Nurture campaigns and upsell emails are not the only things you can do with your email list. Our focus here at Windsor is to help eCommerce brands get the most out of their email campaigns and the opportunities they create. Part of that is looking inward and making the most of email lists in ways that do not always include sending more emails. From creating cohorts and look-alike audiences to find new customers to using email response rates to make support decisions, your email list is a treasure trove of information. 

Inward Opportunities for your Email Lists

Intuitively, eCommerce store owners see email lists as a chance to stay in touch with customers, re-engage customers that have moved on, and even prospect for new business. While these activities are definitely important, they are far from the only things you should be doing with your email lists and customer database.

The largest area of potential opportunity for online store owners is by digging into their email lists themselves. These inward opportunities serve to inform not just future email campaigns but also marketing, product, and support strategies as well.

Thinking About the Data In Your Email Lists

When it comes to data, email lists are a goldmine. Not only do they contain the contact information of subscribers, but they also include a wealth of demographic and behavioral data that can be used to improve marketing efforts.

Demographic data might include information such as age, gender, income, or location. Behavioral data could include past purchase history, website visits, or engagement with email campaigns.

All of this data can be used to improve marketing efforts by helping to target specific customers with relevant offers and content. It can also help to fine-tune marketing strategies by identifying which tactics are most effective with different groups of customers.

Enriching the Data in Your Email Lists

Once you have this data, the next step is to enrich it. This means adding more information to it that can be used to better understand your customers.

One way to do this is to add social media data. This could include information about what social media networks your customers use, what types of content they share on those networks, or how active they are on them.

Another way to enrich your data is by adding psychographic data. This could include things like personality traits, values, or interests. Finally, take care to append data around not only previous purchases but also support needs, frequency of purchase, and average order value to the people in your customer email list.

This type of data can help you to better understand your customers’ motivations and what might trigger them to make a purchase or take another material action.

Putting the Data To Work

Once you have gathered and enriched your data, it’s time to put it to work. This could mean using it to segment your email list so that you can send more targeted content. You can also use the insights from the data to inform things like marketing campaigns and messaging, brand creative, and product and support feedback. All told, this data can help inform decisions across your eCommerce business.

Look-Alike Audiences

One way to use this data is to create lookalike audiences. These audiences are created by finding common traits among your best customers. Age, gender, and location are just the start. Taken far enough, you can mine data from social media to find other interests your customers share. For example, if you sell healthy teas and tea products online, maybe your data will show that your customers have a broad interest in health and wellness. This might push you towards marketing to health and wellness groups on social media with a message about how healthy tea can be. Now, instead of only targeting tea lovers you can target people that share interests with people who love tea.

Product Feedback

Another way to use email list data is for product development purposes. By studying what products customers on your list have purchased in the past, you can get an idea of what new products they might be interested in. You can even study customer behavior over time to see how their interests have changed.

Going a step further, you can use your email list to track not just purchases but also returns and the reason for those returns. Product insights are

Improving Support

Email list data can also be used for support purposes. For example, you can use email open and click-through rates to decide which issues need the most attention from customer support. This allows you to provide better customer service by addressing the problems that matter most to your customers

One of the hallmarks of successful and growing eCommerce businesses is support that thrills clients. Each interaction or ticket may be difficult to track in a vacuum. By mining your customer email list looking for common issues or support requests and uncover insights that help improve support for everyone.

Outward Opportunities for your Email Lists

Segmentation and A/B Testing

Segmenting your email list can help you to better understand your customers and send them more targeted content. You can also use it to A/B test different versions of your content to see which performs better.

One way to segment your email list is by demographic information, such as age, gender, or location. This can help you to send more targeted content that is relevant to your audience.

You can also segment your email list by interests or behaviors. For example, you can segment your list by people who have made a purchase in the past month, people who have visited your website in the past week, or people who have abandoned their shopping carts.

Segmenting your email list can help you to improve your open and click-through rates, and it can also help you to better understand your customers. This opens up new opportunities for marketing campaigns based on data, not guesswork.

Re-Engagement

Re-engagement campaigns are an effective way to reconnect with customers who have shown interest in your brand in the past but have not interacted recently.

Using your customer email list for a re-engagement campaign can be used to win back customers who have stopped opening your emails, people who have visited your website but have not made a purchase, or people who have made a purchase but haven't returned recently.

Re-engagement campaigns can be highly effective, but they need to be carefully planned and executed. Starting with a list of customers, filtering for those that have not made a purchase or visited the website for a while, and adding them to a re-enagement campaign is a great use of a customer email list.

The Email List as a Lifeline

Your email list is a valuable asset, and it's important to make the most of it. There are many ways to use your email list data to improve your business, from segmentation and A/B testing to re-engagement campaigns. By understanding the different uses for your email list, you can create more targeted content, improve customer support, and find new opportunities for marketing campaigns. Your email list is a valuable resource, so make the most of it!

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