How To Use Email Marketing To Sell More Without Discounting
Do you find it difficult to generate sales without relying on discounts?
Discounts, flash sales and seasonal sales generate a lot of hype for ecommerce businesses, but they can do more harm than good in the long run.
In this post, we examine the dangers of discounts and how you can use email marketing to sell more without relying on discounting.
Why you shouldn’t rely on discounts to generate sales
Discounts are a sales tactic the retail industry has used for centuries to increase revenue. They’re particularly useful for convincing potential customers to take the plunge and purchase their first product from you.
But if you’re only able to generate revenue for your business by offering discounts, you have a serious problem on your hands that signals poor marketing strategies, products that just aren’t that good and a website that’s difficult to navigate.
You should investigate each one of these potential problems, but we’re going to focus on just one of them in this post.
For now, beware of the dangers of over discounting as discounts may:
- Decrease the amount of revenue you generate from sales
- Negatively impact the perception of your products
- Cause you to rely on a single marketing strategy
Let’s discuss each of these briefly.
How discounts impact your sales
Whether you make your products yourself, hire a manufacturer or dropship, each product you sell costs money to produce.
As such, you need to sell each product at a larger price than it took you to produce that product. The difference between these two figures is your profit margin.
When you offer too many discounts, you chip away at your profit margins.
You may not operate at a loss, but relying on discounts to bring in business will lead to less revenue.
You can argue that that revenue wouldn’t even be where it’s at without those discounts, but it’d be much more productive for you to figure out why you can only generate sales when you offer discounts than it would for you to plan the next type of discount you should offer.
Why discounts are bad for your brand
Without shopping there, what is your impression of products you find at your local discount store? What about online shopping platforms like Temu and TikTok Shop?
Both of these platforms offer cheap products, but whether or not those products are of an acceptable level of quality is not important.
What’s important is that because these products are available at such cheap prices, they’re perceived as being cheap and are, therefore, unworthy of paying full, “name brand” prices for.
If you offer too many discounts, you may train your customer base into perceiving your product as a “cheap” brand that should only be bought at a discount.
Why discounts should never be your only marketing strategy
You probably have a few social media pages you post to and probably an email list. You might even have a blog.
All of these are fantastic marketing channels, but they’re not marketing strategies on their own.
In truth, if you only generate sales by promoting discounts to your audience, you’ve pigeonholed yourself into relying on a single marketing strategy.
Not only does this particular strategy cut into your profit margins, relying on a single strategy is dangerous. You find that your customers suddenly stop responding to discounts one day.
You’ll need to scramble to find another marketing strategy as quickly as you can if you want to maintain your revenue stream.
It’s best to use multiple strategies and optimize them as you go. That way, if one becomes less effective, you have others you can rely on.
Why email marketing is an effective marketing tool for ecommerce
When you acquire a new customer through your ecommerce store, you have the opportunity to acquire a new email subscriber as well.
In fact, you should.
Not only does an email marketing tool make it easy to set up transactional emails, like Order Placed and abandoned cart emails, it also allows you to set up segments and powerful marketing automations.
You can create two separate segments for customers and non-customers, and set up different segments for each product category you offer as well.
Marketing automations allow you to send specific emails to subscribers based on actions they take while subscribed to your email list.
For example, if a customer purchases a particular product, you can send them tutorials on how to use and maintain that product.
We’ll get to all the different ways you can use email marketing to increase sales in a bit.
What ecommerce businesses should look for in an email marketing tool
The most important feature ecommerce businesses need to consider when looking for an ecommerce tool is whether or not that tool integrates with the ecommerce platform they use.
Decide on which email marketing tool you’re most interested in, and have a look through the integrations it offers.
For example, MailerLite states they have native integrations with WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Wix and Square Ecommerce.
If you don’t see your ecommerce platform listed, look through the integrations offered by your ecommerce platform instead, and see if they offer one for the email marketing tool you’re interested in.
If not, look at Zapier. This is a third-party app you can use to integrate two apps that don’t have native integrations with each other.
For example, MailerLite will only connect to our favorite ecommerce platform Sellfy through Zapier integrations.
In my opinion, it’s best to choose an email marketing tool that integrates natively with your ecommerce platform so you have access to more features.
For example, with MailerLite’s native integration with WooCommerce, you can create automations that trigger when a customer places an order for a specific product or from a specific category.
It’s triggers like these that allow you to add customers to specific segments.
However, with MailerLite’s Sellfy integration through Zapier, you can only set up actions that are based on one of three triggers: customer places a new order, customer subscribes to your email list, and customer unsubscribes from your email list.
There’s not much you can do with this type of integration.
Selly does offer its own email marketing functionality that includes segmentation, but it doesn’t offer automation. Be wary of technicalities like this while choosing an email marketing app for your ecommerce platform.
Speaking of which, the only other features you truly need from your email marketing tool are segmentation and automation.
Segmentation allows you to organize your subscribers into different lists based on actions they take while subscribed to your email list.
For ecommerce, those actions might include purchasing a product, not purchasing a product and purchasing a specific product.
Automation are workflows you can set up that cause specific actions to happen when customers activate specific triggers.
For example, if you offer two different versions of the same product in a WooCommerce store, let’s say Product A and Product B, you can create an automation workflow in MailerLite that adds a subscriber to Segment: Product A when they purchase Product A.
The only other features you should be worried about are email templates, an email builder and cost.
Email templates are fully-designed emails you can import into a tool’s email editor so you don’t have to start from scratch. An email builder (sometimes called an editor) is a tool that allows you to create customized email designs with a drag-and-drop editor.
For example, with MailerLite you get access to pre-made templates and a drag & drop editor:
How to generate more sales with email marketing
1. Create ecommerce-based segments
Segmentation is the basis of a strong email marketing strategy.
Let’s talk about what happens when you create a new email draft in your email marketing tool of choice.
By default, that email will be sent to your entire email list, a list that contains every customer who’s ever purchased from you, blog readers who have joined your list to receive your newsletter and social media users who subscribed to download a free resource from you.
But you want to promote a new product you’re offering, and the only way you know how to get your subscribers from the email you send them and into your store is to offer them a discount.
If you segment your email list, you can choose to send this email to customers you know would be interested in it based on purchases they’ve made in the past.
You can even send two different promotional emails: one for customers and one for subscribers who haven’t bought anything from your store, yet.
Here are common ecommerce-based segments you should add to your email list:
- Customers – Subscribers who have made a purchase from you
- Non-Customers – Subscribers who haven’t made a purchase from you
- Product-based segment – A different segment for each product you offer
- Category-based segment – A different segment for each product category you offer. This is useful if you offer too many products and cannot reasonably create a different segment for each. In this case, create segments for product categories in MailerLite and tags for individual products
Some email marketing integrations allow you to create specific segments.
For example, MailerLite’s Shopify integration allows you to create segments that are based on customers’ purchase history, such as first-time customers, customers who have spent more than $500 in your store and customers who have shopped at your store more than five times.
2. Recommend complementary products
If you offer a lot of different products, chances are you offer products that go together.
For example, a guitar store might offer guitars, pedals, amps, straps, cases, strings, picks and more.
Let’s say your customer recently purchased a guitar from you but didn’t buy anything else. In this case, you can set up an automation trigger that will automatically send that customer a promotional email for a specific guitar pedal, one you feel complements that specific guitar model best.
Automation workflows allow you to choose how long to wait between actions in a sequence. It’s best to wait a week or two after your customer made their purchase to send the email. That way, they’ve had time to receive the product and test it out.
If you create tags for individual products, you can make sure this email only sends to customers who are new to the tag for that specific guitar model but do not have a tag assigned to them for that specific guitar pedal.
Fortunately, most email marketing tools allow you to add products to your email complete with customizable Buy Now buttons.
3. Recommend similar products
You can also set up an automation workflow that recommends similar products to your customer.
It’s more effective to send them emails about complementary products, but once a month has passed after their initial purchase, it might be a good idea to start promoting other products you offer to them.
For our example, you could send them promotional emails for other guitars.
4. Send customers exclusive offers
Not all offers you send to your customers have to be based on discounts.
You can also incentivize customers to make purchases by sending them exclusive offers, such as first-access to a new product you plan on launching soon.
This can even be a way for you to pre-sell products you’re not sure your customers would be interested in.
5. Use storytelling
Encourage subscribers to open your emails by forming emotional connections with them.
Share a personal story as it relates to your niche, a story about your business and how you formed it, a story about why you sell the kinds of products you sell, etc.
6. Showcase your products
MailerLite has a gallery block in their email builder that’s good for this tip.
Dedicate individual emails to specific products. Showcase their best features and how those features would benefit your customer.
You can also send mini tutorials to your customers that showcase products more effectively.
7. Encourage customers to engage
MailerLite has a block in their email editor that allows you to add quizzes and surveys to emails.
You can use this block to have your customer take a mini quiz that recommends a specific product to them or have your subscriber speak their mind about something in a short survey.
8. Tease product launches
MailerLite has a countdown timer block.
If you’re about to release a new product in your store, share promotional emails with your customers that tease that product.
Use the countdown timer block to let your subscriber know exactly when to expect the product in your store.
Final thoughts
Discounts can help you increase sales but you’re also going to lose out on revenue and cause yourself a bunch of other problems.
The most significant being that people will start to consider your products to be cheap.
It also trains them to leave your site and hunt for steeper discounts (or specific discount codes). Or even hold off buying altogether.
But with email marketing you can use automation to encourage potential customers to make a purchase without resorting to discounting.