5 Best Practices for C2 Email Marketing

Email marketing is the lifeblood of eCommerce companies, currently playing the greatest role towards raising the customer lifetime value. Even with that being a well-known fact, very few digital savvy companies are utilizing them at the end of the funnel.

Upon winning a new account and auditing direct marketing channels such as email, we learn that companies are blasting emails via their company services with no regards to the context or content.

Personalized marketing tools like C2 solve this problem, encouraging marketers to adjust the content to the context of the season as well as the target segment being aimed at such as moms, dads, occupations etc. In doing so, email marketing begins to a play a more central role in the revenue driving ecosystem of the customer funnel.

Here are some of the ways to leverage C2 in 2017:

Cross Sell & Upsell

While it's a common tactic for eCommerce retailers to employ Google tags and pixel tracking to remarket, retarget and upsell, the approach somewhat appears unused in email marketing. Fix this by adding recommendation modules that have been educated in the complimentary items to the one's browsed or purchased for such as batteries for a clock or a vase for flowers.

Are We There Yet?

After a sale has been made and you're about to send a shipping notification, top it off with an open time personalization tech that updates the progress of the order. Doing so requires minor API setup but the value delivered to the customer, especially in urgent situations, is huge. Placing this information within an email keeps your customer engaged, instead of them checking the UPS or Aramex site.

Reward and Encourage Loyalty

If your brand has a loyalty program, look to gamification by sharing a leader-board of the most loyal customers and showing your intended audience a "progress bar" of their earned points. Segments that have not signed up for the program should be prompted to do so, offering a minor trinket as a reward. Here's a copy to try for the first email, "Earn 100 points from this purchase. Click here to create a loyalty account by [insert date] and earn these points".

Rally Customer Advocacy

Anytime your brand has an event, ideally, a consumer-centric one like a brand activation or a sports event sponsorship, schedule your C2 to send them information about these events within order confirmation emails. Just like the Order Track idea above, you can employ countdown clocks via open-time personalization tech to create a sense of urgency around the event or show cut off dates to register interest/tickets around the event.

Reward Customer Advocacy

Every customer that is on social yearns for more views, reach, comments and "reactions" to their posts. So whenever a customer shares his or her positive post-purchase experience on their social media of preference, celebrate it. Take that post, slap it up on your social media page, tag the fan and promote it. Depending on the medium - heart or repost (Instagram) or retweet (Twitter). Doing so directs traffic to your fans, rewarding them for showing off their purchases and also allows new prospects to see relatable people using and enjoying your products.

Take these C2 ideas with you and apply them to any industry. They've worked for our clients in the B2C, B2B and G2P space a number of times. Just remember that, depending on your country, regulations around email usage vary. So be sure to fully understand the laws before implementing transactional emails.