7 Reason Why Your eCommerce Emails Disappoint You

Have you noticed how many eCommerce stores there are now?

Competition is rife (to the least!)

However, you’ve got things to squeeze more conversions out of your traffic right?

And for most stores, email marketing is right up there with the best of your marketing efforts…rightly so.

Now, I don’t know about you, but most of what I see about eCom emails is an agency or a software company telling me how using their software or their agency would boost email revenue by 8 BILLIONS DOLLARS a week!

(does evil laugh…mwah hah hah haaah!)

I joke of course, but it feels like that right?

As an email marketing manager who sends about 7 million emails per year, I’ve found out a few things that work…

…and a few things that don’t work. Dammit. Those days sucked.

Cross check my 7 reasons for poor conversion below, with your own eCommerce emails, to avoid what’s been affectionately labelled…a stinker of a campaign.

1 — Boring Subject Line

“Offer Ends Midnight!”

I’ve used that loads of times…sigh…

It used to be ok, a few years back. Now it’s dull. Everyone has an offer ending midnight, everyday. Kick back and put a little more thought into how you can inject some curiosity into the subject line.

Adversely, using puns aren’t that good either. I’ve tested them. They lose a lot.

2 — Bad/No Headline

You know, the humble headline gets forgotten about a lot in eCommerce emails. But why?

Let’s look at the job of a headline:

To get the next line read.

In an eCom email it can do that, or if you have an image straight after, your headline should be sucking people into that image even more.

From my experience, tying your headline into what your image is doing works wonders. Give it a try.

3 — Boring/Copy & Paste Bullets

If you use bullets in your email copy, are you fully leveraging their awesome power?

The old “copy & paste job” from the manufacturers copy will not cut it here.

Bullet writing is a skill in itself. Too much to cover in this article. But I can tell you this…

…go benefit first, feature second.

Spend some time on them, give them a little TLC, and you’ll find that your customers who like to read will hone in on these and be enticed to “go to offer”…

4 — Repeated CTA’s?

And bullets leads me nicely onto this one. After someone has read the bullets, give them something to click.

In fact, repeating your CTA’s (usually buttons that say “Shop Now” or “Go To Offer”) will increase your click throughs.

No, they won’t help your email win design awards, but what ‘sells’ rarely does.

Add one in the first 600 pixels.

Add one after the bullets.

Add one after each section of your email…and be sure to finish with one too!

5 — Are The Reviews Relevant?

“It does what it said it would do.”

Said Gary.

Great, nice one Gary.

This type of review does not belong in your email. It’s too generic, too dull, and I always feel like they’re a bit passive aggressive!

Do you get that vibe too?

If you don’t have reviews that say something specific (I’ll dedicate an entire article to this soon) then don’t use any.

Social proof is great, but it’s got to be great social proof.

6 — Low Friction Button Copy

Test this.

It’s not at the very top of the things to test in your emails…but it does make the list.

Personally, I’ve always found it easy to beat “Shop Now”.

Can you use something more specific?

Can you use something that links in to your offer or product?

I once used “Show Me The Wok”. So simple. It worked a treat.

Things like this squeeze those extra few more percentage points of conversion from your emails.

7 — Did They Feel the Benefit of Your Product?

This is a tricky one to quantify. Allow me to break down what it means first though.

Your product will have a benefit. It solves a problem.

Did your customer feel that your product will solve their problem?

From the content of your email, could they imagine themselves using it? Could they picture the results from using it?

Creativity and quality direct response copywriting is needed here to get your customers to feel the benefits of owning your product.

Bonus Reason 8 — Bad Offer

Yep. Sometimes you can get everything right, have everything optimized…but you still barely shift a few units.

In these situations, it can be your offer. “Don’t ride a loser” I once read in a business type book (think it was one of those ‘Rich Dad’ books).

If the offer sucks, stop running it.

And there you have it!

7 (+ 1 bonus) reasons why your ecommerce emails may not be hitting the dizzying heights you were told they would.

Check your emails against these and you won’t go far wrong.

If you get stuck, find a pro to help you out.