6 Tips For Sending Better Marketing Emails

Are you wondering what you should do with your customers’ emails after you’ve collected them during checkout?

Obtaining email addresses creates a direct line of communication between you and the people you know who like to buy the things you sell. If you haven’t explored email marketing yet, you may not be aware of how valuable your customers’ emails are and what you can do with them to grow your business.

In this article, we’ll share six tips you can use to maximize the full potential of customer email addresses for your online business.

1. Collecting Your Customer’s Email

Before we cover how to leverage your customers’ email addresses, let’s quickly go over the best way to collect them.

WP Simple Pay, the best Stripe payments plugin for WordPress, lets you easily accept payments on your site without having to set up a shopping cart. The plugin offers a drag-and-drop payment form builder that allows you to customize your forms for maximum conversions. One of the best parts about the plugin is that you can use it to edit, add, and remove form fields to help you get the data you need, including your customer’s email.

Since the easiest way to get your customer’s email is to simply ask for it during the checkout process, WP Simple Pay makes it easy to accomplish this.

In fact, many of the plugin’s pre-made payment form templates already have the email address field built into the payment form for you.

WP Simple Pay lets you ask for additional information, like your customer’s name and shipping address. It also allows you to ask questions and even gives you a text field option that lets your customers write full responses to your specific inquiries.

Additionally, you can set up a checkbox that asks your customers to sign up for your newsletter.

While there are many reasons why you should be using dropdowns, text fields, and checkboxes to collect information from your customers, we’ll be focusing on the email address for the purpose of this guide.

2. Ask For Permission to Send Emails

First and foremost, the best practice is to always ask permission to send your customers emails. Since they’re typically expecting nothing more than a payment confirmation email, you should explicitly ask them if it’s okay to send additional emails regarding new products, services, announcements, links to blog posts, upcoming sales, and more.

We’ve already gone over how easy it is to add a checkbox to your payment form that already has Yes selected by default using WP Simple Pay. This means they would need to uncheck the box to deny you permission to send marketing emails.

Since you’re already collecting your customers’ email addresses through your payment forms, it makes sense to squeeze as much value out of them as possible with email marketing.

While technically, you have implied permission to send emails because the recipient is a customer, you’ll have better results with your email marketing (and annoy fewer people) if you only send emails to people who have given express permission.

With express permission, you’ll see…

• Higher open and click-through rates because people want to read your emails.
• Improved deliverability because fewer people will mark your emails as spam.
• Achieve better ROI (because you won’t pay to send to emails to people who don’t want to read your content or engage with your brand.

3. Add Your Customer’s Email to Your Mailing List

While WordPress is capable of functioning like a mail server, and there are plugins that let you send emails directly from your WordPress dashboard, that’s never efficient. If you want to take email marketing seriously, you’ll need an email marketing tool.

Many tools are available, like ActiveCampaign, Drip, and MailChimp. These are all great entry-level email marketing tools because they’re user-friendly and allow you to set up automation to help you streamline this process.

WP Simple Pay offers powerful built-in integration to automatically add your new customers’ emails to ActiveCampaign, Drip, and MailChimp. It also offers automation with Google Sheets that adds your new customers directly to a row in a Google Sheet after they’ve made a purchase using your payment forms.

4. What to Send to Your Customers in Your Emails

Once your customers’ email addresses are loaded into your email marketing tool, the next step is to start sending emails.

What exactly should you send?

1. Valuable and Educational Content

Show off your knowledge and expertise by giving away free content that helps your customers solve their problems.

You might share…

• Listicles
• Infographics
• Case studies
• Interviews
• Tutorials
• Industry news
• Reviews and comparisons
• Resources
• Checklists
• Inspirational stories
• Presentations
• FAQs
• Screencasts
• Beginner’s guides
• Notes from a recent conference
• Cheatsheets
• Galleries of images
• Summaries of other people’s work
• Content roundups

How you format your content will depend on the content itself. If you want to share videos, image-heavy articles, interactive elements, or 500+ word posts, you’ll probably want to publish this on your blog and use emails with links to drive traffic. However, if your content is easily consumable in an email, package it as-is for your customers.

2. Requests for Feedback

Email is a great way to collect feedback from your customers about your products and services, your site, their payment or donation experience, and your business or organization as a whole.

Capturing this kind of data during the transaction gets in the way of the transaction. Generally, it’s best to reduce the number of steps your customers have to take to complete their purchase. Each step they have to take reduces the number of people who follow through, so fewer steps mean more conversions.

You can request feedback via email by…

• Asking them to reply to your messages with their thoughts.
• Asking them to fill out a form regarding their experience.
• Asking them to take a survey
• Asking them to submit a testimonial or review for their purchase
• Asking them to participate in an interview or case study

3. Announcements and Updates

Keep your customers informed about changes to your business and products by using your email list as a platform to make announcements. This information might make a customer buy from you again or convince someone who was on the fence to take the plunge.

Here are some things you might announce:

• New product features, improvements, and bug fixes
• Upcoming sales or deals
• Any time you’re mentioned in a media publication.
• Giveaways or limited-time offers
• Updates to old information, like contact information or policies
• New locations or staff

4. Customer Success Stories

Sharing customer success stories is a great way to convert on-the-fence subscribers and encourage old customers to buy again. Show how you worked with your customers to help them achieve their goals.

Don’t be afraid to dig into the details, too. Use data and specific stories to brag about your work. This also works well for nonprofit organizations. You should be sending regular email updates to your donors with information about what you’re working on.

For more information, see our detailed guide on how to use email campaigns to collect donations.

5. What Not to Send Your Customers in Emails

Whatever you do, don’t send low-investment content. Don’t email your customers just because you haven’t emailed them in a while. Always make sure you have something worth sending.

That goes along with avoiding sending unsolicited emails. If someone didn’t voluntarily give you their email address, you don’t have permission to send emails to it. They will almost definitely mark your address as spam, which can affect your sending reputation and email deliverability.

6. Respect Your Customers’ Emails

Respecting your customers ‘ email addresses is the most important thing you can do with them. Don’t sell or give away their information. Don’t flood them with emails, and don’t send content that doesn’t relate to you or your business.

If you take email marketing seriously, your customers will reward you with regular engagement, repeat business, and advocacy for your brand.

There you have it! We hope this article has helped you learn how to leverage your customers’ email addresses to send better marketing emails.

If you liked this article, you might also want to check out our guide on how to create per-form email confirmation messages in WordPress.

What are you waiting for? Get started with WP Simple Pay today!

To read more articles like this, follow us on Facebook and Twitter.