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On average, 80% of new leads never translate into a sale.
Not just a few, not even half, but 80%...
Just to spitball the math on this, if your eCommerce website averaged 10 new email signup leads every day for a year that would equate to 3650.
If 80% of them failed to ever make a purchase, you’re looking at a loss of income from 2920 people in a single year.
And if your average order value for customers was on the low side of say… $35, then that’s a potential loss of over $102K.
Oof… that hurts, right?
So how do you better equip your store to help keep that sharp drop from happening to you? Since these leads are coming to you through email signups, it only makes sense to use email to combat things.
But how, you may wonder? Let's dive in!
In this article, you will learn:
- Why customer education is an effective lead nurturing strategy to build trust with your customers.
- How to use the H.A.S. approach to provide valuable, relevant content in your marketing campaigns.
- 5 customer education strategies eCommerce brands incorporate in their lead nurturing campaign.
Customer Education: The Lead Nurturing Emails Your Marketing Automations Need
InvespCRO found that companies who excelled in lead nurturing generated 50% more sales at a 33% lower cost.
And what channel did they find was the most impactful for lead nurturing?
If you guessed email, then *ding, ding, ding!*, we have a winner!
Lead nurturing through email marketing is an automated email campaign or workflow that (hopefully) personalizes the experience to the person receiving them. Customer education emails go a step further.
The best way to describe a consumer education email sequence is to say they help foster a relationship with consumers by providing valuable content and information which educates them about your brand and products.
Through offering value, you earn trust, increase consumer loyalty, and can help guide your shoppers through the buyer's journey.
But the question is, how? How do you create this type of email content? What types of emails work? What can your emails include? Below we’re taking a look at helpful tips as well as some examples to answer those questions for you.
Customer Education Emails:
Help, Answer, Show (The H.A.S Value Approach)
If you’re having a hard time figuring out what these types of emails should say, try to brainstorm around these three ideas:
- Help. How can you help your customers? What do they need that your product can solve their problem? What information can you give that would be helpful to them and help your brand become the go-to source for that help?
- Answer. What questions do they have about your product(s)? What are common questions or problems in your industry for the people you serve?
- Show. Can you show the value of your products? Would a product, explainer, or tutorial video help?
Your product has value to these potential customers, and the H.A.S Value Approach is a fun little exercise to help you figure out what that is.
The other really important part of brainstorming ideas here is to look at what makes your brand and products unique. Perhaps you’re like Pura Vida, where you have a very interesting story and your business supports others’ work.
Or maybe the way your business handles customer support and shipping is what sets you above the rest. You can really dig in here to find what makes you stand out.
And when you find it, use that to your advantage to boost your brand awareness to educate your subscribers about who you are to create an emotional tether.
But I get it.
Seeing something like this done well, makes it easier to understand where you should take your own emails.
Thankfully, there are many great examples out there that have managed to find their value-prop to use in their customer education efforts.
Colorescience: A Little Can Go A Long Way
Oftentimes, when we think of “education” we consider it as something long-winded or a step-by-step process, that sort of thing. However, it doesn’t have to be so “in your face” when enlightening people about your products.
Colorescience is a great example of a brand that mixes customer education into every avenue of their marketing — email marketing campaigns included.
Their various marketing efforts highlight all the different types of education-based content you could create. On the surface, these two emails may not seem like they’re teaching anything, but each of them teaches something about the uniqueness of the products.
The first email shows and tells in very few words how their SPF Sport Stick really works and what makes it unique.
The second email highlights their lip balm product and also offers some lesser-known traits that the product has that the subscriber would likely find of value (buildable coverage, hypoallergenic, free of various allergens, etc.)
You can show the value and teach your subscribers important details about your products without being long-winded and, well, boring.
A little bit of explaining and showing can go a long way, so you don’t always need to overthink it.
Moment: Teach Your Customers How To Perfect Their Craft
We often use Moment as an example for eCommerce brands to emulate regarding their email marketing because they do such a great job.
They sell multiple products for mobile photographers and travel photography. While their products offer quite a lot of value, their consumers are usually looking for new products and methods that improve their photography or videography craft.
As part of their overall marketing strategy, all content that is produced — like the YouTube video and blog post that goes along with the image above — gets attention in an email.
While the content of this is covered in the content that lives on their website, Moment goes the extra mile to condense that information into this message. If the subscribers only have a moment to read something from them, they put enough helpful information into the email to be valuable without being overwhelming.
They teach and educate by being as helpful to their audience as possible. It's one of the things that helped them go from a Kickstarter campaign to a full-fledged company with 20+ employees and a huge social media presence.
//[inject:ad-ebook-cltv]
Burrow: Put Your FAQs In An Email
Every brand has a batch of questions they get asked all the time.
Some of them are always the same, like, “Do you offer free shipping?” and, “What’s your return policy?”
Others may be unique to your brand.
Either way, these questions often pop up in the minds of someone interested in your brand, and sometimes, those seemingly small questions — when they go unanswered — can be enough to keep them from making a purchase.
Burrow sidesteps this issue a bit by placing their FAQs in a pleasantly designed email. This helps them to eliminate thoughts that could hold a buyer back.
Adding this type of email to your own welcome series is a great way to do the same for your brand.
Pulp & Press: Dig Into The Value Your Product Has
Your product no doubt has a certain value to your customers.
Once you know what that is (and it could be a variety of things) you can use that to create nurture emails like this one from Pulp & Press.
As a health-focused brand with juicing products, they have certain things their customers look for that pertain to good and nourishing food. But as you read the copy of their email, you can see that they’re purposely using their “insider” knowledge of their customer base to show their value.
Terms like “low sugar content”, “kick cravings to the curb” and “nourish your body” offer a lot of value to those who need or want to watch their sugar intake and who have a focus on getting healthy.
It’s subtle, but in the process of going deeper and educating more about the product, they also show their value.
Using the terms and words your customers are using to describe what they need/want and placing those in your copy increase the value you have in their eyes.
//[inject:ad-demo]
Customer Education Is Essential in eCommerce Today
Some people move from one to the next faster than others, but most people need to get to know you, your brand, your values, and your uniqueness before they’re willing to give you their money.
Spending time to put together education-based emails that go into an automated email funnel like a Welcome Series can keep you from losing a large percentage of potential revenue.
The H.A.S. Value approach can drum up ideas for what types of emails you can create and add to your funnels.
And since this is all automated, once you’ve created these, they will continually run in the background and work hard for you.
It’s one of the reasons we love automated email marketing so much:
It makes life so much easier!
If you’re looking for an eCommerce-focused email marketing and automation platform, then check out Sendlane. You get 14 days for free with no credit card required, and our awesome team of customer success peeps are at the ready to help jump right in.
Click here to get started today!
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