Why Are Email Lists So Valuable to eCommerce Sites?

To be successful in eCommerce, retailer-consumer relationships must extend beyond transactional communications.

Accomplishing this requires online stores to master their customer relations, particularly through email marketing.

Making the most of your email lists will not only allow brands to unlock the long-lasting benefits of customer loyalty but it will also help retailers to stand out in a highly competitive industry, no matter the size of your business.

In this article, we’ll uncover the true importance of your email lists and the steps you should take to maximise this potential.

Suggested reading: To discover how to optimise your email marketing, read our blog ‘What email newsletter sign-up incentive works best in eCommerce?’

How to calculate the value of your email list

By calculating the value of an email subscriber, you can uncover the true value of your email lists and learn how much each subscriber is worth to your business.

To calculate the value of an annual subscriber, follow this formula:

Accurately working out this figure will allow you to track the success of building your email lists in the future.

6 reasons why email lists are valuable to your business

Understanding the value of your email subscribers will help you to unlock additional revenue flows from your existing customers and site visitors. 

Let’s explore the value of your email list and how you can maximise the advantages it can provide your business with.

1. Provides direct and personalised communication

High levels of customer engagement can provide a continuous source of value to any online business.

Harnessing this engagement to encourage repeat purchases can allow you to transform your communications into profit.  

To achieve this, retailers should take advantage of the opportunity to speak directly with their targeted audience through email newsletters.

You can optimise your emails for maximum engagement by including:

• Personalisation tactics: Personalising your subject lines with the recipient’s name is the easiest way to begin speaking directly to your subscriber and increase your open rate.
• Promotions: Reward email lists with subscriber-only deals or make them aware of time-sensitive offers to highlight the benefits of being on your mailing lists. 
• Educational content: Provide extra information, such as tips and tricks for popular products, to further integrate your brand into your customers’ lives.
• Product recommendations: Act on cross-selling opportunities by sending subscribers genuinely relevant recommendations based on on-site behaviour and past purchases.

One of the many advantages of email marketing is that it allows retailers to target customers in a way that recognises them as an individual.

Maximising this potential with the points listed above will see your email lists provide a sustainable increase in conversion rates.

What you can do: Deploy Salesfire’s Post-purchase Recommendations Email campaign to ensure that you are fulfilling your customer’s need for personalised communication while growing your sales.

2. Build customer relationships

The in-person interaction that comes with brick-and-mortar stores can make it easier to build customer relationships.

However, successful email marketing strategies can help online businesses replicate this experience.  

You can create meaningful relationships with those on your subscriber list by creating drip campaigns such as:

• Welcome emails: Start your relationship with your customer the way you mean to go on by welcoming them to your brand. Introduce your company, provide information about your products/services and even offer future purchase discounts to begin building trust immediately.
• Birthday offers: Show your appreciation by sending out birthday offers. While continuing to build loyalty, you can expect to create new purchase opportunities.
• Abandoned cart reminders: There are many reasons a customer may add to their cart without purchasing. Combat this with a sequence of abandoned cart emails to encourage browsers to complete their order.
• Re-engagement sequences: Reignite the interest of disengaged customers to ensure that you are reaping the full benefits of your email list. Provide updates on your company to show what they’re missing or incentivise their return to your site with a discount code.

These strategies can be highly effective in strengthening the retailer-consumer relationship, helping to foster loyalty and encourage future purchases.

Pro tip: Encourage on-site customers to complete your newsletter opt-in form with the incentive of a discount code.

Once signed up, confirm their voucher code within their welcome email to increase the potential of them becoming repeat purchasers.

3. Maximise customer lifetime value

Once you’ve established a strong connection with your customers, focus your efforts on maximising their value to you.

As a brand, you should strive to increase the profit you generate from a customer over the course of their relationship with you.

Implementing cross-selling and upselling strategies into your emails will allow you to do exactly that. 

To successfully deploy these strategies, use segmentation to split your subscribers into smaller lists based on specific criteria, such as location, purchase frequency or on-site behaviour.

From there, you’ll be able to target specific lists with products tailored to them. 

This will provide your subscribers with the content they want to receive while allowing you to increase product interaction and revenue. 

4. Drives traffic and sales

If you’re looking to achieve long-term success, almost every move you make should be revenue driven.

In an eCommerce context, this goal can be achieved by driving traffic to your site and encouraging purchases. 

Luckily, a strong email list offers the means to do this.

With a sale potentially just an email away, it’s vital that your emails are optimised with: 

• Compelling copy: Uphold a consistent and recognisable tone of voice alongside engaging copy to build trust.
• Clear call-to-actions: Make CTAs easy to follow and understand. For example, a simple ‘buy now’ button towards the top of an email will garner more clicks than if it were placed at the very bottom.
• Time-sensitive offers: Create urgency with countdown timers to emphasise the limited availability of an offer to encourage quick purchases.

By using these tactics throughout your sequences, you can consistently drive traffic to your site whilst drawing maximum value from your email lists.

Pro tip: Be mindful to balance promotional emails with value-driven content to maintain meaningful and long-term relationships with your customers.

What you can do: With 44.1% of visitors bouncing after viewing just one page, you must ensure your email CTAs link through to fully optimised landing pages to prevent this.

An optimised landing page features:

• High-quality product images
• Relevant and helpful product descriptions
• Strategically placed CTAs

For more actionable tips on how you can optimise your site to increase conversions, read The Ultimate eCommerce CRO Checklist.

5. Retain customers

Your retention strategies are equally as important as your subscriber acquisition tactics. 

Once you’ve added contacts to your email list, you must make sure your sequences are ready to re-engage them with your site.

Since every customer journey looks different, taking advantage of automation and behavioural tracking is crucial.

A powerful way to do this is by deploying an Email Sequences tool, complete with pre-set triggers and campaigns to respond to individual users.

Not only can you hope to rekindle their interest when it comes to shopping on-site, but you can also expect to achieve an increase in retention rates.

What you can do: Focus on abandoned cart recovery to effectively use your email lists to re-engage customers in order to experience sales growth.

Offer the option for customers to save their baskets at checkout. This provides the opportunity to remind them of the purchase they almost made with an email.

This could be the difference between losing a browser and gaining a purchase.

6. Builds brand awareness

Trust is integral in the relationship between a brand and its customers.

As we know, trust is not given but earned. In an eCommerce context, this can be sustainably built via well-constructed emails.

The contents of this should present your brand as an industry leader. To do so, we recommend featuring subject matter such as:

• Tutorials: Provide step-by-step tutorials to highlight the value of your products and expertise.
• FAQs: Answer common questions in your TOV to connect with your readers.
• User-generated content: Include user-generated content in your emails to highlight real-life use cases and provide inspiration.
• Updates: Share product and company updates to give customers a closer insight into your brand.

As the relationship between you and your email subscribers evolves to become one defined by trust, you can expect to create a customer base that advocates for your company and is loyal.

Embrace the value of email lists

The world of eCommerce is highly competitive and relatively unpredictable.

By focusing your effort on using your email lists to further the lifetime value of your customers, you can secure your spot in the market for the future.