Are you looking for a simple way to increase sales on your San Diego website? Good old-fashioned email marketing is still one of the most effective online marketing tactics for ecommerce retailers, studies show. For example, according to the Direct Marketing Association, email outperforms social media advertising by a factor of three to one when considered in sales per advertising dollar spent. During Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2012, the number of online shoppers who made a purchase after a social media site referred them to an ecommerce site decreased by 26 percent from 2011, according to IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark. In fact, “social sales” accounted for less than 0.5 percent of all Internet sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday,.

Since we know email marketing works to drive ecommerce traffic, try these tactics to create more effective email messages.

• Start simple. Good old-fashioned limited-time offers still engage customers to visit your site. Use a subject line such as “Final Hour” or “Friday-Only Sale” to get customers excited about clicking through to your site.
• Be specific. Targeted email messages based on customer behavior are more effective than general emails. Create targeted emails based on what products customers are browsing on your site, the size of past orders, or what they’ve purchased in the past six months.
• Move those shopping carts. Abandoned shopping carts are a headache for etailers, but they can be a cash cow if you use email right. Send triggered emails that alert customers about un-purchased items in their carts or update them when an item is about to go out of stock or a price has changed.
• Send them in for a landing. Specific landing pages are essential for successful email marketing. Each email should have a specific landing page that relates to the email and encourages action. An email urging shoppers to buy men’s shoes, for instance, needs to link directly to your men’s shoes page or (better yet) to a landing page created specifically for your men’s shoe sale.
• Handle your email list with care. Make it less simple for customers to unsubscribe by creating a variety of options on your unsubscribe page. Instead of just asking if they want to unsubscribe, provide choices such as taking a three- or six-month break from your emails or asking if they’d like to get emails once a week or once a month. By being more flexible, you’re more likely to keep customers on your email list and increase your chances of making a sale.

Email may sound old-fashioned today, but it’s still one of the best ways to drive traffic to your San Diego business’s website—and watch your sales soar.