Seems that now all the online shops use email marketing. Every week at the same time millions of subscribers receive new catalogs, discounts, and special offers information. They are bombarded with dozens of reminders they should draw attention to. Sounds a bit annoying, but all that people said “yes” to the subscription conditions, and they can reject it whenever they want.

So they do. Many online shops owners and market analysts have noticed that they lose subscribers: about 22% of them unsubscribe in a first month, further 14% in a half a year, even shoppers who have an account more than 2 years and made orders several times unsubscribe rather often. Definitely, it could be considered as a bad sign of customers’ loyalty decreasing.

Trying to look deeper at this issue, most of the subscribers who continue to receive emails just don’t open them or they open and don’t click to any buttons to see more details. What is the point? Should we say that email marketing doesn’t work already? I tend to think no, it still makes sense, but there are some common mistakes that can ruin all the efforts.

The key point of emailing ineffectiveness is the lack of customization. Most online shops, especially if we talk about mono brands, don’t even try to personalize the mailings content, all the subscribers from different regions receive the same, regardless their interests, order experience and so on, but there can be a big gap between them, in their lifestyles and their shopping behavior. The answer is to analyze subscribers list before sending anything, and try to prepare different content for them (at least 4-5 different versions depending on basic features).

There are some TIPS to make an analysis:

• Firstly, take in to account registration form, probably it’s a good idea to make it more detailed and informative, ask not only name, address and phone number but age, interests (there can be used tags, that will be important after, when preparing content, for instance for fashion website there can be: sport, party, summer, office etc.), social networks.
• An address from registration form can be really useful too, for example, if you have a season price for winter tires, your customers from southern part of France really don’t care.
• The easiest thing is to analyze somebody’s shopping experience, what was ordered before. Having an opportunity to look at previous orders can be an advantage to offer some similar products, like AI technologies offered by TMotions.
• Use emailing services with a wide range of analytics opportunities to understand better what’s reasonable for subscribers. If over and over they ignore some topic, maybe it’s not applicable for them. Try to analyze what was clicked and what was scrolled out too. So, after this, more likely you will see the whole picture, can segment your subscribers into several groups and adapt the content for each.

These tips can help you optimize your email marketing, which is still one of the best ways to maintain communication with your customers.