By targeting existing customers through Email Marketing, a client of IMP easily surpassed slow summer months. Only in 3 days, their Summer Sale campaign reached more than $230,000 in revenue, over 50% of which was from Email Marketing.
1. Background
Planning a summer promotion for any e-commerce business is essential since this is when people tend to shop less than any other season of the year. (1)
Further research revealed that consumers are busy throughout the summer due to travel, vacations, and additional spending like summer camps, resulting in low sales.
Our client experienced the same situation. Hence, we worked together to create an effective Summer Sale promotion through Email Marketing to solve the problem.
2. Implementation
Without a proper plan, improving sales in low seasons like summer could significantly cause the brand to lose money. With that in mind, we used Email Marketing to engage with existing customers because of the three following benefits:(2)
- Existing customers usually spend three times more than new customers
- Chances of convincing current customers to shop can be up to 70%, while new customers are only 20%
- Profits can improve by around 25-95% with a 5% investment in customer retention
Here’s the detail of the Summer Sale that we planned with our client:
However, according to our experience, sending emails to all customers can lead to lower engagement. Therefore, we divided recipients into different groups and tailored the content of Email Marketing to each segment, which is called customer segmentation.
For this campaign, we only sent emails to active customers for the last 60 days and have yet to purchase via email or ads. This approach helped us personalize each customer’s experience and avoid annoying them.
Following the approach, we created an email series that includes 4 different content to send throughout Summer Sale:
(the following examples are from other brands)
3. Results
Through personalized experiences for different segmentations, the campaign brought the following results:
4. Conclusion
Summertime is not necessarily a low peak as long as businesses come up with suitable promotions and choose the right channels. Here are some best practices in implementing effective promotions for e-commerce businesses:
- Selecting products associated with the season can drive sales effectively.
- Offering deep discounts with limited time can create the fear of missing out (FOMO) for customers.
- Sending a teaser email to generate curiosity and gain more traffic on the sale starting day.
- Segmenting email lists can help businesses send content to the right potential customers.
- The limited time of happy hour can improve the conversion rate effectively.
If your business desires to improve sales in the low months as above, contact IMP today for consultation!
