Email Marketing Strategy: Taking Full Advantage To Promote Your Vape Shop
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Suppose you are not utilizing email marketing campaigns to promote your vape shop. In that case, you’re missing out on an effortless way to build a customer base, encourage sales, and increase customer loyalty.
With email marketing, you can quickly alert your customers of brand new flavors of e-juices that just arrived at the store, plus send coupons and discounts to increase foot traffic. If you have an e-commerce vape shop, increase your customer base by having every person that visits your site sign up for your email list.
In this article, we talk about how to get started with an email marketing service, grow your audience quickly, and how tools like segmentation and automation can give your vape shop a winning edge in the industry.
Table of Contents
- Getting started with an email marketing service
- How to rapidly grow your audience
- The importance of segmenting your contact list
- Use automation to maximize your efforts
- Conclusion
Getting started with an email marketing service
Before sending your first email, you have to do two things. First, choose an email software provider, and second and most importantly, secure an email contact list.
Choosing an Email Software Provider
There are many email software providers on the internet, and choosing one can be frustrating. Here are a couple of things to look out for when selecting an email software provider:
- Does it offer a free trial?: This is number one on the list of priorities. You don’t want to invest hundreds of dollars on software you can’t test drive. You need to know how it works and what capabilities it has before committing to it and making it part of your marketing program. So before settling in on a software provider, make sure you try it out. If you only run a physical location vape shop, a free trial might be all you need to create your email campaigns.
- Does it allow for branding?: The email service provider you choose should also allow for personal branding so you can use your vape store’s logo and identity on every email.
- Templates: This is pivotal; whatever provider you end up going to has to have lots of free templates. That way, you can create different designs for the various sales for your vape shop.
- Integrations: Your email software provider has to be able to integrate with your current marketing tools. If you run your e-commerce vape shop on Shopify, making sure your email provider can integrate with Shopify is super important. Integrating with other tools and apps to create opt-in email forms is critical and something your provider should have.
- Automation: We talk about this later on in the guide, but essentially your email provider must allow you to send automatic messages based on triggers and behaviors to create a more personalized experience for your subscribers.
Securing an Email Contact List
If you own a brick and mortar vape shop, you can start building your email contact list by asking your customers after every purchase or interaction to sign up for your email list. If you have a more sophisticated point of sale system, you might be able to gather their email electronically at the time of checkout and build your contact list that way.
Similarly, on an e-commerce site, prompt your customers after a purchase to sign up for your newsletter or emails. This strategy is an excellent way to start building a contact list. In the next section, we examine other tactics that can rapidly grow your email audience.
How to rapidly grow your audience
While there are no shortcuts to growing your email list, there is one thing you can offer that will increase your contact list by leaps and bounds. You can grow your contact list with incentives.
Incentives can take the form of coupons, discounts, ebooks, free downloads, free items, free shipping- anything to lure and catch your customers' attention while getting them to submit their emails in exchange for these incentives.
For a brick and mortar vape store, you can create a reward program with featured items of the month that go on sale, and the reward program can be the incentive for clients and customers to exchange their emails.
With a vape e-commerce website, you have a few more options. Most of the time, you can present the incentives in opt-in forms. You can fine-tune your strategy with opt-in forms and offer the incentives at the customer journey's most critical times. You can present opt-in forms as welcome pop-ups, as exit-intent pop-ups, or after the customer has read a piece of your content.
Welcome Pop-ups
One of the best opt-in forms is the welcome pop-up. With a welcome pop-up, you can make sure that every visitor to your website gets offered an incentive. These incentives can range from free e-juices for new visitors, to discounts on coil building kits, to simply asking the visitor to join your email list.
Exit-Intent Pop-ups
Exit-intent pop-ups are a type of opt-in form that works the exact opposite way as to welcome pop-ups. When users move their mouse to exit out of your site, a pop-up appears, preventing them from leaving without an incentive offer. Again, you can offer free samples of disposables, a guide to mixing e-juice, or just coupons for their next purchase. The point is to get their emails before they leave.
End of Content Piece Pop-up
Finally, you can also create an opt-in form that appears after the user has read one of your pieces of content. Maybe you created a guide on adequately cleaning your vape device, and a customer found this piece of content extremely useful. You can make a pop-up that appears after the user has scrolled to the end of the content, which invites them to submit their email to be alerted when a new piece of content is uploaded.
The importance of segmenting your contact list
Now that you build a contact list segmenting your audience is crucial. By segmenting your customer base, you can personalize each email for every customer on your contact list and ensure that your emails resonate better with each of your customers. Here are some of the ways you can segment your contact list:
- By past items bought: If you have a large segment of customers that have purchased fruit-flavored e-juices, you can segment them as send them personalized emails only promoting brand new fruit-flavored e-juices.
- By recurring purchases: If you noticed that a large portion of your clients, for example, vaping veterans, have regular purchases for wires and wicking materials, you can segment them and provide them with personalized emails with discount rates on these items.
- By new subscribers: You can segment your email list by separating recent subscribers from old ones and creating campaigns dedicated to beginner vapers. You can send them informative content with everything they need to know about vaping.
- By location: If you run both a brick and mortar location and an e-commerce site segmenting your email contact list by location is essential since those closest to your physical location can receive special in-store offers.
- By type of opt-in: As discussed earlier in the article, there are many types of ways a customer can opt-in to receive your emails. Segmenting them by the initial form they opt-in is essential. For example, if a customer opt-in to receive emails because he wants discounts, send this customer only deals. If a customer opted-in because he wants to receive more content, send them only content emails with the occasional offer.
Use automation to maximize your efforts
Finally, with automation, you can create auto-responses for your segments, earn customer loyalty, and put most of your email campaigns on auto-pilot.
Auto Responses
A great thing about automation is that you can create automatic email messages based on behaviors. For example, if new subscribers opt-in to receive your newsletter on a welcome pop-up, send automated email messages thanking them for joining the list. Depending on the sophistication of your email provider, add this person to your segment of new subscribers.
Earn Customer Loyalty
Another excellent capability of automation is the ability to program emails based on the customer’s information. If, for example, in your opt-in forms, you can catch a customer’s birthday, with automation, you can send an automated email congratulating them on their special day and include a coupon for a birthday cake e-juice. This small act can make them raving fans of your vape shop.
Running On Auto-Pilot
Finally, with automation, you can create email campaigns that run on their own. There’s no need to manually send emails whenever a customer makes a purchase, writes a review, or emails you asking a question. In all three of these scenarios, you can create automated emails that either thank them for the purchase, offers them a coupon on e-juice for their review, or gives them an email with an expected reply time.
Conclusion
Email marketing is a powerful tool that, when used right, can take your vape shop to the next level. The most important thing to remember is that you find the right email marketing provider for your needs and that, at the very least, it allows for some form of automation since this will free up your time to do more of what you’re supposed to do, sell vape items.
