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How to Maximize Email Marketing for Your Dropshipping Business

11 May
2022
How to Maximize Email Marketing for Your Dropshipping Business

Dropshipping businesses are growing in popularity in recent years. If you’re one of the many businesses in this competitive space, a regular check-in about whether you’re getting the most out of your email marketing campaigns can bring about changes that will separate you from the rest.

An effective email marketing strategy should pave the way for regular deep dives into campaign performance, to measure your statistics and data. Although these can vary from industry to industry, an open rate of 25% or more generally suggests that things have gone according to plan.

Alongside this, it’s generally agreed that click-through rates should be 1.25% or higher, with bounce rates ideally less than 10%. If your email campaigns aren’t quite hitting all three, our guide can help turn the tide.

What is a Dropshipping Business?

Dropshipping businesses sell products online, with a slight twist to the traditional retail model.

Where most traditional retail businesses stock the products they sell themselves, dropshipping businesses purchase inventory from a third party instead.

Basically, they’re the middleman between the consumer and the manufacturer, wholesaler or anybody that can fulfil an order.

Doing this means that the business is able to avoid facing additional overheads from storing stock, which comes with the risk that some items will never end up being sold.

Dropshipping business owners have the freedom to work from anywhere, without having to worry about being tied down to a physical location.

Generating and testing new ideas

The dropshipping model is perfect for entrepreneurs and startups without needing too much capital to get the ball rolling on a new idea quickly. Product demand can be tested using the latest marketing trends without running the risk of going “all in” with your money.

Sendlane’s email and sms marketing platform can make executing cost-effective email marketing campaigns easier than ever.

Email Marketing for Dropshipping

Dropshipping companies have a lot to gain by investing in email marketing. It’s an essential promotional avenue that helps with getting to know your target audience better from campaign to campaign.

Email marketing is incredibly useful when it comes to learning about how customers are engaging with specific products, too. This is a lot easier after tapping into the following ideas, which can amplify your future campaigns:

//[inject:ad-personalized-email]

Use targeted email campaigns

The days of sending out a single newsletter every month to all your subscribers at once have come and gone. 

Nowadays, this is a quick way to drive up your unsubscribe rates.

Instead, creating targeted email campaigns that have been curated for specific audience segments can improve engagement rates for your dropshipping business. These segments should be branches of the total master list, with messaging that speaks directly to the needs and desires of your subscribers.

When this is done well, it allows you to personalize content in a way that communicates clearly to those that are already interested in what you have to say.

Forget about rushing to create a new spreadsheet and manually creating individual tabs for every segment you want to add to your marketing strategy. Sendlane makes creating multivariable segments as easy as possible by:

  • Designing the platform to give businesses the option to import or migrate consented lists without any fuss
  • Creating and updating segments requires no more than a couple of minutes
  • From there, your team can begin to curate specific messaging — like an abandoned cart reminder — in order to increase the odds of conversions
Example of a multi-variate segment built inside Sendlane

Check out some eCommerce email marketing case studies in this article and get some ideas from them!

//[inject:ad-ebook-segmentation]

Analyze Data Carefully

An email campaign can look incredible, but how can you be sure that it has hit the mark with subscribers?

The right analytics will be able to tell you right away.

Spending enough time analyzing campaign data is an essential component of a successful email marketing strategy.

This should be worked into your planning right from the start of every campaign, with a view toward encouraging learning from mistakes. Analyzing data carefully should tell you exactly what people are searching for and buying, which makes it easier to align the focus of your marketing across all channels.

Although you might already have a clear understanding of your sales funnel, diving into analytics can present new opportunities to drive sales for specific audience segments.

Knowing the scope of its potential to facilitate growth, it’s worth investing in analytics training for the team. Studying the data will come in handy no matter which marketing platform they are using daily.

Boost engagement

Boosting engagement levels on email campaigns requires clear and insightful messaging. 

Remember - people have to contend with a lot of emails over the course of a single day. Your should stand out from the crowd, with a call-to-action that’s easy to grasp.

If you’re struggling to know where to begin to drive email marketing engagement, run a campaign that pushes your social media profiles first. This will boost interaction, indirectly casting a wider net for you to reach leads and customers in future too.

Exclusive discounts are a great way to encourage subscribers to take action - and who doesn’t love a discount?

(Source)

And if these are curated to the specific segments mentioned earlier, you’re more likely to get a better response.

Promotions should always be well thought out, pointing towards building a long-lasting relationship with customers. Something as simple as a birthday voucher can be a great way to get customers to click through to your website from an email. Plus, the thoughtfulness might even generate a bit of organic traction after.

Cross-sell products

Your dropshipping business probably has a lot of different products in its catalog. Once you know what the market is picking up on, your email campaigns should start to cross-sell similar/related products to customers, based on their buying habits in the past. 

(Source)

Sometimes, customers simply haven’t been made aware of the fact that you sell a wide range of different products. If you already know what they are interested in, it’s easy to curate the user experience for this, to get them to convert a second, third or fourth time.

Cross-selling goes hand in hand with upselling in digital marketing. A well-timed post-purchase email can make doing this much easier.

A simple follow-up message creates an opportunity to get instant feedback. 

It also leaves some room to promote related products. Even if they don’t convert right away, a simple click is a good signal of intent to buy in future. eCommerce businesses are in it for the long haul, after all.

Boosting the Bottom Line

Sendlane’s marketing automation platform is designed to assist dropshipping and other businesses to create successful campaigns.

This goes beyond just improving open, click and bounce rates in the short term, and comes down to actually boosting the bottom line.

Our deep-data integration encourages companies to truly understand the specific audience they serve. The result is more potential for increased sales. To put this simply, if you know your audience, it’s easier to know how to promote your products to them.

From there, creative campaigns are almost endless. 

Multi-store integration and management

If you’re currently running multiple dropshipping stores, it’s safe to say that you’re probably spinning too many plates. Having to work through the analytics on every campaign across each store not only takes time but also drains essential resources within the company that might be better spent in another department.

Dropshipping businesses need all hands on deck to stay competitive in the global marketplace. 

Because of this, Sendlane has made it possible to pull multiple stores into our platform simultaneously. The idea is to make it easier to manage all online stores at the same time.

It also offers the chance to measure engagement in a single store, with a view towards integrating the learnings into campaigns in another.

After all, one hand washes the other.

Any digital marketing strategy should always emphasize personalized, well-targeted email campaigns. 

Doing so with a dropshipping business, in particular, is a good way to maximize ROI. And having the right tools for the job makes it easier than ever.

If you’re ready to learn more about how Sendlane can help, download one of our free eBooks or get in touch with us as soon as you’re ready. 

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