Why Email is an Online Seller’s Best Friend

The online selling marketplace is a typical example of an aggressive ecosystem. You have to adapt quickly to all the technological changes around you to survive, and thrive. Although email is a technology that has been around for many many years, it’s applications in terms of online sales are some of the most effective ways to increase your business. For an online seller, email is one of the only few ways to have an actual dialogue with the customer. Of course, there are other, more sophisticated ways of networking, like Facebook and Twitter. But as a recent study shows, email is still an online seller’s best friend as compared to social media. Facebook/Twitter have their own advantages in the world of online sales, which consist of consolidating a mass outreach and creating a trustworthy and accessible online presence. But in terms of hard selling figures, email beats them all. In the last four years, the online retailers have quadrupled the rate of customers acquired through email to nearly 7 percent. Here are 5 reasons why email is the way to go for you as an online seller.

What Email Does for an Online Seller

1. Emails are Private

In fact, they are the one of the only means of online communication that are exclusively built upon the idea of privacy. Let us start with the first step – acquiring an email address. Acquiring an email address of a customer means that they trust you enough to do business with you. This is a very valuable thing for an online seller, much more valuable than a Facebook ‘Like’ or a re-tweet. Now you can employ this email address in various aspects of your strategy, from customer management to marketing. Hence, first rules first – Do not flood an inbox with spam. Nobody likes that. It will only spoil the newly established customer-seller relationship.

2. Emails for Customer Relationships

While Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms are essentially ‘social media’ platforms, email is your own personal mailbox. Many online sellers do not realize this difference between these two tools of marketing. What is the point of sending a stock email privately to a lot of people if it can be sent publicly to reach a wider margin? Instead, you can employ email for another task – survey, feedback and customer relationship establishment. Update your customers with the status of their order. Ask them at the end of the transaction whether everything went according to their convenience. This is what emails are for – private channels that help you build trust. Most good inventory management systems consist of tools that can automatically send emails to your customers regarding the status of their orders.

3. Emails for Marketing

For a seller, marketing strategy objectives can be broken down into four important parts –
1. Get them to the store.
2. Make them buy something.
3. Keep them coming back.
4. Get their friends along.
Social media platforms are more than adept to handle step 4. But emails work wonders for step 3. This is essentially the extension of the same philosophy that led to the advent of online stores – ‘If you can’t get them to the store, get the store to their home’. Well, ‘if you can’t get them to the site, get the site to their inbox’. Of course, a certain deft touch is required in doing this, rather than plainly mailing an online catalogue. With the power of the internet, we can easily access and identify shopping patterns are search strings employed by our customers. There are tools available in the market that can analyse this data and provide a clear strategic direction. The focus should be on sending relevant emails. That is the key.

4. Emails for Cross Selling

Cross selling is one of the most lucrative techniques for making profits in the sales world. The concept is very easy, and follows the ‘Would you like to buy some ink to go with the pen you just bought?’ strategy. Product pairings and groupings are common factors in cross selling, but understanding the customers’ habits and interests also helps a lot. Because cross sells are so customer specific, emails are the best way to go about with them. The best way is to personalise your mails with sales pitches for the products that you want to cross sell. Remember, emails are just the baits. Selling comes later.

5. Strategizing the Email

All of the above is great, but to use email as an effective tool in your online sales arsenal, you need to be able to use it right. We see many bad sales emails popping up everyday in our inboxes. Common practice is to just delete them without opening. How to get out of this conundrum? The idea is that email is not the happy ending in itself, but just a means to the happy ending. View an email as a start to a conversation. As we discussed above, an email is a private space between you and the customer. Thus, give a precise, brief pitch and invite the customer to reply. Once the contact has been established, things happen much faster.

If you want more automated emails at every step of your customer purchase cycle, get in touch with us at Browntape. Our inventory and order management software also takes care of customer emails, in a step towards making your customers happier.