How to increase revenue from your photo products email campaigns

Only a small fraction of those you send your emails to will ever open them and, even them, only a smaller percentage of these will ultimately decide to make a purchase. So, with this in mind, how can you increase your chances of generating revenue from email marketing?

We’ve previously discussed the basics of creating an effective email marketing strategy on our blog but there is certainly much more that can be done to ensure your email efforts are as cost-effective as possible. Below, we present five tips for increasing the revenue created from your emails.

1. Personalization & segmentation

Our inboxes are flooded with newsletters & other emails every day. This is true for both you and your customers so, to stand out with your offers, you should avoid generic messages.

Email personalization has been around for years and it will only continue to evolve. These days, it is not enough to simply include your subscriber’s name; you also need to take their demographic, previous purchases into account, as well as their browsing history or marketing behaviour. For the latter, this means targeting personal messages based on which campaign lead him or her to your site, how often they opens your emails or clicks through.

Of course, to be able to include all of this, you need to do more than including relevant fields on newsletter subscription forms or checkout pages. You also need to set up proper tracking, integrated with your email marketing tools, to develop a segmentation strategy.

All of this will enable you to send much more precisely targeted mailings. For example, you can send discount offers for photobooks to those who browsed this specific category, or send info on new photo gifts to those who have previously purchased an item from the respective category.

With such personalization in place, it’s significantly more likely that a subscriber will be interested by your emails and the content within, consequently improving your chances of making that sale.

2. Automated workflows

Automated workflows are a must. To make revenue, it’s vital that you reach your customers as soon as possible. For example, if he or she has just subscribed to your list or abandoned their cart, it’s a good idea to set up workflows for these two events, by using welcome and abandonment campaigns with triggers set up along the customer’s journey.

The content of these emails, especially in regards to cart abandonments, should be highly personalized. For instance, show the items the user left in their cart or even include discounts for that particular category of photo product.

You also need to think about your timing. For abandoned carts, you might want to reach the subscriber within an hour, a day or even a week after it happened. The welcome sequence, on the other hand, should start just after someone has subscribed. It should also show some of your most engaging content, popular products and your best offers. Automated workflows can be created with help from email tools like Mailchimp and they will help you greatly.

3. Implementation of triggers

Newsletters that hit inboxes every week are often highly generic and, ultimately, just not that interesting for subscribers to read. Instead, try sending less frequent emails and implement trigger based campaigns.

These will send out messages when particular events happen, making them highly time-relevant. Possible triggers include upcoming birthdays, or passing a particular length of time since a user last visited your store, for example.

4. Loyalty & Re-engagement

To keep subscribers engaged, you need to constantly reach them with content and offers that they will find interesting. Customers will be the most interested in your messages in the first few weeks of discovering your brand, so it’s important to use this time to convince them that opening your emails is a good idea.

If you don’t, they may start to ignore your emails and sending frequent emails to inactive subscribers can cause your messages to be considered as junk mail. Few people at all check their spam folder to learn about brand offers, so this results in lost customers.

This all touches upon our first tip – personalization and segmentation – but there’s more to it than that. In addition to messages that are suited to particular customers or subscribers, you also need to consider how your emails help these people to re-engage with your brand. You need to bring them something of value.

This includes stating a clear call to action, as well as mentioning specific special offers and discounts. For the latter, consider including a discount at the start of the customer journey: the first email after they subscribe, create an account or make their first purchase. You can add an expiration date to create urgency and ensure your discounts aren’t simply forgotten, especially if you send reminders. Just remember that people do not purchase photo products every day and time your follow-ups with this in mind.

5. Mobile-friendly design

We’ve already touched on this in our first article about email marketing for photo product E-commerce but, to recap: according to Litmus’ “Email Client Market Shares Trends for 2017”, 51% of emails are now opened on a mobile device.

What does this mean for you? If your email design isn’t suitable for mobile devices, you will lose a chance to make potential sales and will lower your future opening rate. In addition to your design’s responsiveness, you should consider the size of any included photographs, as well as the length and structure of each message. Don’t make it too long and ensure your CTA clearly stands out.

In terms of length, don’t just consider the email body, as the subject line is just as vital. It might appear shorter on mobile devices than desktops, giving you less wordspace to work with, so get straight to the point. If the most important part of your message (the part that gets them to open it) is at the end of the subject line, people on mobile devices might not even see it and will lack the compulsion to open and read. Naturally, this further decreases your chances for converting subscribers into customers.

If you already have all of this sorted out, think about the email design. Is it appealing and does it represent your brand well? Mobile friendliness won’t make any difference at all if your emails look sloppy.

So, there you have it, 5 tips to help keep your emails personalized and engaging. This will help ensure people read for longer and stay hooked on your store’s brand!