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What to consider when managing email marketing for ecommerce promotions

If you work in email marketing at an ecommerce business, you might run into the challenge of planning a discount promotion that you cannot advertise on the product detail pages or other aspects of the website during the promotion. Now, some of you might say, an ecommerce business where you can't quickly change the look of the ecommerce pages on which that business lives? And email marketing for ecommerce is my job function?

Yes, it happens, and I'm guessing there are also about as many of us who have had this experience as those who are wondering why that would ever be an issue to consider.

When this happens, it's a challenge, but it's definitely possible to create a seamless email-to-site experience for a discount promotion when you can't include all of the information you would like to on the product detail pages. Here's how:

  • Provide specific instructions for applying the discount if the promo information isn't onsite. For instance, if customers have to enter the promo code at the last step of the checkout experience, let them know this upfront so they don't get confused. If the promo code needs to be entered in all caps to work, let them know in the email.
  • Show people in the email what the discount looks like for the items you're promoting by sharing the original, crossed out prices and the new prices with the savings they'll get by using the promo code. You may not have this feature once they get to the website, but by then they'll know and have a picture in their mind of the discount they'll get once they apply the promo code in the checkout process. Even though people can mentally calculate what a 20% discount on one of your products is, seeing it right in front of them before they even decide to go to your site can help influence their decision to buy.
  • Create landing pages that are all about the promotion and that feature the products you want to promote in this marketing campaign. Often, although you can't change the information on the product detail pages, the checkout experience, or the header on every page of your website, you can update landing pages or create new ones for a promotion like this.
  • Consider what you put on site if you're running a savings vs. control test. If you're sending customers in these groups to two different landing pages, make sure that they are stand-alone pages and cannot be accessed through other parts of the site. It may sound obvious, but it'll be better to isolate all activity on both landing pages to traffic from the marketing emails, and if you don't make a concerted effort to do this, you may have extra traffic unrelated to your test muddying your results.
  • Create emails that highlight your promotion, make the value of it clear to the customer, get people excited about it, and get them to want to buy, but make sure that the email still clearly flows to the on-site experience. For example, feel free to experiment with how your emails look in terms of layout, colors, or overall design, but don't create something that is so different that people might not recognize the site they're on once they click through. Since sometimes you might not know where that line between exciting but relevant or exciting yet unrelated email is, this could be one of the tests. In other words, test how different you can make your emails while still getting people interested in your site and not turned off by any major differences between the experiences.
  • If you know that layout and information on the product detail pages is often confusing to your customers, based on your other data, consider including price, format, and any other essential descriptors of your products that customers would want to know in the email.

Do you have other tips that have helped you manage email marketing for ecommerce promotions where you are limited on the website with what you can do to explain the details of and how to apply the discount.


Interested in more ideas on email marketing? Read Clear Your Cache's take on open rate analysis, "When you shouldn't use open rates to evaluate subject line tests."

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