I have recently had a successful email marketing campaign for one of my ecommerce sites. I will share the story of this email marketing campaign as a case study.
The site we have launched the email marketing campaign is an ecommerce site which is 14 months old. We have never done email newsletter or any type of email marketing for this site due to very busy schedule. We had around 14,000 email addresses collected from our customers. So, I thought it was time to start our regular newsletters, and increase our returning customer rates by offering specials through email marketing.
After an extensive research, we had 3 choices of hosted email newsletter programs on the table, and we have decided to go with Aweber.. Aweber had all the features we needed, plus some extra features such as a great autoresponder system integrated. After we’ve signed up with Aweber, the only down side seemed as the verified opt-in requirement. Yes, our only choice was to have a verified opt-in email list. We couldn’t just email our list of previous customers. We had to send them an email asking if they wanted to be added to our newsletter.
* What is verified opt-in?
Frequently called confirmed opt-in or double opt-in, it is generally defined as sending an email to a new subscriber request to verify that they are the person who made the request before adding them to a mailing list. This is usually accomplished by means of an email message sent to the subscriber to which they must reply, or containing a URL which they must visit, in order to complete the subscription. This prevents others from accidentally or maliciously adding an email address to a mailing list that does not belong to them.
After sending 14,000 emails to our previous customers, only 750 of them opted in the newsletter. I was first shocked and very disappointed with the low return rate. After speaking with a few friends in email marketing field, they have encouraged me with the success rate. Even though we had only 750 people on the list, they were all previous customers, and also were very interested in receiving emails from us. Because we have asked their permission for it.
It has been little less than 24 hours since we’ve sent the newsletter, and I believe we have already great success. Here are the facts:
- Only 6 emails were undeliverable
- 79% open rate (79% of the people who have received the newsletter have opened it)
- Almost 80% of the people who have read the email have clicked a link within the email.
- Already had 20 orders with over $2000 revenue.
We had a very simple design with a short text. We had the company logo, 1 coupon code, 1 short paragraph thank you letter for being a customer, and 3 new product images/links. Short and simple, to the point.
We are planning to work harder for our ecommerce site’s email marketing campaigns. We will start sending one newsletter a month regularly, and planning to increase it to twice a month after Christmas.
We are also planning several promotions to increase the newsletter signup rate for our site.
This is a short story of a real email marketing case study for an ecommerce site. There’s no marketing tricks, no genius ideas, just a simple thing to do. Most of our so busy with our sites, and never find the time for email marketing. I hope this will inspire a few of my readers out there, and they will launch the email marketing campaign which has been waiting for a while.
Thanks to Aweber email marketing/autoresponder which has helped us to launch a newsletter campaign within few minutes. It was so easy to use a built-in template, test it before sending it to our customers, create both html/text formats, and launch the campaign. Aweber’s bultin tracking system is very simple and right to the point, it shows the necessary data for us to track our campaign.
