Considering how cutthroat the dropshipping industry is, you can’t afford to lose even one client. Email marketing is one of the cheapest ways to attract new customers and keep existing ones happy.
What exactly does this device do?
How about the best service providers for a modest dropshipping business?
What is included in email marketing?
Email marketing is often reduced by recipients to weekly newsletters that are ignored or deleted. That is completely not the case. In fact, there should be no fewer than six distinct email types included in any email marketing campaign for a dropshipping eCommerce store.
Welcome email
When a customer gives you their email address, like on a subscription form or after making a purchase, you can send them this.
Abandoned cart emails
It has been proven through studies that emails sent after a shopper has abandoned their cart have a higher conversion rate than other types of emails.
Discounts & special offers.
To encourage people to sign up for your newsletter, you can offer them special deals in exchange for their email address.
Follow-ups
. Once a customer has made a purchase, they should be presented with an offer for a related item. If someone buys flower seeds from you, you could throw in some free fertilizer or a seed-starting light.
Holiday promotions
Online holiday shopping in the US brought in over $120 billion during 2018. A lot more buying is done by consumers in the run-up to the holidays. Consequently, you shouldn’t ignore the opportunity to boost sales on holidays like Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Chinese New Year, Christmas, and others.
Requests for reviews
Having positive reviews from satisfied customers can boost traffic to your online shop. It’s best to wait a week or two after a customer receives their order before contacting them to request feedback. You could even try requesting a picture showing the customer with their new purchase.
Good email design
You should make sure that all of your marketing emails stand out visually. To the rescue, the vast majority of email marketing services make it simple to create emails that look like they were designed by pros. Mailing list management apps like MailChimp and SendInBlue, among others, offer an array of free, customizable templates for any and all events. You have complete control over the look and feel by inserting your own logo and images, changing the headings, and more. Make sure the fonts and color scheme of all your marketing materials are consistent with your brand.
Take SendInBlue’s aesthetically pleasing sample for example:
Compliance
Discounts, special offers, and other such magnets are effective ways to bring in new customers. However, keep in mind that when communicating with users based in the EU, you are legally required to detail EVERY SINGLE KIND of email you intend to send them. For this reason, if your call to action is “subscribe to receive exclusive deals,” you may legally send them only emails advertising such deals. Your GDPR notice should specify whether or not you plan to send a newsletter or other types of emails. To learn more about what should be included in a GDPR notice, click here.
It’s all about deliverability
None of the top platforms are completely free, but you may want a free service if you’re just getting started with your dropshipping eCommerce business. However, the vast majority of them have a free plan that allows you to send a certain number of messages per day or month.
A visual builder is another feature of a top-notch email marketing platform. There should be a library of available templates and a simple interface for creating new ones. If you’ve never taken a design course in your life, you can still make beautiful emails with this.
But there’s something else essential that’s often overlooked. The term for this is “deliverability.”
As you can see, it doesn’t matter how lovely your email is if it’s destined for the spam folder. The same goes if there is a delay in delivery or if delivery is skipped altogether.
The inbox is the desired destination for your email. This depends on how reliable the provider’s mailing server is in the eyes of your customers’ Internet service provider.
The deliverability rates of various email marketing services vary greatly. EmailToolTester found that 84% of all emails are successfully delivered to recipients’ inboxes around the world. However, this figure can be as high as 95% for some services and as low as 40% for others.
Service platforms to plan your email marketing strategy
What follows is an analysis of three email marketing services that provide everything a dropshipping store could want (free plan, builder, etc.). They all have a deliverability rate of 85% or higher, which is the most important metric.
MailerLite
There are many similarities between MailerLite and MailChimp, but MailerLite is much more affordable. You can reach up to a thousand people with the Free Forever plan each month, and you can send as many as twelve thousand emails total.
Pros:
A perfect choice for newcomers because it is uncluttered and easy to understand;
Extremely high rate of delivery (nearly 95% and rising);
Excellent drop-and-drag interface;
To track the origin of each subscriber.
Cons
No sophisticated bots, no social media monitoring, no premade designs.
MailChimp
When it comes to email marketing, MailChimp is by far the most well-known and utilized service. A 90.6% deliverability rate proves its efficacy. With the free plan, you can have up to 2,000 subscribers and send 10,000 emails per month, with a 2,000 daily limit.
Pros
Free plan includes some basic templates;
Simple to operate;
Multiple platforms can be connected (Zapier, WordPress, Elementor, etc.);
There is a way to bring in premade email formats
Cons
Constructing an automated system calls for time and skill;
lacks tag support (which hampers list segmentation);
If you’re using the free tier, all of your subscribers will be added to a single audience.
SendInBlue
SendInBlue’s free plan is fantastic because there are no limits on the number of contacts you can have. Specifically, you can only send 300 emails per day, which equates to about 9000 per month. The number of emails you send per month is the primary factor in determining which SendInBlue plan best suits your needs.
Pros
Automation tools that pack a punch; a well-stocked resource library;
Setting up transactional email is simple;
Designed specifically for online shopping
Cons
On the free plan, the SendInBlue branding is permanently displayed.
Only the more expensive plans allow for multiple users.
The excellent landing page editor is not included in the free plan, though it is available on all paid tiers.
Only services with a permanent free tier are included in this list. Of course, if you’re willing to shell out some cash, you can also try out some other fantastic email marketing platforms:
ActiveCampaign has the highest deliverability rate (93.8%). It costs only $9 per month to send an unlimited number of emails.
GetResponse boasts a deliverability rate of 85.4% and plans start at $15/month for 1000 subscribers.
Great deliverability (91,4%) with ConvertKit, but pricey at $29/mo for up to 1000 subscribers and $49/mo for up to 3000 subscribers.
Bonus tips and bottom line
A drop shipping company can benefit greatly from an organized email marketing campaign. Nonetheless, the efficiency of your website is equally important as the content of your emails. The customer may click through from an email, but if the page loads too slowly, they will not stay. As a result, before you even think about crafting an email marketing campaign, you need to focus on improving your pages’ load times.
Choose a reliable and quick hosting service, as this will affect how quickly your store displays products. The importance of fast load times cannot be overstated in a field as competitive as this one.
All the site’s images need to be optimized, which means they need to be compressed as much as possible without losing quality. This will, once again, increase your site’s speed.
Create engaging product descriptions and individual meta descriptions for every product. It’s a huge job, so you might want to hire a professional copywriter.
You’ll be up against hundreds of other stores selling the same products at nearly the same prices if you run a dropshipping business. As a result, you can’t hope for random visitors to your site to spontaneously make a purchase. Instead, you should employ every strategy at your disposal to win over customers. In addition, your marketing emails should properly format and arrive in your recipients’ inboxes. Choosing an email marketing service is not something to be taken lightly. If anything, you should view it as the most important factor in the success of your company.
To stand out, you need to find a reliable supplier who can get your products to customers quickly and help you with any logistics problems that may come up.