaster@` - it usually goes to somebody. 3. If none of the above works, pull the full email headers and `dig` around some to find their MX provider, and file a claim with `abuse@` on the provider. That being said, again usually it's an ignorance problem. I have a friend who helps run a company that does escape rooms, and I had only provided my email on a release form. However a few months later, I started getting marketing spam from them to that email - oops. A lot of small companies don't understand the regs around marketing emails and treat them the same as all other emails.
- theothertom 9y ago
  I'd expect it depends on the source - a retailer like Amazon or a local supermarket could well send a daily offer that's interesting/useful. A more niche store might struggle to send something people want to receive even monthly.
- snowwrestler 9y ago
  It's not way off for you, obviously, and based on my experience in email marketing threads, not way off for a lot of the HN crowd. But the HN crowd is a pretty interesting self-selected group of people. "You're not the target audience," as a fellow website builder used to say. And I think it's true that people who build digital products themselves might not have the same mindset about digital communications as the general public. And email is funny in my experience... people seem to forget the emails they like to get, and preferentially remember the ones they're annoyed by. So just out of curiosity I'd ask: do you really receive NO promo emails at all? Absolutely zero? No sales notices from Newegg or other gear sellers? Nothing from any conference you liked or are planning to attend? No airfare sales notices? No "new release" notices for software you like and use? Nothing you've intentionally opted into? I'll give an example of a good email promo experience--I was looking to fly to New Zealand, but couldn't find a good price. A friend forwarded an sale email from Air Tahiti that had a price about half what I'd seen so far. I bought immediately. That was a classic good promo email experience--a truly good deal, available to me before it sold out.
  - AndrewKemendo 9y ago
    No, I want every email I get to be from someone I know. If it's not then hopefully it's from someone I want to get to know. The only deviations to that are 2FA or receipt emails.
tabeth 9y ago
Re: "Email marketing" I wish it was opt-in as opposed to opt-out. The amount of email spam and physical spam received is absolutely ridiculous. I shudder to wonder how much electricity is wasted sending unwanted mail and delivering unwanted emails. Sounds like it'd be a win for everyone based on this guide. Those who want it would opt in, and the company could focus their campaigns for those who want it more. Meanwhile those who don't can be left alone.
- zaarn 9y ago
  It's usually opt-in (if it isn't, a lot of jurisdictions allow you to sue or do other nasty things) but it's ticked by default and somewhat hidden above and below the ToS/EULA.
  - tabeth 9y ago
    > It's usually opt-in > it's ticked by default and somewhat hidden above and below the ToS/EULA. Well, yeah. The point is that it isn't really opt-in.
  - tzahola 9y ago
    So without the extra effort of finding and unchecking the hidden checkbox, you'll receive their spam. Sounds like opt-out to me.
  - Nadya 9y ago
    Checked-by-default means, by definition, it is opt-out as you are opted-in by default. It just has to be possible to opt-out and, if opted-in, unsubscribe at a later date (usually a small, hard to notice link in the legalese of the spam email).
    - zaarn 9y ago
      I think it was a bit of a miscommunication, but yes, it's opt-out then.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    Ah, and not only is it opt-out, you 'opt-in' to at least 5 different email lists all of which you then have to unsubscribe from individually (and if you are lucky the unsubscribe link is present in the mail, and if you are even more lucky it actually works rather than being just another signal to the spammer - sorry, company - that the email address is indeed legit. And that's before we get into selling your email address to 'partners' who will then really go to town to try to monetize the address.
philfrasty 9y ago
Read the domain + title, thought Stripe is launching Mailchimp competitor (...10/10 would sign up...)
- AznHisoka 9y ago
  Stripe should do that too. They could take over a few industries if they wanted to. Like email marketing.
- BMFX 9y ago
  Yeah.... Mailchimp isn't the best play for e-commerce email marketing for sure. There are better alternatives but I would argue there's a ton of room for improvements as an e-commerce developer...
chadash 9y ago
> 91% of customers want to hear from the companies they do business with. It’s unavoidable in the modern e-commerce marketing world. The quote is referring to email marketing. This seems pretty misleading. I can believe that 91% of people want to hear from some companies. But I'd bet that most people are not interested in hearing from most of the companies they do business with. There's a simple solution to this. It's called opt-in, and it's not uncommon (although I wish it were ubiquitous). If I check a box (that is by default unchecked) saying I want marketing and promotional emails, by all means send them my way. But I abhor being automatically signed up for emails just by nature of the fact that I made an online purchase.
- ams6110 9y ago
  Yeah, that's how I feel too. When I get an email such as: > Hey {{ first_name }}, "Hey" isn't a salutation I want as a customer. We aren't friends. > We miss you. Bullshit. This is an auto-generated email. Computers don't "miss" people. > It's been a while since we've seen you. We know you get busy ... Yes, and now you're interrupting my busy day > ... but we'd love to see you again soon. In fact, come back and visit us in the next 5 days and take 15% off your order. If you did a good job with my last purchase, I'll come back when I need something. 50/50 chance at this point that I hit the spam flag.
  - AznHisoka 9y ago
    "I'm sorry for interrupting your day..." No you're not. You wouldn't have interrupted me if you were sorry!
    - Ntrails 9y ago
      That shit winds me up so much. But then broadly speaking so does every other auto-bot spam emial
    - taf2 9y ago
      It’s just like “sorry are you busy, I just have a quick question”
byproxy 9y ago
I know this isn't specific to this particular domain, but the thought of psychology being used in a way to essentially herd cattle to consume leaves me feeling a bit cold.
dandare 9y ago
As an aspiring SaaS founder, I was surprised how hard email marketing (EM) is. My questions so far: 1/ ROI - how much of a difference can good EM make as opposed to bad EM or no EM? Should I not rather focus on improving my product? 2/ What is the low hanging fruit? 3/ What are some of the tools I should be using? If my payment management is in Strip, how do I integrate it with the CRM? [answer: https://stripe.com/works-with/categories/crm https://stripe.com/works-with/categories/crm]
- Dwolb 9y ago
  You should focus on customer acquisition, nurture, retention, and upsell. Email marketing is just one tool that's used in a specific way depending on your industry, product, and customer base. Always focus on improving the product, but don't do this in a vacuum. You need to ask customers and potential customers and customers of competitors about their problems.
- pryelluw 9y ago
  Think of EM as a salesperson. A good one makes a big difference. However, it takes time to develop it into a sales machine. Your best bet at this point is to learn about copywriting basics because that's what EM revolves around.
- maximegarcia 9y ago
  The difficulty is that your emailing strategy, the content, etc... change over time. So you don't want to tie it to much with your product code. Decoupled is better. That allows A/B testing without touching your code. A marketing automation tool allows you to centralize marketing emails as well as transactional emails in one thing, decoupled. Your product emits events with some attributes, and the tool react to it. Examples with "user_registered" and "user_ordered" events: - confirmation of order (at "user_ordered") - ask for a review (at "user_ordered" + 3 days) - welcome process (drip emails starting at "user_registered") - wake up campaigns (no "user_ordered" events since 1 month) - sending a notice for a new product Z to users having bought product X or product Y (segment on users having "user_ordered" for product_id IN (product X id or product Y id)) - ... there is no limit to imagination, I love that! Shameless plug if I may, I'd like to know your interests in such a tool: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc5J5BuP_dEfXPEtXV0-kx-n9omsxYu0mfrQfGuxPxel2lLyQ/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc5J5BuP_dEfXPEtXV0...
deleted 9y ago
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orliesaurus 9y ago
Email marketing is a rabbit hole, I remember this one particular instance where using a discount to re-engage abandoned carts would trigger a purchase, marking the campaign as a success..only to find out the customers had learned that they could get away with it and abuse this system to get discounts every time. Now that's great, they re buying..but we were in practice losing money on every transaction. That's when we started building better software to block this from happening. Analyzing customer behavior, understanding if a promo was really needed, or if the customers were just waiting for the bait. Email marketing is hard man, you could always do something more..and drag so many other resources into it!
- dazc 9y ago
  Only times I ever use a discount code is for stuff I have every intention of buying anyway. The amount of profit some companies throw away because of some half-assed split-testing experiment is unbelievable.
  - orliesaurus 9y ago
    See - I put stuff in my basket - then keep shopping around, because I need this one thing - but I don't know if I am bothered to receive the item during the week rather than the weekend, or for a million other lazy-me reasons - also I convince myself I get a better deal somewhere else?.. that's why my e-commerce baskets look like abandoned - and then I get hit with discounts and reminders, sometimes you can profit by waiting a day instead of impulse buying things - unless you're running out of toilet-paper or food that is :)
jacquesm 9y ago
91% of all statistics in marketing documents are pulled from posteriors. I definitely do not want to 'hear' from the companies I do business with unless I specifically ask for it. No better way to lose me as a customer to pester me with 'opportunities' and 'ways to improve my business' that in fact mean more sales for you.
lvoudour 9y ago
It's been a while since we've seen you. We know you get busy but we'd love to see you again soon And I absolutely love spending an hour deleting a flood of auto-genetated e-mails from my inbox every month or hunting for that tiny low saturation "unsubscribe" link (which sometimes doesn't work/exist at all). The worst offenders are the airlines and travel agencies IMO. I mean I understand getting monthly e-mails from places like amazon where there's a multitude of unrelated things to buy, but how many airplane tickets can I realistically buy?
- farnsworthy 9y ago
  How about credit card companies, who refuse to allow opting out?
  - degenerate 9y ago
    There's a specific government-controlled list for opting out of credit card offers (task yourself to re-fill it out every 5 years). It really works, I don't get them anymore. I have not tried the permanent opt-out, because maybe in the future I do want offers, so I do the 5 year one. https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0262-stopping-unsolicited-mail-phone-calls-and-email https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0262-stopping-unsolici...
- chimen 9y ago
  BMW is sending me an SMS every month - how many cars do they think I need? I can't even call the number that sends the messages - it just says BMW.
- mrisoli 9y ago
  To be fair, living in an European LCC hub I get deals on my inbox every few days and I end up buying plane tickets up to once/twice a month, so it's realistic, maybe not so much for legacy/long haul I also get many emails from legacy airlines for long haul deals and I end up getting one of them a year, I'd say it's a successful campaign, they don't expect a large amount of customers to jump on every deal, eventually one that's closer to your profile pops up
- 9y ago
louisswiss 9y ago
>> Once your customer has made that purchase (and you've actually delivered the product) it's time to ask for a review. Of course, you don't want to be the waiter who asks how the food tastes when the diners haven't dug in yet so you'll want to wait until they've had time to use your product. Pretty useful overview. Have to disagree with the above quote though - if you're running an ecommerce company and have shipped your customer a product, you absolutely don't want to wait before reaching out with a short, friendly, aftersales email asking for feedback and/or a review. The main reason being that you want to catch any potential problems/unhappy customers early and funnel them into a private feedback channel where you can sort out their problem in private. If you wait three days to ask for feedback from an unhappy customer, that's three days where the customer is potentially writing negative reviews, sharing negative feedback on social media and just telling their friends that your company sucks. A secondary reason is that people are nearly always most excited by their new purchase when they've just received the package. That's why you're almost 2x as likely to get someone to leave a review/share with friends if you email them on the same day the order arrives vs. a week later. Lastly, if you're running an ecommerce brand selling physical products, here's a shameless plug for my new tool - www.postperk.com PostPerk is an aftersales tool for ecommerce to help brands reach more customers. Referral and loyalty programs don't work well for upmarket consumer brands, so we built a tool just for these companies - nudging customers to post on Instagram with tailored rewards. Our first customers are seeing results 2-10x better than comparable tools - increased revenue and repeat customers, fewer negative reviews, and a data-driven community of a brand's most engaged and valuable customers/brand ambassadors. Happy to chat with anyone thinking about how to improve their aftersales marketing game :)
- jeromegv 9y ago
  Love the idea! My only concern would be to ask them in 2 separate emails to post on IG and then post a review for our website, but overall its a great idea. Unfortunately we are still too small to afford that (my website is Cambio & Co.) but hopefully we can one day!
fiatjaf 9y ago
Imagine you have a list of emails from users of your app. You want to send a one-time notification to them. For example, saying that you'll start charging for the app in two months (just an example). How do you proceed? I wish there was an app that would take a list of emails and a Mailgun/etc. API token and send that one-time email to these people.
- mars4rp 9y ago
  Please forgive my ignorance but how hard is it to write a for loop and send email to each? Even Mailgun should have a method for bulk send!
  - fiatjaf 9y ago
    Well, not hard, I've done that many times, but still, there are thousands of apps out there for making lists and other stupid stuff, and you're not saying this on their threads.
SteveGerencser 9y ago
I work with several clients that between them send roughly 1 million emails per day, every day, and we are small compared to others I know. They fully understand that there are people like most people here that hate email marketing of any kind. But the response rate to those emails is significant. On an average day they get a 15% open rate. Click rates and purchase rates step down at each stage depending on the purpose of the email, the offer, etc. But that is 150,000 people every day opening at least one email from one of these businesses. While the 91% stat is probably pure fantasy, the number is far higher than anyone would want to believe. eMail simply works. It is a large and vital part of many businesses. All of our lists are double opt-in so there is NO WAY you got on it by accident. We also aggressively clean our lists. Don't open an email in 30 days? You get automatically moved to a different funnel. Don't open an email in 90 days? Yet another funnel. 6 months? Off the list entirely. There is an entire process behind this. We don't want to send emails to people that don't want them any more than you want to get them. Bad lists create delivery issues and get you sent into automated spam filters by providers like GMail. They aren't sent to harass you, they are sent because they work.
- paxy 9y ago
  How do you know whether users have opened an email or not? Or do you mean interacted with the email (i.e. clicked a link)?
  - snowwrestler 9y ago
    Unless they're base64-encoded, images in emails must load off a web server. By customizing the image URLs per recipient, the system serving those images can tell who saw the email. It's not perfect because: - Some preview functions load images, even if the email was not actually opened, and - Some email clients block images from loading by default, so it's possible for the user to open and read the text of the email without triggering an "open" signal. Clicks are much more reliable signals of intent, but there's far fewer of them.
  - cjblomqvist 9y ago
    You can quite easily setup tracking, eg using Google Analytics
Thomaschaaf 9y ago
What technical solution is there to writing it yourself that is on-premise and if possible open source and extensible? I have found mautic but not much else.
zizee 9y ago
Shameless self plug: if you are interested in more email marketing articles, perhaps you'd be interesting in my "Email Marketing Weekly" newsletter. http://emailmarketing.ezinews.com http://emailmarketing.ezinews.com
theuncommon 9y ago
"91% of customers want to hear from the companies they do business with." sounds like a bit of an exaggeration, but I agree - email marketing is still a powerful tool for engaging audiences. Looking forward to seeing how it evolves in the next couple of years.

189 points by charlieirish 9y ago

aogl 9y ago

"Email marketing lists naturally degrade by about 22.5% every year". I would have thought that it would have been much higher than this!

AndrewKemendo 9y ago

Honestly the most surprising thing to me was the study that is cited out of the gate: According to our latest research, however, conventional wisdom is wrong. A vast majority of Americans (91%) do in fact want to receive promo emails. While 86% would like to receive promo emails at least monthly, 15% would like to receive promotional emails every day. Is my personal experience of not wanting any email promotions just way off here? [1] https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/chart/how-customers-want-promo-emails https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/chart/how-customers-...

byproxy 9y ago
At this point I consider my general-purpose email address to be an opt-in advertising receptacle. I don't mind receiving marketing, especially when the coupons are good. However, getting the marketing when I want it for what I want at a particular point in time is tricky. Filtering through the emails becomes tedious, too, as I opt-in to more email lists.
vorpalhex 9y ago
I'm in the same boat as you. I use a unique email alias for every single sign-up, so I know who sells my email address or sends me marketing cruft accidentally. I'm very aggressive in reporting bad actors to their mail provider if they don't honor or don't have unsubscribe links. But I think I'm the exception, not the rule, in this case.
- freeflight 9y ago
  Not using aliases I've become very skeptical of unsubscribe links in general, even if they are in emails of "reputable" and established brands, as scammers are now spoofing regular marketing emails like that in the same way they've been doing with PayPal/Battle.net/Banks for years. Tbh often it does not feel like it's worth the effort, due to the sheer amount of spam you end up getting the older an email address gets, it feels like trying to shovel all the water out of the ocean with a spoon. Are there any good resources out there as to where and how to report such actors? Does this actually help/change anything? I can't imagine there being much of a shortage of shady mail providers.
  - vorpalhex 9y ago
    The vast, vast majority of spam that I get is from otherwise perfectly reasonable companies who don't understand the law. To that end, my steps are: 1. Try their unsubscribe, give them a few days for it to "take effect" (which is nonsense, but, so it goes) 2. Send a polite, but direct email to `postmaster@`, and usually cc `webmaster@` - it usually goes to somebody. 3. If none of the above works, pull the full email headers and `dig` around some to find their MX provider, and file a claim with `abuse@` on the provider. That being said, again usually it's an ignorance problem. I have a friend who helps run a company that does escape rooms, and I had only provided my email on a release form. However a few months later, I started getting marketing spam from them to that email - oops. A lot of small companies don't understand the regs around marketing emails and treat them the same as all other emails.
theothertom 9y ago
I'd expect it depends on the source - a retailer like Amazon or a local supermarket could well send a daily offer that's interesting/useful. A more niche store might struggle to send something people want to receive even monthly.
snowwrestler 9y ago
It's not way off for you, obviously, and based on my experience in email marketing threads, not way off for a lot of the HN crowd. But the HN crowd is a pretty interesting self-selected group of people. "You're not the target audience," as a fellow website builder used to say. And I think it's true that people who build digital products themselves might not have the same mindset about digital communications as the general public. And email is funny in my experience... people seem to forget the emails they like to get, and preferentially remember the ones they're annoyed by. So just out of curiosity I'd ask: do you really receive NO promo emails at all? Absolutely zero? No sales notices from Newegg or other gear sellers? Nothing from any conference you liked or are planning to attend? No airfare sales notices? No "new release" notices for software you like and use? Nothing you've intentionally opted into? I'll give an example of a good email promo experience--I was looking to fly to New Zealand, but couldn't find a good price. A friend forwarded an sale email from Air Tahiti that had a price about half what I'd seen so far. I bought immediately. That was a classic good promo email experience--a truly good deal, available to me before it sold out.
- AndrewKemendo 9y ago
  No, I want every email I get to be from someone I know. If it's not then hopefully it's from someone I want to get to know. The only deviations to that are 2FA or receipt emails.

tabeth 9y ago

Re: "Email marketing" I wish it was opt-in as opposed to opt-out. The amount of email spam and physical spam received is absolutely ridiculous. I shudder to wonder how much electricity is wasted sending unwanted mail and delivering unwanted emails. Sounds like it'd be a win for everyone based on this guide. Those who want it would opt in, and the company could focus their campaigns for those who want it more. Meanwhile those who don't can be left alone.

zaarn 9y ago
It's usually opt-in (if it isn't, a lot of jurisdictions allow you to sue or do other nasty things) but it's ticked by default and somewhat hidden above and below the ToS/EULA.
- tabeth 9y ago
  > It's usually opt-in > it's ticked by default and somewhat hidden above and below the ToS/EULA. Well, yeah. The point is that it isn't really opt-in.
- tzahola 9y ago
  So without the extra effort of finding and unchecking the hidden checkbox, you'll receive their spam. Sounds like opt-out to me.
- Nadya 9y ago
  Checked-by-default means, by definition, it is opt-out as you are opted-in by default. It just has to be possible to opt-out and, if opted-in, unsubscribe at a later date (usually a small, hard to notice link in the legalese of the spam email).
  - zaarn 9y ago
    I think it was a bit of a miscommunication, but yes, it's opt-out then.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Ah, and not only is it opt-out, you 'opt-in' to at least 5 different email lists all of which you then have to unsubscribe from individually (and if you are lucky the unsubscribe link is present in the mail, and if you are even more lucky it actually works rather than being just another signal to the spammer - sorry, company - that the email address is indeed legit. And that's before we get into selling your email address to 'partners' who will then really go to town to try to monetize the address.

philfrasty 9y ago

Read the domain + title, thought Stripe is launching Mailchimp competitor (...10/10 would sign up...)

AznHisoka 9y ago
Stripe should do that too. They could take over a few industries if they wanted to. Like email marketing.
BMFX 9y ago
Yeah.... Mailchimp isn't the best play for e-commerce email marketing for sure. There are better alternatives but I would argue there's a ton of room for improvements as an e-commerce developer...

chadash 9y ago

> 91% of customers want to hear from the companies they do business with. It’s unavoidable in the modern e-commerce marketing world. The quote is referring to email marketing. This seems pretty misleading. I can believe that 91% of people want to hear from some companies. But I'd bet that most people are not interested in hearing from most of the companies they do business with. There's a simple solution to this. It's called opt-in, and it's not uncommon (although I wish it were ubiquitous). If I check a box (that is by default unchecked) saying I want marketing and promotional emails, by all means send them my way. But I abhor being automatically signed up for emails just by nature of the fact that I made an online purchase.

ams6110 9y ago
Yeah, that's how I feel too. When I get an email such as: > Hey {{ first_name }}, "Hey" isn't a salutation I want as a customer. We aren't friends. > We miss you. Bullshit. This is an auto-generated email. Computers don't "miss" people. > It's been a while since we've seen you. We know you get busy ... Yes, and now you're interrupting my busy day > ... but we'd love to see you again soon. In fact, come back and visit us in the next 5 days and take 15% off your order. If you did a good job with my last purchase, I'll come back when I need something. 50/50 chance at this point that I hit the spam flag.
- AznHisoka 9y ago
  "I'm sorry for interrupting your day..." No you're not. You wouldn't have interrupted me if you were sorry!
  - Ntrails 9y ago
    That shit winds me up so much. But then broadly speaking so does every other auto-bot spam emial
  - taf2 9y ago
    It’s just like “sorry are you busy, I just have a quick question”

byproxy 9y ago

I know this isn't specific to this particular domain, but the thought of psychology being used in a way to essentially herd cattle to consume leaves me feeling a bit cold.

dandare 9y ago

As an aspiring SaaS founder, I was surprised how hard email marketing (EM) is. My questions so far: 1/ ROI - how much of a difference can good EM make as opposed to bad EM or no EM? Should I not rather focus on improving my product? 2/ What is the low hanging fruit? 3/ What are some of the tools I should be using? If my payment management is in Strip, how do I integrate it with the CRM? [answer: https://stripe.com/works-with/categories/crm https://stripe.com/works-with/categories/crm]

Dwolb 9y ago
You should focus on customer acquisition, nurture, retention, and upsell. Email marketing is just one tool that's used in a specific way depending on your industry, product, and customer base. Always focus on improving the product, but don't do this in a vacuum. You need to ask customers and potential customers and customers of competitors about their problems.
pryelluw 9y ago
Think of EM as a salesperson. A good one makes a big difference. However, it takes time to develop it into a sales machine. Your best bet at this point is to learn about copywriting basics because that's what EM revolves around.
maximegarcia 9y ago
The difficulty is that your emailing strategy, the content, etc... change over time. So you don't want to tie it to much with your product code. Decoupled is better. That allows A/B testing without touching your code. A marketing automation tool allows you to centralize marketing emails as well as transactional emails in one thing, decoupled. Your product emits events with some attributes, and the tool react to it. Examples with "user_registered" and "user_ordered" events: - confirmation of order (at "user_ordered") - ask for a review (at "user_ordered" + 3 days) - welcome process (drip emails starting at "user_registered") - wake up campaigns (no "user_ordered" events since 1 month) - sending a notice for a new product Z to users having bought product X or product Y (segment on users having "user_ordered" for product_id IN (product X id or product Y id)) - ... there is no limit to imagination, I love that! Shameless plug if I may, I'd like to know your interests in such a tool: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc5J5BuP_dEfXPEtXV0-kx-n9omsxYu0mfrQfGuxPxel2lLyQ/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc5J5BuP_dEfXPEtXV0...

deleted 9y ago

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orliesaurus 9y ago

Email marketing is a rabbit hole, I remember this one particular instance where using a discount to re-engage abandoned carts would trigger a purchase, marking the campaign as a success..only to find out the customers had learned that they could get away with it and abuse this system to get discounts every time. Now that's great, they re buying..but we were in practice losing money on every transaction. That's when we started building better software to block this from happening. Analyzing customer behavior, understanding if a promo was really needed, or if the customers were just waiting for the bait. Email marketing is hard man, you could always do something more..and drag so many other resources into it!

dazc 9y ago
Only times I ever use a discount code is for stuff I have every intention of buying anyway. The amount of profit some companies throw away because of some half-assed split-testing experiment is unbelievable.
- orliesaurus 9y ago
  See - I put stuff in my basket - then keep shopping around, because I need this one thing - but I don't know if I am bothered to receive the item during the week rather than the weekend, or for a million other lazy-me reasons - also I convince myself I get a better deal somewhere else?.. that's why my e-commerce baskets look like abandoned - and then I get hit with discounts and reminders, sometimes you can profit by waiting a day instead of impulse buying things - unless you're running out of toilet-paper or food that is :)

jacquesm 9y ago

91% of all statistics in marketing documents are pulled from posteriors. I definitely do not want to 'hear' from the companies I do business with unless I specifically ask for it. No better way to lose me as a customer to pester me with 'opportunities' and 'ways to improve my business' that in fact mean more sales for you.

lvoudour 9y ago

It's been a while since we've seen you. We know you get busy but we'd love to see you again soon And I absolutely love spending an hour deleting a flood of auto-genetated e-mails from my inbox every month or hunting for that tiny low saturation "unsubscribe" link (which sometimes doesn't work/exist at all). The worst offenders are the airlines and travel agencies IMO. I mean I understand getting monthly e-mails from places like amazon where there's a multitude of unrelated things to buy, but how many airplane tickets can I realistically buy?

farnsworthy 9y ago
How about credit card companies, who refuse to allow opting out?
- degenerate 9y ago
  There's a specific government-controlled list for opting out of credit card offers (task yourself to re-fill it out every 5 years). It really works, I don't get them anymore. I have not tried the permanent opt-out, because maybe in the future I do want offers, so I do the 5 year one. https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0262-stopping-unsolicited-mail-phone-calls-and-email https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0262-stopping-unsolici...
chimen 9y ago
BMW is sending me an SMS every month - how many cars do they think I need? I can't even call the number that sends the messages - it just says BMW.
mrisoli 9y ago
To be fair, living in an European LCC hub I get deals on my inbox every few days and I end up buying plane tickets up to once/twice a month, so it's realistic, maybe not so much for legacy/long haul I also get many emails from legacy airlines for long haul deals and I end up getting one of them a year, I'd say it's a successful campaign, they don't expect a large amount of customers to jump on every deal, eventually one that's closer to your profile pops up
9y ago

louisswiss 9y ago

>> Once your customer has made that purchase (and you've actually delivered the product) it's time to ask for a review. Of course, you don't want to be the waiter who asks how the food tastes when the diners haven't dug in yet so you'll want to wait until they've had time to use your product. Pretty useful overview. Have to disagree with the above quote though - if you're running an ecommerce company and have shipped your customer a product, you absolutely don't want to wait before reaching out with a short, friendly, aftersales email asking for feedback and/or a review. The main reason being that you want to catch any potential problems/unhappy customers early and funnel them into a private feedback channel where you can sort out their problem in private. If you wait three days to ask for feedback from an unhappy customer, that's three days where the customer is potentially writing negative reviews, sharing negative feedback on social media and just telling their friends that your company sucks. A secondary reason is that people are nearly always most excited by their new purchase when they've just received the package. That's why you're almost 2x as likely to get someone to leave a review/share with friends if you email them on the same day the order arrives vs. a week later. Lastly, if you're running an ecommerce brand selling physical products, here's a shameless plug for my new tool - www.postperk.com PostPerk is an aftersales tool for ecommerce to help brands reach more customers. Referral and loyalty programs don't work well for upmarket consumer brands, so we built a tool just for these companies - nudging customers to post on Instagram with tailored rewards. Our first customers are seeing results 2-10x better than comparable tools - increased revenue and repeat customers, fewer negative reviews, and a data-driven community of a brand's most engaged and valuable customers/brand ambassadors. Happy to chat with anyone thinking about how to improve their aftersales marketing game :)

jeromegv 9y ago
Love the idea! My only concern would be to ask them in 2 separate emails to post on IG and then post a review for our website, but overall its a great idea. Unfortunately we are still too small to afford that (my website is Cambio & Co.) but hopefully we can one day!

fiatjaf 9y ago

Imagine you have a list of emails from users of your app. You want to send a one-time notification to them. For example, saying that you'll start charging for the app in two months (just an example). How do you proceed? I wish there was an app that would take a list of emails and a Mailgun/etc. API token and send that one-time email to these people.

mars4rp 9y ago
Please forgive my ignorance but how hard is it to write a for loop and send email to each? Even Mailgun should have a method for bulk send!
- fiatjaf 9y ago
  Well, not hard, I've done that many times, but still, there are thousands of apps out there for making lists and other stupid stuff, and you're not saying this on their threads.

SteveGerencser 9y ago

I work with several clients that between them send roughly 1 million emails per day, every day, and we are small compared to others I know. They fully understand that there are people like most people here that hate email marketing of any kind. But the response rate to those emails is significant. On an average day they get a 15% open rate. Click rates and purchase rates step down at each stage depending on the purpose of the email, the offer, etc. But that is 150,000 people every day opening at least one email from one of these businesses. While the 91% stat is probably pure fantasy, the number is far higher than anyone would want to believe. eMail simply works. It is a large and vital part of many businesses. All of our lists are double opt-in so there is NO WAY you got on it by accident. We also aggressively clean our lists. Don't open an email in 30 days? You get automatically moved to a different funnel. Don't open an email in 90 days? Yet another funnel. 6 months? Off the list entirely. There is an entire process behind this. We don't want to send emails to people that don't want them any more than you want to get them. Bad lists create delivery issues and get you sent into automated spam filters by providers like GMail. They aren't sent to harass you, they are sent because they work.

paxy 9y ago
How do you know whether users have opened an email or not? Or do you mean interacted with the email (i.e. clicked a link)?
- snowwrestler 9y ago
  Unless they're base64-encoded, images in emails must load off a web server. By customizing the image URLs per recipient, the system serving those images can tell who saw the email. It's not perfect because: - Some preview functions load images, even if the email was not actually opened, and - Some email clients block images from loading by default, so it's possible for the user to open and read the text of the email without triggering an "open" signal. Clicks are much more reliable signals of intent, but there's far fewer of them.
- cjblomqvist 9y ago
  You can quite easily setup tracking, eg using Google Analytics

Thomaschaaf 9y ago

What technical solution is there to writing it yourself that is on-premise and if possible open source and extensible? I have found mautic but not much else.

zizee 9y ago

Shameless self plug: if you are interested in more email marketing articles, perhaps you'd be interesting in my "Email Marketing Weekly" newsletter. http://emailmarketing.ezinews.com http://emailmarketing.ezinews.com

theuncommon 9y ago

"91% of customers want to hear from the companies they do business with." sounds like a bit of an exaggeration, but I agree - email marketing is still a powerful tool for engaging audiences. Looking forward to seeing how it evolves in the next couple of years.