Some say the sweetest sound any human being can hear is their own name. It’s true, when we hear or see our names, our attention tends to be more raptly focused—at least momentarily. As an ecommerce bookseller, you can use that moment to attract customers to your store with a personalized email marketing message. However, personalization means more than just including a name. Here are some other ways to make your messages ring true for recipients.
Get to Know Your Customers
Before you can send a personalized message, you have to take some time to understand the receiver. There are a number of ways to do this in ecommerce. You can run surveys to learn what’s important to your customers. You can analyze your traffic to see where your buyers come from, when they tend to log on and which pages they frequent most often. Offering your visitors the opportunity to skip site registration by using their social log ins will give you access to their social media data. With this information in hand, you can more clearly understand their motivations and craft emails speaking directly to them.
Craft Messages Based Upon Their Actions
The discount ticket sales site Goldstar monitors users’ behavior and sends an email if a user shows an interest in a show—but doesn’t purchase tickets. You can use this same tactic when you’re considering how to sell ebooks online. If a user lingers for a while looking at one of your offerings, takes the time to read a chapter excerpt (you do offer those — right?), but doesn’t purchase the book before logging off, you can trigger an email reminding them of their interest in the book, including another excerpt and letting them know it’s still available.
Personalization Works Both Ways
Let’s put ourselves on the other side of the transaction for a moment. You get an email from YourEbookSite.com featuring upcoming releases, the genres of which have been culled from your demonstrated preferences on the site. However, “Elizabeth” signs it and right above her signature is a smiling picture of her reading a book, instead of the site’s logo. Suddenly, there’s a person at YourEbookSite.com speaking directly to you — and her recommendations are right up your alley. This will hold your attention better than an obvious e-blast from a faceless company.
Target Specific Landing Pages
As an online ebook seller, you have a distinct advantage over other retailers in that every customer purchase gives you some insight into the way their minds work. Do they like action-based fiction, financial intrigue or biographies of historical figures? Whatever they prefer, you can group these categories onto landing pages dedicated to the genre and send customers email messages with calls to action leading to those specific pages. This way, instead of rooting around your site looking for something they like, the customer is led directly to a page full of the exact genre they prefer. Conversion is bound to result.
While this might sound somewhat complex at first, given the analytical tools available to you now, enacting these strategies is much easier than you think. Spend some time analyzing the data your customers leave when they visit your site with this in mind and the patterns will begin to emerge. What’s more, you can employ elements of this tactic in every aspect of the message—including the subject line. An exceptionally powerful tool, personalization gets customers engaged, ups your open rate and improves conversions.
