MARKETING
The Ultimate Guide To Email Marketing for Your Dropshipping Business
Is a small advertising budget preventing you from driving a broad audience or generating significant traffic to your dropshipping business? Then you are unaware of the benefits of email marketing campaigns. It is a low-cost way to get in front of your customers where they spend most of their time: in their email inbox.
Email marketing is not “old-school” as you may have previously believed. It is a powerful tool that can help build strong customer relationships and increase sales.
Let’s explore some expert-recommended dropshipping email marketing strategies.
What Is Dropshipping?
In an age where the cost of living has risen dramatically, dropshipping is a great way to start making money before you have even created or developed your own products. It’s an e-commerce concept where instead of keeping the products you sell in stock; you purchase them from a third party (usually the manufacturer or wholesaler) to fulfill your orders.
It’s as simple as looking for products that are in high demand and then selling them on sites such as Shopify and Amazon. You can use dropshipping to test the market and see if your product or niche is popular.
How Does Email Marketing Work
When you use email marketing, you promote your products and services by emailing people who have signed up for your mailing list.
Email marketing for your dropshipping store involves a variety of steps, but the general procedure is as follows:
- You create a mailing list of people interested in learning more about your brand and the products you sell.
- Email marketing tools store and segment subscribers’ email addresses for future use.
- You create and send emails to communicate with your subscribers.
- Those who have subscribed to your content are more likely to engage with it and visit your online store when they receive a newsletter from you.
The Advantages of a Successful Email Marketing Campaign
Marketing your dropshipping business via email is a low-cost strategy that can yield a high return on your investment (ROI). But email marketing has other advantages too, such as:
- Boosting sales – Your subscribers are more likely to purchase from you if you send them the right message because you already know they’re interested.
- Low costs – The cost of running an email marketing campaign is lower than other marketing channels, such as paid social or PPC advertisements on Google. You should be able to see a clear difference in your revenue during your accounting process.
- Higher engagement – Marketing to people who have signed up for your mailing list means sending messages to people who have expressed an interest in your brand and products. This results in a higher level of participation.
- Easily measured – You can see how each email performs based on the data you collect through tracking and analytics. There are a lot of tools and platforms that include this feature.
- Higher reach – When you use email marketing, you can simultaneously send a message to hundreds or thousands of people. Your email list size is the only constraint.
- Easy to launch – You don’t need to know how to code to create an email marketing campaign; plenty of user-friendly platforms and tools are available for beginners.
Reasons To Use Email Marketing for Your Dropshipping Business
If you haven’t invested the time to create an email marketing plan for your dropshipping business, you’re missing out on the opportunity to make more money and build up your business bank account.
Here are four reasons you should consider adding email marketing to your strategy.
Building Long-Term Relationships With Customers
Email is an integral part of fostering customer loyalty. While Google and social media can help you find new customers, email is still the most effective method of maintaining and expanding existing business relationships. It’s one of the best ways to keep customers coming back.
Online businesses benefit from returning customers because it lowers the average acquisition cost; it costs five times as much to acquire a new customer than to keep an old one. Moreover, a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by 25% to 95%.
Can Assist In Getting Results Faster
Direct and immediate access is the hallmark of email marketing – you send an email to someone who might be interested, they open it, and then decide whether or not to take action (such as redeeming a coupon, visiting your site, checking out their abandoned cart, etc.). With email marketing, you don’t have to wait months or even years to see results.
You can get new followers and visitors to your website that have the potential to convert right away. Email marketing may produce results more quickly than other channels, even though you must continue to work on growing your subscriber list.
Email Influences Revenue Streams
One of the reasons email marketing is a good choice for dropshipping is that it can have a positive effect on all three growth multipliers at once:
- Conversions – Automating engagement and cart abandonment emails can boost revenue.
- Frequency – The number of customer purchases can be increased by cross-selling or promotional campaigns
- Average Order Value – Customers in the proper buying cycle stage can be targeted with up-selling and lifecycle marketing campaigns
Your sales results can be compounded by implementing a well-planned email marketing campaign that simultaneously targets all three revenue growth multipliers. That’s why email campaigns are worth the time and effort.
A Changing Algorithm Doesn’t Affect Email
It’s also worth noting that email isn’t affected by search engines or social media algorithms, making it a valuable asset for e-commerce businesses.
How often have you developed a social media or SEO strategy, failing because your platform decided to modify its algorithm?
If you’re a dropshipping business on a tight budget, you may not be able to afford to pay to advertise on social media sites to expand your customer base. Email marketing shines in this scenario – it’s a less expensive and more effective way to reach customers.
Five Types of Dropshipping Store Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing requires a well-thought-out strategy to achieve meaningful results. Hence, it must be set up correctly to generate sales.
Your dropshipping store can benefit from these five email marketing campaign types:
Initiation
What you want to accomplish with an initiation email marketing campaign is to get people familiar with your brand and establish a relationship with them. At this point, you’re beginning to convert your leads into returning customers.
The best time to send this email campaign is after a visitor has signed up for your mailing list.
Abandoned Cart
When it comes to regaining abandoned carts and turning them into sales, email marketing is a powerful tool.
Before launching an abandoned cart recovery email campaign, it’s crucial to know why customers are leaving their carts behind in the first place. The following are some prominent examples:
- Unexpected costs
- Complicated checkout procedure
- Customer disinterest in a purchase
- Lack of funds to purchase
- High cost of shipping
If you want to get these carts back, you need to be able to find them first. There are email marketing services like Zumvu to help you with this.
After that, you’ll want to create enticing emails to catch customers who have already left your site. Adding coupons, discounts, and product recommendations to your email messages can help you stand out from the competition.
Post-Purchase
If you feel it’s a good idea to thank your customers when they buy something, you are right. The post-purchase email campaign helps you do just that.
But you can do more than express gratitude to them. For example, you could provide customers with order tracking information or make product suggestions to solicit their opinions and recommendations.
Engagement
Keeping customers engaged with your brand is critical even after they have purchased from you. Don’t let them forget about your business, brand, and offerings!
You should send regular emails to your customers announcing new products, special sales and deals, and blog content.
Promotional
Promotional email marketing campaigns are used to notify customers and subscribers about upcoming sales events, such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the Christmas season, among other things.
Conclusion
Running a dropshipping business puts you against hundreds of rival companies selling the same products for almost the same prices. So you can’t just assume people will find your website by accident and buy something.
Instead, you should employ your available resources to attract customers. You should also ensure that all your email marketing campaigns actually end up in your customers’ inboxes. Therefore, don’t think of selecting an email marketing service as a formality – think of it as your company’s single most crucial success factor.
MARKETING
YouTube Ad Specs, Sizes, and Examples [2024 Update]
Introduction
With billions of users each month, YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and top website for video content. This makes it a great place for advertising. To succeed, advertisers need to follow the correct YouTube ad specifications. These rules help your ad reach more viewers, increasing the chance of gaining new customers and boosting brand awareness.
Types of YouTube Ads
Video Ads
- Description: These play before, during, or after a YouTube video on computers or mobile devices.
- Types:
- In-stream ads: Can be skippable or non-skippable.
- Bumper ads: Non-skippable, short ads that play before, during, or after a video.
Display Ads
- Description: These appear in different spots on YouTube and usually use text or static images.
- Note: YouTube does not support display image ads directly on its app, but these can be targeted to YouTube.com through Google Display Network (GDN).
Companion Banners
- Description: Appears to the right of the YouTube player on desktop.
- Requirement: Must be purchased alongside In-stream ads, Bumper ads, or In-feed ads.
In-feed Ads
- Description: Resemble videos with images, headlines, and text. They link to a public or unlisted YouTube video.
Outstream Ads
- Description: Mobile-only video ads that play outside of YouTube, on websites and apps within the Google video partner network.
Masthead Ads
- Description: Premium, high-visibility banner ads displayed at the top of the YouTube homepage for both desktop and mobile users.
YouTube Ad Specs by Type
Skippable In-stream Video Ads
- Placement: Before, during, or after a YouTube video.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Vertical: 9:16
- Square: 1:1
- Length:
- Awareness: 15-20 seconds
- Consideration: 2-3 minutes
- Action: 15-20 seconds
Non-skippable In-stream Video Ads
- Description: Must be watched completely before the main video.
- Length: 15 seconds (or 20 seconds in certain markets).
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Vertical: 9:16
- Square: 1:1
Bumper Ads
- Length: Maximum 6 seconds.
- File Format: MP4, Quicktime, AVI, ASF, Windows Media, or MPEG.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 640 x 360px
- Vertical: 480 x 360px
In-feed Ads
- Description: Show alongside YouTube content, like search results or the Home feed.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Square: 1:1
- Length:
- Awareness: 15-20 seconds
- Consideration: 2-3 minutes
- Headline/Description:
- Headline: Up to 2 lines, 40 characters per line
- Description: Up to 2 lines, 35 characters per line
Display Ads
- Description: Static images or animated media that appear on YouTube next to video suggestions, in search results, or on the homepage.
- Image Size: 300×60 pixels.
- File Type: GIF, JPG, PNG.
- File Size: Max 150KB.
- Max Animation Length: 30 seconds.
Outstream Ads
- Description: Mobile-only video ads that appear on websites and apps within the Google video partner network, not on YouTube itself.
- Logo Specs:
- Square: 1:1 (200 x 200px).
- File Type: JPG, GIF, PNG.
- Max Size: 200KB.
Masthead Ads
- Description: High-visibility ads at the top of the YouTube homepage.
- Resolution: 1920 x 1080 or higher.
- File Type: JPG or PNG (without transparency).
Conclusion
YouTube offers a variety of ad formats to reach audiences effectively in 2024. Whether you want to build brand awareness, drive conversions, or target specific demographics, YouTube provides a dynamic platform for your advertising needs. Always follow Google’s advertising policies and the technical ad specs to ensure your ads perform their best. Ready to start using YouTube ads? Contact us today to get started!
MARKETING
Why We Are Always ‘Clicking to Buy’, According to Psychologists
Amazon pillows.
MARKETING
A deeper dive into data, personalization and Copilots
Salesforce launched a collection of new, generative AI-related products at Connections in Chicago this week. They included new Einstein Copilots for marketers and merchants and Einstein Personalization.
To better understand, not only the potential impact of the new products, but the evolving Salesforce architecture, we sat down with Bobby Jania, CMO, Marketing Cloud.
Dig deeper: Salesforce piles on the Einstein Copilots
Salesforce’s evolving architecture
It’s hard to deny that Salesforce likes coming up with new names for platforms and products (what happened to Customer 360?) and this can sometimes make the observer wonder if something is brand new, or old but with a brand new name. In particular, what exactly is Einstein 1 and how is it related to Salesforce Data Cloud?
“Data Cloud is built on the Einstein 1 platform,” Jania explained. “The Einstein 1 platform is our entire Salesforce platform and that includes products like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud — that it includes the original idea of Salesforce not just being in the cloud, but being multi-tenancy.”
Data Cloud — not an acquisition, of course — was built natively on that platform. It was the first product built on Hyperforce, Salesforce’s new cloud infrastructure architecture. “Since Data Cloud was on what we now call the Einstein 1 platform from Day One, it has always natively connected to, and been able to read anything in Sales Cloud, Service Cloud [and so on]. On top of that, we can now bring in, not only structured but unstructured data.”
That’s a significant progression from the position, several years ago, when Salesforce had stitched together a platform around various acquisitions (ExactTarget, for example) that didn’t necessarily talk to each other.
“At times, what we would do is have a kind of behind-the-scenes flow where data from one product could be moved into another product,” said Jania, “but in many of those cases the data would then be in both, whereas now the data is in Data Cloud. Tableau will run natively off Data Cloud; Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud — they’re all going to the same operational customer profile.” They’re not copying the data from Data Cloud, Jania confirmed.
Another thing to know is tit’s possible for Salesforce customers to import their own datasets into Data Cloud. “We wanted to create a federated data model,” said Jania. “If you’re using Snowflake, for example, we more or less virtually sit on your data lake. The value we add is that we will look at all your data and help you form these operational customer profiles.”
Let’s learn more about Einstein Copilot
“Copilot means that I have an assistant with me in the tool where I need to be working that contextually knows what I am trying to do and helps me at every step of the process,” Jania said.
For marketers, this might begin with a campaign brief developed with Copilot’s assistance, the identification of an audience based on the brief, and then the development of email or other content. “What’s really cool is the idea of Einstein Studio where our customers will create actions [for Copilot] that we hadn’t even thought about.”
Here’s a key insight (back to nomenclature). We reported on Copilot for markets, Copilot for merchants, Copilot for shoppers. It turns out, however, that there is just one Copilot, Einstein Copilot, and these are use cases. “There’s just one Copilot, we just add these for a little clarity; we’re going to talk about marketing use cases, about shoppers’ use cases. These are actions for the marketing use cases we built out of the box; you can build your own.”
It’s surely going to take a little time for marketers to learn to work easily with Copilot. “There’s always time for adoption,” Jania agreed. “What is directly connected with this is, this is my ninth Connections and this one has the most hands-on training that I’ve seen since 2014 — and a lot of that is getting people using Data Cloud, using these tools rather than just being given a demo.”
What’s new about Einstein Personalization
Salesforce Einstein has been around since 2016 and many of the use cases seem to have involved personalization in various forms. What’s new?
“Einstein Personalization is a real-time decision engine and it’s going to choose next-best-action, next-best-offer. What is new is that it’s a service now that runs natively on top of Data Cloud.” A lot of real-time decision engines need their own set of data that might actually be a subset of data. “Einstein Personalization is going to look holistically at a customer and recommend a next-best-action that could be natively surfaced in Service Cloud, Sales Cloud or Marketing Cloud.”
Finally, trust
One feature of the presentations at Connections was the reassurance that, although public LLMs like ChatGPT could be selected for application to customer data, none of that data would be retained by the LLMs. Is this just a matter of written agreements? No, not just that, said Jania.
“In the Einstein Trust Layer, all of the data, when it connects to an LLM, runs through our gateway. If there was a prompt that had personally identifiable information — a credit card number, an email address — at a mimum, all that is stripped out. The LLMs do not store the output; we store the output for auditing back in Salesforce. Any output that comes back through our gateway is logged in our system; it runs through a toxicity model; and only at the end do we put PII data back into the answer. There are real pieces beyond a handshake that this data is safe.”
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