Customs duty: import duty in India

 If you plan on importing into India, you need to know what customs duty or tariffs you may need to pay. This guide covers all you need – plus some handy insight into how Wise can help, with mid-market rate currency exchange, for a better deal when paying for goods from overseas.

What is a custom duty?

Customs duty tax is an indirect government tax on consumers. Duties are paid by importers and distributors – who then pass the cost on to consumers. You may also see reference to excise duties. These are added to products like alcohol and tobacco, increasing the cost of harmful goods and discouraging public use.

How about customs tariff?

Duties are charged on both local and imported goods. Tariffs, however, are only used for imported and exported goods. Tariffs protect the local economy by making imported goods more expensive compared to domestic production.

Indian customs duties

Customs tariff in India

Indian customs duty costs vary according to the goods involved, where they’re coming from, and what they’re made from.

To work out custom duty rates, you’ll need the HS code, which is known as HSN Code in India, for your products – that’s the code used in the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System, a globally agreed method of identifying product types.

Then, find the specific Indian customs taxes involved by reference to the Tariff Schedule or the Indian Customs Tariff as laid out in the Customs Act (1962) and Customs Tariff act (1975).

Types of custom duty in India

Type of custom duty	Rate	When applicable
Basic Customs Duty (BCD)	BCD is decided according to the HS code of the product and its origin. It can be from 0% to 100%.	Basic Customs Duty is assessed on all goods imported into India. The actual fee paid will depend on where goods are coming from, what they are, and what they’re made of. Some goods such as life saving medicines may be exempt – and therefore receive a 0% BCD rate.
Countervailing Duty (CVD)	0% to 12% depending on the product	Countervailing duty is applied on products which received benefits like tax breaks or or subsidies in the country where they were manufactured. The aim of this duty is to stop these products having an unfair advantage over locally produced goods.
Special Additional Duty (SAD)	4% where applied	Special Additional Duty of Customs is applied on some imported goods, where the locally produced equivalents would be subject to sales tax. This is to make sure that domestic manufacturing is not at a disadvantage. SAD is calculated on the total of the assessable value of the goods, plus other taxes that must be paid such as BCD and CVD.
Social Welfare Surcharge (SWS)	10% where applied	The Social Welfare Surcharge was introduced in 2018 to support government social welfare projects. This fee replaces the Education Cesses which were previously used. Goods which were previously exempt from Education Cesses are likely to be exempt from SWS, too.
Safeguard Duty	By notification	Safeguard Duty can be imposed by the Indian customs authorities if it is needed to protect local industries from an increased volume of imported goods. If imports are damaging local producers, they may become subject to Safeguard Duty.
Anti-dumping Duty	By notification	Dumping is an unfair international trade practise which involves selling goods in a foreign market for below production cost, or below their market value. This would severely damage local industry, and is therefore counteracted by Anti-dumping Duties where required.
Compensation cess	Applied according to product type, for items such as tobacco products, and pollution causing products like coal and cars.	Compensation Cess was created to compensate manufacturing heavy states which would lose revenue when the new IGST was brought in nationally in 2017. This tax is intended to be used for 5 years to ease the transition into IGST for these states.
Integrated Goods & Services Tax (IGST)	5%, 12%, 18%, 28%	The Integrated Goods & Services Tax (IGST) came into being in 2017. It brought together various other existing taxes under one umbrella. IGST is applied on imported goods under one of 7 different rates, and is used to create a level playing field between imported goods and local goods which are also subject to various taxes.
Customs handling fee	1%	On top of any other taxes payable, there is a 1% customs handling fee to pay.

How custom duty is calculated in India?

The amount of custom duty you have to pay may be fixed, or calculated according to the value of the specific products. This is known as an ad valorem basis calculation. Rules are set out for ad valorem calculations in Rule 3(i) of the Customs Valuation Rules, 2007. If your specific products aren’t covered under this rule, the value is calculated under the hierarchy laid out below.

If you want to learn how to calculate import duty on the goods or service you import to India, check out our guide on import duty calculation

Method	When applicable
Comparative Value	Value can be decided based on comparison with similar items, under Rule 4
Comparative Value	Value can be decided based on comparison with similar items, under Rule 5
Deductive Value	Rule 7 allows for valuation based on the sale price of the items at their point of origin
Comparative Value	Rule 8 decides the value based on the raw material and production costs of the product, as well as expected profit at the point of origin.
Fallback Method	Rule 9 allows for a fallback method, based on the above rules but with more flexibility

How to Improve Teamwork In the Workplace

Every organization will accept the fact that teamwork is a GOOD thing. However, you might also come across a tiny percentage of people who say, “Teamwork? Oh, such a waste of time it is!” That’s okay—no need to focus on them.

There is definitely something special about teamwork that makes it a top priority for HR and organizations. When you have teamwork in your workplace, you can

• Foster creativity and learning
• Blend complementary strengths
• Build trust amongst teams
• Teach conflict resolution skills to your teams
• Promote a wider sense of ownership
• Encourage healthy risk-taking

Knowing the value of teamwork, an organization can scale its growth multi-fold at a faster pace. Wondering how to improve teamwork in the workplace? Then, you have landed in the right place.

Here are a few tips to help you foster teamwork at your workplace: 

7 tips to improve teamwork in the workplace

1. Set clearly defined goals

Being an organization, you need to have clearly thought out and well-defined long-term goals. Then, it will make it easy for every team member to work harmoniously towards the same goal with a spirit of teamwork.

You can also set variable targets and difficulties so that the team has a structured workflow. When the milestones are achieved, your team’s dedication is surely going to increase.

2. Stop micromanaging

Your teams should feel like independent, standalone units contributing to your company goals. Unless you give your teams some autonomy, they won’t be able to take charge. Instead, they will constantly look at you for direction. 

Wherever possible, try to let your teams set their own deadlines, develop their workflows, and tackle obstacles. This will motivate them and also help them work as a collective unit.

3. Recognize and reward

According to a survey, recognized employees are satisfied employees. And satisfied employees will do better at work. So if you are looking for a happier, stronger team, recognition is the secret. Here are some ways to recognize or reward your employees:

• Team-wide emails recognizing individuals
• In-person praises
• Promotions
• Bonuses
• More holidays
• Recognition program for employees

4. Create a culture of collaboration, not competition

The prime objective of teamwork is to foster collaboration, but it turns into unhealthy competition. Employers often compare different teams with each other, which is not a good practice at all.

Each team has a different set of responsibilities and different skill sets. When you compare someone with someone else, you are disregarding their work and putting them down. Instead, you can hold team-building activities to improve efficiency with healthy competition.

Try refraining from any such sort of competition within your teams and try to build trust in a team.

5. Set a protocol for resolving conflicts

Nobody likes to go through the unpleasantness of conflicts at the workplace, but no matter how peaceful your company culture is, conflicts will happen.

That’s why you need to put yourself into action. You should figure out a way to deal with conflict even before it happens. If you have pre-planned everything in advance, you have the power to spin an unpleasant situation into a learning event.

Wondering how to execute it? First, hold a meeting with your trusted team members to establish a protocol. Then, once you finalize the protocol, relay this to everyone in your team.

You can also fine-tune the procedure as conflicts arise within teams.

6. Use project management tools

You can enjoy flexible working practices and better teamwork if you have the right set of tools in your toolkit. There are various project management tools available in the market which you can use to communicate and collaborate with your team members effectively.

Though emails and instant messaging (such as WhatsApp) are a great medium to keep people on the same page, you might also need to host a weekly video conference to share your thoughts through a more intimate channel. Additionally, an online screen recorder can be an invaluable tool for recording meetings or creating video tutorials to further enhance team communication.

You can find the right project management tool for your team with just a bit of research.

7. Understand the importance of good leadership

Last but not least, you need to understand the importance of good leadership skills for effective team management. Each team requires a leader who encourages accountability, models empowerment, and facilitates unbiased decision-making while maintaining momentum.

Team leaders know the most about the project, and that does not always mean they have extensive experience with leading. But, they can indeed work on their leadership skills to ensure they have better teamwork in the workplace.

Wrapping up

Studies have shown that stronger teamwork has the potential to increase employee satisfaction and decrease absenteeism. Improving teamwork in your workplace can help your organization in various ways.

However, you need to keep in mind that strong teams are not through together overnight! You need to work on how to improve teamwork in the workplace! All the best.

The ultimate guide to Amazon Reports

 Running a successful Amazon business hinges on data-driven insights. And understanding your performance metrics is the key to unlocking your full potential on the platform. Amazon offers several reports to help you analyze your sales, advertising, and overall customer experience. By leveraging these reports and focusing on the right metrics, you can optimize your strategy and outshine the competition.

What are Amazon Reports?

Amazon Reports are essentially data dashboards for sellers on Amazon. They provide valuable insights and information to help sellers track the performance of their business. There are two main categories of Amazon reports:

Business Reports: These reports focus on sales, traffic, inventory, and fulfillment. They include things like total sales, units ordered, number of visitors to your product listings, conversion rates, and how often your products win the “Buy Box” placement. By analyzing this data, sellers can identify trends, make better decisions about pricing and advertising, and improve their overall sales strategy.

Advertising Reports: If you run advertising campaigns on Amazon, these reports will tell you how your ads are performing. You can see things like which keywords are driving the most traffic and sales, what your click-through rates are, and how much you’re spending on advertising. This information can help you optimize your ad campaigns for better results.

How to access Amazon Seller Central Reports

Here’s how to navigate to the different reports available in Amazon Seller Central:

Log in to your Seller Central account.

Navigate to the Reports Tab in the top left corner of your Seller Central homepage. Hover over the “Reports” tab to display a dropdown menu.

Select the desired report type from the dropdown menu, e.g. “Business Reports,” “Advertising Reports,” “Payments Reports,” or “Fulfillment Reports.”

Once you’re within a category, you can choose the specific report you want. Most reports allow you to set a custom date range for the data you want to see.

Click on “Request Report” or “Download Report” depending on the report type.

Benefits of using Amazon Reports

Amazon Reports offer a crystal-clear view into every aspect of your business as a seller. You can track everything from sales and traffic to inventory levels and customer behavior. By diving into these reports, you can:

• Track total sales, units sold, and revenue trends to identify your top-selling products, peak sales periods, and customer buying patterns.
• Analyze conversion rates, bounce rates, and traffic sources to understand how customers interact with your listings.
• Discover which keywords are driving the most traffic and sales, allowing you to refine your advertising campaigns and maximize your return on ad spend (ROAS).
• Gain insights into your inventory levels, identify slow-moving products, and optimize your stock to avoid stockouts or overstocking.

Amazon Business Reports

Amazon Business Reports provide insights into sales trends and the actions visitors take on your product pages. These are the reports that you should keep and eye on:

Sales Dashboard

This date-based report provides a clear view of your orders and sales data, allowing you to compare your current performance to previous periods. These easy-to-read reports are presented in your currency and percentages, along with helpful graphs and tables for visual analysis.

Sales & Traffic

This report shows how many people viewed your listings and visited your Seller page, along with your conversion rate – the percentage of viewers who turn into paying customers. You’ll also see total sales, gross product sales (revenue before fees), and even how many units are typically viewed per customer session.

Detail Page Sales and Traffic by ASIN

This report provides the most in-depth look at individual product performance. It breaks down various metrics for each product and its variations (child ASINs). This includes crucial data points like the number of product views and the conversion rate for each product. Here’s a breakdown of the key information that you can see in this report:

Sessions: The number of unique visitors to your product page in the last 24 hours.

Page Views: The total number of views on your listing within a selected time period. This includes customers who viewed your listing multiple times so it might be higher than your sessions.

Page Views Percentage: The percentage of page views individual product ASINs receive compared to other products.

Buy Box Percentage: The percentage of page views where you owned the Buy Box.

Units Ordered: The total number of units ordered during the specified date range.

Unit Session Percentage: This is the most important metric in the business report as it shows your conversion rate: the percentage of units ordered compared to the number of page views.

Ordered Product Sales: The total revenue for each product within a specific time period.

Total Order Items: The total number of times a specific item was ordered within a selected timeframe.

Amazon Advertising Reports

These reports give you crucial insights into how your keywords, search terms, and bids are performing. You’ll see key metrics like clicks, cost-per-click (CPC), Advertising Cost of Sale (ACoS), and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) – all presented alongside your PPC sales and overall spending.

Advertised Product (Sponsored Products and Display)

These reports are designed specifically for sellers who run Sponsored Products or Sponsored Display campaigns. They provide in-depth data for each individual product you’re advertising. This means you can see how each ASIN is performing in terms of impressions, clicks, sales, and other key metrics.

Attributed Purchases (Sponsored Brands)

Unlike Advertised Product reports that focus on clicks and impressions for advertised products, Attributed Purchases show which products are purchased as a result of your Sponsored Brands campaigns.

Search Terms (all ad types)

As the name suggests, this report reveals the exact search terms customers are using to find your products on Amazon. It includes the following metrics:

Keyword Targeting and Match Type

Search Term used

Sales & Conversion rate for specific terms

Click-Through Rate

Cost-Per-Click

Impressions

By identifying the most popular search terms, you can integrate them into your product listings, improving search ranking and organic visibility. Alternatively, you can flag poorly performing terms as negative keywords to prevent irrelevant clicks and ensure your advertising budget reaches the right customers.

Placements Report (all ad types)

This report breaks down key metrics like impressions, clicks, sales, and ACoS for your campaigns across various placements. These placements could be:

Search Results: Top of search (TOS), Search results page (rest of search)

Details Page: Directly on a product’s detail page

Other types of Amazon Reports

There are more Amazon reports available beyond the ones we’ve covered. Let’s explore a few more valuable reports to add to your seller toolkit:

Return Reports

This report allows you to see how many returns you’ve received within a specified time period and the reasons why customers return your products. You can use Return Reports to identify trends such as return frequency or product-specific issues. Additionally, by pinpointing the root causes of returns, you can take proactive measures to improve product quality, listing accuracy, and customer communication – which can help to reduce your return rate.

Fulfillment Reports

These reports provide sellers with details of their sales, inventory, and shipments. You can find data on items shipped, inventory levels, orders processed, storage fees, removals, and reimbursements.

If you use Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), there are reports to understand how your Amazon FBA business is running. There are several reports available, including Long-Term Storage Fee reports, Subscribe & Save Performance, Promotions Performance, Stranded Inventory, Returns, and Inventory Age & Health.

Google Meet Guide For Beginners

 Online video conferences are becoming more and more common as the times change and more businesses embrace a distributed workforce.

If you’re new to video conferencing (or just new to Google Meet), it’s a good idea to know how to host or participate in your virtual meeting, sales pitch, or webinar.

Google Meet is one of the leading contenders when it comes to online video conferencing. It is affordable, easy to use, and works with many integrations for other Google Services. But perhaps most importantly, Meet offers users a level of security that they can’t get with many other video conferencing apps (I’m looking at you, Zoom).

In this Google Meet Guide for beginners, we will be introducing you to everything there is to know about Google Meet including pricing, features, and how to use this video calling app. 

What’s Offered in Google Meet

Before discussing how to use the service, it is important to understand Google Meet in terms of its different product tiers (all of which are free through the end of September 2020 – one of the ways Google is helping businesses during the pandemic.

Google Meet Basic

The free version of Google Meet allows users up to 60 minutes per session at a time (expanded to up to 24 hours through the end of September 2020), with a maximum of 100 participants in the room. All features available with the Basic tier are available in the Business and Enterprise Essentials packages. These features include:

Use Meet from a browser,

Send invites to external participants,

Mobile apps,

Live English subtitles,

Screen sharing, and

Adjustable layouts. 

Google Meet Business

The G Suite Essentials pricing package starts at $10 per user per month. Under this package, Google Meet can support a single conference for up to 300 hours with a maximum of 150 participants in the room.

Like the free version, users can also enjoy an unlimited amount of sessions. Aside from all the features in the Free version, with G Suite Essentials, users have access to both domestic and international dial-in phone numbers. 

Google Meet Enterprise

The G Suite Enterprise Essentials pricing package can be further personalized for larger businesses, therefore the exact price varies.

With this package, Google Meet supports conferences for up to 300 hours with a maximum of 250 participants in the room. You’ll also enjoy an unlimited amount of sessions so anyone in your corporation can have a Meet call or conference, any time.

Under this package, live streaming in-domain can be supported with a maximum of 100,000 viewers. In addition to all features from the Free and Essentials package, Google Meet for Enterprise offers Google drive access, and intelligent noise canceling. 

Google Meet Features & Integrations

Google Meet has a variety of different features and integrations that allow conferences to be more productive. Being familiar with them brings you one step closer to a successful remote video conference. I’ll go over the most important ones here.

Integrations

Integrations are features that are accessible through different Google services. Knowing how to use the different integrations will allow you to schedule your meetings and operate them more efficiently. 

Google Calendar

Since Google Meet is one of the services provided within G Suite, conferences can be made and scheduled through Google Calendar.

With this integration, simply open Google Calendar and input the necessary information such as meeting date, time, and who is invited to attend. One feature of Google Calendar is that you can send invites for your colleagues to verify their availability, which saves a lot of time. Google Calendar will also send you alerts as early as 2 weeks before the scheduled meeting so you never miss a video call. 

Gmail

Google Meet is also easily accessible through your standard Gmail account. Log into Gmail and you’ll have access to active meet rooms that you have been invited to. Joining is just a matter of clicking into the room. Of course, you can also send invite links through Gmail (just like Calendar). 

Features

Aside from integrations, Google Meet has many features that can be used to make your meeting run more smoothly. Some are pretty standard across video conferencing platforms, but Google Meet executes those better (in my view).

Here are a few of my favorite features of Google Meet:

Screen Sharing

Google Meet allows one member at a time to share their screen, usually this is reserved for the host to present anything they have prepared for the presentation.

This is great for meeting reports, documents, online lessons, or webinars.

Google Meet has encrypted privacy features that make sure anything shared is secured and unavailable to uninvited participants.

Screen Recording

Google Meet allows users to record meetings. This is an amazing feature for a couple of reasons.

First, those who were not able to attend the meeting will have an easy time getting on the same page with the rest of the team – the recording will be available to them right after the meeting wraps up.

Second, there’s no need to take contemporaneous notes or minutes during the meeting. You can focus on engaging and brainstorming with your team and what you decide will be recorded.

Finally, if you record a sales pitch or presentation about your product or service, you can then leverage that as an evergreen sales webinar, freeing up your sales team to close deals rather than pitch.

Recorded meetings can be saved and uploaded to Google Drive, storage limits depend on what type of Google account you have (free or G Suite). 

Live Closed Captioning

Live Closed Captioning is a great feature that supports inclusivity for those who are hard of hearing. Captions are live as the speaker talks and certain speakers can be pinned or highlighted to add emphasis on who is speaking and what they are saying. This feature is one of the most underrated parts of Google Meet, and it’s one of my favorites.

Call In Options

Call-in options are available for those who are not able to join the video chat. This is an option free with Google Meet (other services offer this feature with a cost), which is a huge plus. Google Meet allows both domestic and international phone numbers to call in with the call in option.

With remote and mobile teams where access to a computer may not always be possible, this option allows every team member to participate from anywhere in the world. 

How to Use Google Meet

Now that we have covered the basics such as pricing, integrations,and special features, here is a simple step-by-step guide on how to successfully conduct a Google Meet(ing). 

1. Log Into Google Meet

While Google Meet is free for everyone to use, keep note that only those with Google Meet accounts are able to host and start Google Meet conferences. This can be done by simply clicking the Google Meet icon or typing in meet.google.com into the browser. 

2. Start A Meeting

Once you are logged in, all you have to do is select the “start a meeting” option if you are starting a meeting, or “join a meeting” if you are joining a meeting. If you are starting a meeting, you will need to name your meeting room. 

3. Prepare Meeting Room

Once you have named your meeting room, you will then need to prepare your meeting room. This can be done by allowing camera and microphone permissions, and setting up any presentations you have prepared for the meeting to be screen shared. 

This should go without saying, but take some time to make sure your camera is positioned well and that there’s adequate lighting in your room before the meeting begins. Also, make sure there’s nothing on the screen that you’ll be sharing that is personal, private, or which you don’t want to be seen.

4. Invite Members

This is the last step and can also be followed if you are an invited member to a Google Meet. To invite members you will receive a link that is specific to your Meet room and all you have to do is send it to the invited participants.

If you are a participant, all you have to do is click the link – anyone can join with a link, but the host has control over who can and cannot enter the chat room.

Factors to Consider

While setting up, joining, and conducting a Google Meet is very easy and secure, there are still some factors to consider in terms of cyber security and accessibility. 

Privacy

While Google does a good job maintaining security and keeping unwanted participants out, it is important that you uphold your privacy rights in terms of items shared in Google Meets. Regulations such as HIPAA or other non disclosure agreements are completely in the hands of the participants and there is no guarantee that Google has jurisdiction over such materials. 

Apps

Google Meet has a mobile app (iOS / Android) wherein you can also access chat rooms and video conferences and get alerts from your phone.

Using Google Meet

google-meet-1All in all, Google Meet is a great platform to use for conducting remote video conferences. The platform is more affordable than its competitors, offers great free features, is secure, and is overall very easy to use and navigate. Google is the king of creating user-friendly productivity software, and Meet is no exception.

With G Suite, everything is in one place and all of your business’s productivity apps dovetail with one another. Google Meet allows you the integrations to get the most out of a G Suite subscription.

7 ways to make money and scale your business with Amazon

 Amazon can be a great place to build your business, whether you want to sell a few products as a side hustle or are thinking about adding an online sales channel to your existing business. From choosing a product to building your own brand, explore some of the different ways you can make money with Amazon.

7 ways to make money on Amazon

1. Choose a product type or specialize in a niche

Choosing a product to sell can be a challenge. Start by thinking about your interests and hobbies, allowing you to draw on your strengths and capitalize on knowledge you might have about a particular industry. Other times, inspiration can strike when you least expect it.

You might try selling a single product, or source a variety of items from different product categories. You might find yourself gravitating toward one category, like clothing or toys. You may want to expand your catalog, or narrow it down to a handful of products—maybe even just one top seller.

Check out this guide to find product ideas, and get inspired by this list of successful online businesses.

Use Product Opportunity Explorer in Seller Central to identify popular product categories and niches.

Keep an eye on purchases, and let sales analytics guide your decisions.

2. Sell handcrafted items

If you’re a pro at sewing, woodworking, or another skill, turn your expertise into an ecommerce business. Amazon Handmade is an online community of artisans selling unique goods to a global audience. This program comes along with a fee waiver for a Professional selling plan, plus other perks for artists and creatives who want to share their work with the world.

Learn how other artisans turned their handmade passions into a business in the Amazon store.

See how you can easily list your first handmade product.

Explore how Amazon Lending can help you fund your business.

3. Create and distribute merch

Maybe you have a great idea for a funny T-shirt or coffee mug. Bring your ideas to life with Amazon Merch on Demand. This program allows you to design custom apparel and accessories on a print-on-demand basis. Products print after each sale (so you don’t have to worry about unsold stock) and ship through Prime so customers can receive orders quickly).

Have an idea but need someone to bring it to life? Amazon’s Merch Collab is a licensing program where brands collaborate with qualified designers and manufacturers to create branded merchandise.

Keep in mind considerations for selling clothes online and running an online clothing business.

Learn more about requirements for brand names and logos in the Amazon store.

4. Sell to businesses

Amazon Business provides a suite of features and tools that can help you connect with business-to-business (B2B) customers. Business customers often buy in larger quantities and return items less—which means you can sell more with less time and effort. Reach business customers with customized prices, bulk selection, certifications, and other B2B features.

Use certifications and a business profile to help your products stand out to procurement professionals and other B2B customers shopping on Amazon Business.

Understand and manage your B2B sales in this B2B Central overview.

Get B2B product and pricing recommendations using Business Discount Insights.

5. Earn passive income by recommending products

You don’t need to sell products to make money with Amazon. Amazon’s affiliate marketing program, Amazon Associates, lets you monetize traffic through social media and other channels by recommending products for sale in the Amazon store. This affiliate marketing model allows you to earn up to 10% in commissions. Interested in earning passive income?

Associates Central has resources for reporting, payments, account information, and more.

Associates use easy link-building tools to direct audience to recommendations.

If you have a following on social media platforms, you can also join Amazon’s Influencer Program. You can monetize your social media content by recommending Amazon products and earning commissions on qualifying purchases.

6. Sell books online

Selling books online can be a great way to generate some extra income. Whether you want to resell children’s or comic books, list rare collectibles, or self-publish a book you wrote, selling books online can help you reach readers around the globe.

Secondhand books are generally easier to find, cheaper to acquire, and can be more profitable if you find good deals locally or online. Learn about Amazon’s condition guidelines for books.

Have you written the next great novel or play? Self-publish through Kindle Direct Publishing, which allows you to maintain control of your rights, set your prices, make changes anytime, and earn royalty on sales.

Book prices depend on variables like type and condition. It can be a good idea to monitor the prices of other booksellers and adjust your prices accordingly to make sure they’re competitive. Amazon’s Automate Pricing tool lets you automatically adjust prices based on pricing rules and preferences.

7. Resell, wholesale, or dropship products

Rather than creating your own product or establishing a brand, other ways to make money with Amazon are by reselling, sourcing wholesale, or dropshipping products.

Resell products: Amazon can be a great channel to resell for a profit. Just be sure to follow Amazon’s selling policies and code of conduct for sellers.

Source wholesale: If you’re planning to move lots of inventory, work with a wholesaler or a manufacturer to set up a supply chain and get products into the hands of as many customers as possible.

Dropship or print on demand: Don’t want to invest in procuring and storing inventory until the product sells? You can work with a dropshipper to send orders directly to customers after they place purchases. You might also use a print-on=demand solution like Amazon Merch.

You can start out with just one of these strategies, or try a combination. Get inspired and learn more with this guide to inventory management.

Strategies to drive ecommerce sales

Once you’ve decided how you want to make money in the Amazon store, there’s a range of ecommerce strategies you can use to grow your business.

Build your own brand

Building your own brand takes effort and investment, but it can pay off in customer loyalty. Plus, Amazon offers a suite of brand-building tools and protection benefits through Amazon Brand Registry. From enhancing your product detail pages and increasing customer engagement, to generating customer reviews and protecting against counterfeits, the program takes the guesswork out of brand management.

Build your brand with tools that help grow awareness for your brand, improve customer consideration, increase conversion, and build brand loyalty.

Protect your brand with programs and tools like Transparency and Report a violation to give you peace of mind.

Make strategic decisions to grow your business based on aggregated customer data with Amazon Brand Analytics.

Set competitive prices

Do you have a pricing strategy? If not, researching the competition for products you’d like to sell can be helpful. This is especially important when you first list products, but sales can benefit in the long run if you set up a system to conduct pricing research on a regular basis.

Dedicate some time to analyzing prices for similar products in Amazon search, or use our Automate Pricing tool to automatically set prices across your portfolio based on current demand.

Optimize listings to connect with more shoppers

To connect your offerings with more potential customers, use SEO best practices to help product listings rank in search results. Basic search engine optimization involves targeting specific keywords in product titles, bullet points, and product description.

The Listing Quality Dashboard on Seller Central can help you identify ways to improve the discoverability of your products by recommending product attributes and other details to add to your product listings. This can improve the customer’s experience and fix time-sensitive issues that may result in your listing being hidden from search results.

Cross-sell, advertise, and offer special deals

Depending on the products you’re selling and your ideal audience, trying new sales and marketing tactics can be a great way to boost your bottom line. Here are a few ideas for driving sales on Amazon:

Cross-sell or up-sell: Cross-selling is where you help the customer find products related to the one they want to buy. For example, someone purchasing a phone might also want a phone case. With Virtual Bundles, you can combine two to five complementary products from your enrolled brand on a single product detail page. Up-selling is where you recommend a premium version of a product or an upgrade, such as an add-on. Use comparison charts in A+ Content to subtly cross-sell or up-sell.

Advertise: Amazon offers cost-per-click ads to help you reach current and future customers, including Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands. Reach customers outside of Amazon by using Sponsored Display.

Offer deals and coupons: You can entice customers with digital coupons and promotions. Two common types are Lightning Deals (random deals that appear throughout the day) and Best Deals (short-term promotions where an item is featured for a limited number of days).

To land on the Amazon Deals Page, try promoting your offers with seasonal sales, or run deals for holidays and shopping events such as Prime Day. Learn more in this guide to ecommerce marketing.

Experiment with A/B Testing

What content works best? With A/B testing, you can find out by comparing different versions of titles, images, and other parts of a product listing.

Experimentation can increase sales by up to 25%. Run A/B tests (also known as split tests) on Amazon product content to optimize for conversions using the Manage Your Experiments tool found in Seller Central. Learn more about how running A/B tests can help your bottom line.

Engage your audience

Engaging with your customers can be a key part of creating customer loyalty. You can do this a few ways.

After a customer purchases a product, you can follow up with them via email and invite them to leave product reviews. Amazon offers email templates to help you shape the customer journey to improve sales.

If your customers spend time on social media, it might be worth investing in social media marketing. You can hold contests, post trivia, and use other interactive ways to show people products and channel traffic to visit your online store. If you want to take it to the next level, social selling through a destination like Amazon Live is a way to do product reveals in real-time, give customers tailored product suggestions, and more.

Tools and program to help you scale

Signing up for Amazon’s Professional selling plan comes with access to a host of programs and tools to benefit your business—whether you’re already established in ecommerce or considering selling in the Amazon store for the first time.

Take advantage of fulfillment solutions

The fulfillment process—picking, packaging, shipping orders, and handling returns—can consume valuable time and resources, especially as you scale. But you have several fulfillment options based on your specific needs: fulfill orders on your own, outsource fulfillment, or do both.

Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) lets you outsource order fulfillment to Amazon. Once you send your inventory to Amazon’s fulfillment network, we store, pick, pack, ship, and provide customer service and returns. The program can help you increase sales and stay focused on growing your business.

You can also use FBA’s Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) program to outsource fulfillment for purchases made on your own website or another sales channels.

Streamline operations with ecommerce automation

Amazon provides sellers with automated technology for inventory management, tracking sales and orders, responding to customers, and other essentials. Simplify and automate daily tasks to keep your business running smoothly, such as marketing workflows and analytics reporting.

Automating your business can save you time, improve customer satisfaction, maintain a consistent brand presence, and help you gain valuable business insights.

Process payments

Payment processing is a key part of providing customers with a seamless shopping experience. Amazon Pay offers shoppers the trust and convenience of Amazon for your online store, while Amazon Currency Converter in Seller Central lets you sell globally and get paid in your local currency.

5 tips to craft a high-performance About Us page for your brand

 Sellers with an Amazon storefront can add and enhance the About Us page. Don’t overlook an About Us page as a valuable opportunity to present your business to the world and optimize content to grow sales. In this article, we’ll cover steps for adding an About Us page to an Amazon storefront, plus expert tips for how to craft a successful page in order to attract visitors and convert them into loyal customers.

What is an About Us page?

An About Us page (or About page) is a webpage you can add to an ecommerce store to introduce customers to your brand and the types of products you sell.

The About page can work together with a Home or landing page. If the Home page hooks the attention of customers, the About page will often be their next stop to learn more about your brand. Use the About page to provide more in-depth details about your brand, like your values, problems you’re working to solve through your products, or key product features.

Why is an About Us page important?

A high-performing About page can boost sales for your business by helping shoppers connect with your brand and get a better understanding of how the products you offer might fit into their lives. Consider adding or optimizing a brand About page to provide customers with an enhanced experience and increase conversions.

How to add an About Us page to an Amazon storefront: 3 steps

1. Sign up and enroll your brand

Get started by signing up for an Amazon Seller Central account and choosing a Professional selling plan, if you don’t have one already. Then enroll your brand in Amazon Brand Registry, a free resource to help you build and protect your brand.

If you don’t have a registered or pending trademark (a requirement for enrolling in Brand Registry), check out IP Accelerator. This resource can you connect with vetted legal service providers who can help you secure a trademark at competitive prices.

2. Access the Amazon Stores builder

Sign up for an Amazon Ads account to get access to the free Stores builder and create a digital presence for your brand in the Amazon store.

Choose a template and use the drag-and-drop tiles to add videos, images, and text. You can organize these elements to fit your needs and engage customers.

3. Customize your About page

Use the drag-and-drop tiles to design an About page as one of your subpages. You can add up to three levels of subpages to build out your storefront. To create a subpage, click Add page in the Stores builder and choose from the template options, or select a blank page.

Once you’ve previewed your content and are ready to publish, submit it for review. It’ll go live once it passes moderation.

5 tips for crafting an About Us page

1. Introduce customers to your business

The About Us page is a space to showcase your brand’s personality and differentiate yourself.

Communicate the story behind your business along with your values and your mission. Did you start your business in an unusual way? Have you overcome certain challenges or obstacles? Don’t hold back from sharing personal touches like these—they can go a long way in establishing audience rapport.

2. Showcase products and your specialty

What’s your niche? Whether it’s sportswear, pet snacks, or something else, let customers know what you have to offer.

Do products have a sought-after feature or fill a gap? Don’t shy away from including this level of detail to convey selling points and help shoppers see how your catalog stands apart from the rest.

Take it a step further and help customers understand the “why” behind products. Are you committed to improving the environment or dedicated to a social cause? Do you source products in a unique way or make them by hand? Are they certified organic or fair trade? Is the packaging biodegradable? Do you donate a portion of profits to charity? Weave in details like these to help customers make informed purchasing decisions.

3. Use clear text and compelling imagery

In a short amount of time, photos, videos, and punchy statements can tell visitors a lot about who you are and what you represent. Use a mix of drag-and-drop elements, and keep the page simple and persuasive.

Put yourself in the customer’s shoes, then consider how you want to make an impression. What details would you want to see? What imagery would win you over and convert you into a buyer? Also, consider the average amount of time a visitor might spend on the page. Thirty seconds? Maybe more, or maybe less? Balance the layout with this in mind.

4. Make it about the customer

Think of an About page as being as much about the customer as it is about your brand. A high-conversion About page can help shoppers connect with your business and envision how products might fit into their lives.

What does your audience need? How do you provide it? Show how products solve a specific problem or meet a certain pain point. The goal is for customers to be able to see themselves reflected in your brand through your choice of images, text, and other elements.

5. Use search engine optimization

Take an About page to the next level by doing some keyword research. Then weave target phrases into your headlines and copy. Effective search engine optimization (SEO) can help shoppers find products and your brand. 

Show the world how you stand out with an About Us page

A brand About Us page is one way to help customers learn about your brand. There are others, and our guide to ecommerce marketing can help inform your overall strategy.

If you want some assistance getting started, our Service Provider Network can also connect you with professionals who can help with design, photography, tech support, and more. You can also tap the Amazon Ads Partner directory for help with creative and optimization.

FAQ: About Us pages

Q:

How do I write an About Us page for my business?

A:

Think about it from the customer’s point of view. What information do they need to get a sense of your brand and why they might want to purchase products from you? Shape your About page around the most important points you want to convey, and don’t forget to weave in keywords.

Q:

What goes into a good About Us page for an ecommerce brand?

A:

Use compelling content to introduce visitors to your brand and show what makes products unique. Explain how you solve a problem with a special feature, or how you’re trying to help make the world a better place. You can also provide answers to common customer questions (FAQs) or feature testimonials from happy customers.

Q:

How do you add an About page to an Amazon storefront?

A:

First, sign up for an Amazon Seller Central account and choose a Professional selling plan. Then enroll your brand in Amazon Brand Registry to get access to the free Stores builder in the Amazon Ads console. Next, create an About us page by adding a subpage to the ecommerce storefront you design.

How and when to write a follow-up email after receiving no response

 When a client doesn’t respond it can lead to delays, doubts and awkward conversations.

When a client doesn’t respond, it can feel awkward and lead to endless doubts and questions on your part. By following up with them, you can figure out exactly what’s happened and help get things back on track. But how do you follow up respectfully?

Below, we explore how and when to send a follow-up email and give you a number of potential templates to use in a variety of different circumstances.

We will be covering:

• Why clients might not be responding and how you can turn this around
• Why you should send a follow-up email and how this can improve your response rates
• What to consider before following up with a client
• When to send follow-up emails and how often you should send these
• How to write a follow-up email and what to include
• Example follow-up emails to help you get started

Let’s dive in!

Why don’t clients respond?

Not receiving a response from a new client is unnerving to say the least, especially when you’re a customer-centric organization. Remember that no matter how excited a client is to work with you, they’ve also probably got 1,001 other things going on and for many of us it is a constant struggle to reach ‘inbox zero’.

In fact, marketing report shows that 40 percent of consumers have at least 50 unread emails in their inbox at any given time – yikes! There is every chance that your email has been lost in their inbox among the seemingly endless sea of unread emails.

It could also be that they’ve discussed your impending projects with their colleagues and have identified a couple of potential roadblocks. Maybe they’re awaiting sign-off from their manager. Maybe their accounts team has told them that if they’re going to proceed with you, then they need to come up with cost-savings in other areas.

There are all sorts of reasons why a client might not respond in a timely manner. Try not to let your imagination run wild – just touch base with them so you can get the ball rolling.

Why should you send a follow-up email?

According to research sending just one follow-up email could increase your response rate by 22 percent. It was also shown that the first follow-up email is the most effective with a 40 percent higher response rate than the initial email which sits at around a six percent response rate.

There are a number of instances where a follow-up email might be appropriate, and a few where a follow-up is warranted and even expected. Depending on the industry you work in there may be a number of factors that dictate when and how often you need to follow-up with clients. For example, if you are working in an industry where compliance plays a significant role you may be required to follow-up with clients – and there may be consequences for failing to do so.

Sending a follow-up email is generally considered a good practice, if not to remain compliant and check a box from your side it also shows you are engaged in the client’s journey and helps to set and reinforce expectations.

4 Things to consider before sending a follow-up email

There are 4 golden rules to keep in mind when deciding whether or not to send a follow-up email.

1. Don’t be afraid to pick up the phone

Email is the fallback that many service professionals use to communicate with clients. Emails are great. After all, they allow clients to respond when it’s convenient for them, they can take their time composing the appropriate response, and it provides an irrefutable log of all back-and-forth communication.

However, it’s a lot easier for your email to get lost in a client’s inbox (or to be read but promptly forgotten about) than it is for a client to ignore a phone call. If your emails seem to continually go unanswered, then it might be time to pick up the phone.

If you have sent your proposal to a client you can give them a quick call to let them know they should have received a proposal from you. This also gives you the opportunity to confirm they have received it and answer any questions they may have that could have delayed their acceptance of the proposal.

2. Automate when you can

Clients aren’t the only ones who are busy – and you can improve your efficiency and save time by automating your follow-up email process. Following up on multiple emails to different clients can become a time consuming process. Automating parts of this process will help with the heavy lifting. Depending on the platforms you use there are many different ways to automate some or all of the follow-up process.

For example, Ignition’s proposal reminders feature allows you to send reminders to clients who are still yet to accept your proposal. You can choose how many days to wait before sending a reminder and select the total number of reminders to send out until they accept your proposal.

3. Always give the client a call-to-action

CTAs or calls-to-action help to remind a client of what you need from them – whether it’s key information, an answer to your question, sign-off on a project, or payment.

Giving the client clear instructions helps them to action things from their end as quickly as possible. We recommend making the call-to-action as direct as possible so that you can avoid any potential confusion.

CTA examples:

• Include a ‘schedule a meeting’ link if you are following up to confirm a time to meet with them
• Ask a clear question, for example, asking for a time to meet with them
• Position your questions at the beginning and the end of the email if you are chasing information
• Provide a direct link for your client to pay an overdue invoice

4. Make sure you actually need to follow-up

Cover yourself first and check that you haven’t already received a reply from the client. It might have disappeared in your email, or they may have contacted someone else in the team.

Follow-ups can be awkward enough as it is – let alone if you make a mistake and actually did receive a reply from them. So before you send a curt ‘As per my previous message…’ email, double check that you haven’t already received their response (and check those spam and trash folders just in case!).

How long should you wait for a response before following up?

It can be hard to know exactly when you should follow-up if you haven’t heard from a client. On the one hand, you want to keep on top of things and make sure they don’t lose interest. On the other hand, you don’t want to seem too pushy.

It is generally considered good practice to wait at least two to three days between your follow-ups. Clients, like anyone else, are often busy which may mean it takes a few follow-up touchpoints to prompt a response. It is easy to forget that you’re not always going to be your client’s top priority and sending a follow-up email too quickly can make you appear rude or even annoying in some cases. We recommend sending a gentle reminder a couple of days after your initial email to get back in touch whenever they’re ready to proceed.

Here are some basic guidelines:

• Assess the urgency. If a client hasn’t responded about a project that’s due to be completed by the end of the week, then perhaps send a follow-up a day or two after your original message. However, if they haven’t got back to you about your availability for a project in a month’s time, then consider waiting a week or so.
• Rely on context. Small talk at the beginning of a meeting can provide you with invaluable information. Perhaps a client apologizes for joining the call late and explains they’ve been in back-to-back meetings, or perhaps they casually mention that they’re preparing for a big company-wide initiative that’s about to launch. If this is the case, leave more time between follow-ups. Not only will this make your email less likely to get lost in the ether, but it’ll also ensure that you don’t end up annoying them during a really busy time.
• Don’t let your proposal go cold. In general, wait no longer than a week without following-up on a proposal that you’ve sent over. Provided they had not already given you an expected timeframe for their response. Proposals may require sign-off from different stakeholders, or you may want to make sure that the proposal has been thoroughly read. Sending a follow-up email may also surface any final questions the client has before they are ready to sign off on the proposal.

How often should you send a follow-up email and how many should you send?

There is no one-size-fits-all rule for the number of follow-up emails you need send to a client – that is dependent on the circumstance. What we do know is that sending two to three follow-up emails is considered to be the optimal amount – with the first follow-up email being the most effective. With data also showing that sending an excessive number of emails is generally not the answer either.

Avoid taking up too much of a client’s time by constantly chasing responses, limit it to three follow-ups if you can – the effectiveness of follow-ups is shown to drop off after the fourth email. Try to get the small details sorted out via client intake forms, text, phone, or a messaging platform such as Slack – try communicating with your client in the format that is easiest for them if you are after a quick response.

What to include in a follow-up email

1. A short but compelling subject line – try to include part or all of your request if possible. E.g. Reminder: Overdue invoice requiring payment or Following up on business expense report.
2. A warm and friendly greeting or an appropriate greeting based on your rapport with the client.
3. In the body of your email make sure to include the objective in simple language. This has been shown to improve the likelihood of receiving a response and your request being fulfilled.
4. Provide context where necessary, forward the original email or provide any necessary links of documentation to avoid the client having to search for it and potentially delaying their response.
5. Sign off with a tl;dr or summary of your request and provide a clear call to action to prompt a response or the desired action from your client.

What Is a Marketing Plan

 No matter how much you stick to a plan, things go wrong. As the famous quote by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower goes: “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

When it comes to ecommerce, consumer trends shift, circumstances change, and initial experiments don’t always go as planned. All of these things impact your marketing plan. 

Research shows that marketers who proactively write a marketing plan are 356% more likely to report success. So, what does a realistic ecommerce marketing plan look like? And how do you handle unexpected obstacles and overestimations that threaten your company’s marketing strategy? This guide shares the answers.

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is the strategy a business uses to get its products or services in front of its target customer. It includes who the target market is, the channels used to reach them, and the messaging that will help the business sell its products. 

The purpose of a marketing plan isn’t to create a step-by-step, never-fail manual. Rather, it’s a roadmap to help you accomplish the best-case scenario, while also maintaining realistic expectations for your marketing initiatives and establishing backup plans if something doesn’t work.

Marketing plan vs. business plan

A business plan paints a bigger picture of how you plan to run your business. It includes a mission statement, products you’ll launch, and market research. A marketing plan, on the other hand, is a specific document that details how you plan to achieve these wider goals through marketing. 

Marketing plan vs marketing strategy

An overarching marketing strategy details how marketing will drive business results. A marketing plan is the route you’ll use to get there. It’s more specific than a strategy and includes a practical roadmap on how you’ll put your marketing activities into play. 

Creating your own marketing plan is no small job. You put hours into customer and competitor research to find the channels likely to have the biggest impact on your marketing goals. You can check out marketing plan examples, but when it comes to creating your own, you can save time with a template.

Types of marketing plans

Digital marketing plan

A digital marketing plan is a specific type of marketing plan that revolves solely around online channels like social media, email, and search engines. It doesn’t include offline channels like billboards or radio ads.

Social media marketing plan

A social media marketing plan focuses specifically on how a business will use social media to reach its target market. It gives you a framework of which channels you’ll use, the types of content you’ll create, whether you’ll invest in social media ads, and how you’ll drive product sales. This can take place either through your online store or a social media storefront such as Facebook and Instagram Shops.

Content marketing plan 

A content marketing plan details how you’ll produce content that turns people into paying customers. This can span multiple formats, including an email newsletter, infographics, product documentation, and user-generated content (such as social media posts). 

Alongside the more traditional elements of a marketing plan, a content-marketing-specific strategy would include:

• Keywords you plan to target
• Who you’ll use to create the content (e.g., freelancers or in-house marketers)
• How you’ll promote and repurpose your content

Offline marketing plan

An offline marketing plan details how a business will reach its target market without using digital channels. This might include billboards, radio ads, direct mail, event sponsorships, and outdoor advertising. 

How to write a marketing plan

Detail your unique value proposition

Outline your buyer personas

Run a SWOT analysis

Detail product features and benefits

Set key performance indicators

Outline your marketing funnel

Define your marketing channels

Decide on your content formats

Plan your marketing resources

Create a measurement and optimization plan

Detail your unique value proposition

A unique value proposition underlines your entire marketing plan. Regardless of the channels and formats you plan to use, consistency is key. Mixed messages on what you sell and what your brand stands for will only confuse potential customers.

A simple way to refine your messaging is to focus on your unique selling point. Costco, for example, is cheaper than its competitors. Harper Wilde’s products are comfier than any other bra retailer. Find the marketing channels each retailer uses and you’ll see messaging centered around its adjective.

Consult your customers if you’re unsure what your value proposition adjective should be. Research is the biggest part of any copywriting process. Survey people who’ve already bought from you, run an Instagram poll to discover why people follow your brand, and see where your competitors’ weaknesses lie. Look for adjectives that crop up frequently during the process.

What overarching goal are you trying to accomplish with the business? Why does it exist? Summarize it in one sentence, and you’ll have a mission statement to inform everything you do, which includes your marketing strategies.

Outline your buyer personas

Going overboard with assumptions is a common mistake among marketers. The end result is a marketing plan that doesn’t actually result in revenue.

While data won’t give you a foolproof plan, every assumption is one more bit of uncertainty you’re folding into your marketing goals. If an amazing plan has a 40% chance of holding up to real-world scenarios, one without much rigor—and lots of assumptions—might hold up 10% of the time.

Consult your customer segments and buyer personas to get as much information as you can about the person buying your products, such as: 

• Demographic data (location, age, and income level) 
• Interests, goals, and challenges 
• Channels they use to discover new products

Be careful not to confuse this with your target audience. Children would be the target audience of a toy brand; parents are the buyer persona. The latter is who you’ll be reaching out to with your marketing plan. 

Run a SWOT analysis

A SWOT analysis helps uncover your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats relative to your competitors. It’s useful to include one as part of your marketing plan because it can help anticipate problems you might encounter, make more data-driven decisions, and spot areas where you can get ahead of your competitors. 

Dive deep into the data you already have about your customer base by investigating marketing analytics, social media audiences, and customer surveys. It reiterates who you’re trying to reach—and more importantly, the triggers that would make them buy your product over a competitor’s.

Remind yourself of your unique selling proposition (USP) throughout this process. Tailor your marketing plan around key takeaways from these. 

Detail product features and benefits

Include any special features, competitive advantages, or customer favorites your marketing plan will lean on.

You could have the best mattress in the world—one made with 100 springs and cotton stitching, vigorously tested by sleep experts. But you’d struggle to market it if you lean too heavily on product features. A customer cares more about getting a peaceful night’s sleep than detailed product specifications.

“Every great marketing plan needs one thing first: a product that is 10 times better than the next,” says Nick Saltarelli, co-founder of Mid-Day Squares. “Once you have that, marketing is about deep human connections.”

Nick says, “It felt obvious that there was a sweet spot somewhere in between: people who wanted to follow along, and a true behind-the-scenes look into building a massive chocolate business from the ground up.”

As a result, the Mid-Day Squares marketing plan doesn’t prioritize product promotion. The brand instead “focuses on getting people to fall in love with us, the founders, to scale the human connection,” Nick says.

Set key performance indicators

What are you trying to achieve with your marketing plan? Create both short- and long-term business goals that relate to financial metrics like revenue growth, retention, or new customers.

Most marketers measure success using return on investment (ROI)—the revenue you expect to generate after spending your marketing budget. It’s every marketer’s dream to get $100,000 in sales from $1,000 in marketing spend. While that isn’t the most realistic expectation, knowing your target ROI will prevent overspending. If your ROI is hurtling beyond your predictions, you can better allocate that budget to be spent elsewhere.

But there’s more to marketing measurement than dollar returns. Revenue isn’t always the end goal. Brand awareness, website traffic, and social media followers are short-term marketing objectives that aim to get new people into your marketing funnel. Nail them early on and you set your business up for success later down the road.

Outline your marketing funnel

Not everyone will see your products and convert into a customer instantly. Most people progress through a sales funnel. Content that will make someone progress to the next stage depends on the one they’re currently in. 

If you were to use Facebook ads to sell your products to a generic audience modeled on your buyer persona, for example, you might not get the highest conversion rate. These people don’t know who you are, what you stand for, or why they should choose you over a competitor. 

But if you used Facebook ads to specifically target people at the bottom of your marketing funnel, you could use retargeting ads to show items someone had in their shopping cart. You’re bound to get a better return on your investment with this strategy because you’re only investing money into reaching people who just need a final nudge to convert. 

Let’s break down how you might outline your marketing funnel in a marketing plan. 

The marketing funnel has three stages: TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU.

Top of the funnel (TOFU)

People at the top of your marketing funnel don’t understand who you are or what you sell. Social media, podcasts, and video content play huge roles here. Each channel is used by potential customers looking to learn or be inspired.

For this stage, prioritize metrics that give insight into how people are engaging with your top-funnel content, such as:

Page views

Video views

Website clicks

Click-through rate (CTR)

Cost per click (CPC)

Middle of the funnel (MOFU)

People reach the middle of the funnel when they know they have a problem that needs to be solved. Look at the marketing channels and formats you’re using to target these people. Most often, it’s search engines and retargeted ads.

Google Analytics is your best bet here. While the dashboard can feel overwhelming for a lot of people, you don’t need to look at every report. Use the following metrics to see how people engage with your middle-funnel content:

Bounce rate

Pages per session 

Users by traffic source

Email subscriber conversion rate 

To track the data above, especially for advertising campaigns, add the Meta pixel to all pages of your store.

Bottom of the funnel (BOFU)

Going for the hard sell? For marketing messages where the only goal is to convert your audience into paying customers, consult the back end of your ecommerce store. It’s home to sales and product-related data that helps you understand whether your marketing plan is successful, such as:

Added to cart conversion rate

Average order value (AOV)

Number of orders

Reached checkout conversion rate

Sales conversion rate

Shopify Analytics dashboard showing metrics like total sales, sessions, and conversion rate.

Shopify Analytics shows all the BOFU data you’ll need.

Post-funnel and retention

Planning to build a steady stream of paying customers off the back of your ecommerce marketing plan? It’s easy to assume revenue growth comes from audience growth. But oftentimes, the easiest way to grow your revenue is by focusing on the people we forget about: existing customers.

Resist the temptation to focus on flashy metrics like social media followers and YouTube subscribers. Instead, involve existing customers in your marketing plan. Use them as a source of testimonials and word-of-mouth referrals.

“Happy customers have been powerful word-of-mouth catalysts for our brand, and it has made sense to keep them engaged,” says Chris Campbell, partner at The Charming Bench Company. “We’ve been getting a steady stream of five-star ratings on websites and social media, which we then share on our Facebook, X [formerly known as Twitter], Pinterest, and Instagram profiles. It’s a great alternative to pushing loud sales messages that don’t always work.”

Define your marketing channels 

Channels are the platforms you’ll use as part of your marketing plan. Go back to your market research and uncover the online and offline channels your target audience is using to shop and get entertained or inspired.

Some of the most popular channels for ecommerce businesses include:

Social media. Social media is used by more than six out of 10 people. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and Pinterest are free to use (on the whole) and help brands reach their target audience. 

Search engines. Some 44% of online shoppers start their product research on search engines. By making search engine optimization (SEO) part of your marketing plan, you can generate new business by reaching people when they’re actively looking for your products or services.

Email marketing and SMS marketing. Email and text message inboxes are two of the most sacred places for a marketer to reach. A phone number or email address gives you a direct line of communication with your target customers, if they opt in to hear from you.

Podcasts. Record conversations you have with your team, customers, or experts in the industry and share them with your audience. By establishing yourself or your brand as a thought leader in your industry, you’ll inspire confidence that in turn builds trust in your products.

Offline channels. While digital marketing is vital in today’s world, offline and in-person marketing efforts can be equally powerful. Get in front of people when they’re not online, using channels like word-of-mouth recommendations, radio, billboards and outdoor advertising, or TV marketing campaigns.

There’s a sweet spot to how many channels your marketing plan should include. Go too wide and you burn resources on channels with poor returns. But become too reliant on one channel and you’re at risk.

Algorithms power most digital marketing channels. They’re praised as the type of technology that delivers personalized experiences for their users, but any changes to an algorithm can make marketing plans utterly useless overnight.

“If you rely on SEO, then any algorithm updates could potentially cut your revenue for months before you recover,” explains Marquis Matson, VP of Growth at Sozy. “If you rely on paid ads, then any changes to privacy policies can cut your revenue. If you rely on email marketing, then any ESP [email service provider] policy changes can cut your revenue. Diversifying your acquisition is crucial in a fast-paced digital marketing world.”

Footwear brand Hippy Feet is one ecommerce brand that failed to diversify channels. “The original marketing plan was to drive traffic to store through ads—relying heavily on paid Facebook and Instagram traffic,” says Sam Harper, Hippy Feet’s co-founder and CEO. “While this is still a major component of our marketing strategy, the decreasing effectiveness of these ads has forced us to expand our marketing efforts.

“A diverse media strategy is crucial to helping an ecommerce business survive in this highly-dynamic market. By driving traffic through SEO, email, and media coverage, we’re more resilient and less impacted by a single tech platform changing their algorithm.”

Decide on your content formats

For each channel, define which content formats you’ll use to capture attention and drive website traffic. That could include:

Audio. Reach podcast and radio listeners with audio content. 

Images. Capture visual learners and shoppers on visually dominant social media sites with infographics, GIFs, and memes.

Video. Get listed on YouTube, the world’s second largest search engine, with explainer videos and product demonstrations. Many social media platforms—Instagram and TikTok included—are also evolving to prioritize video content. 

Written content. Most search engine results retrieve links to optimized written content, such as blogs, transcripts, or landing pages.

Content marketing is a beast that constantly needs to be fed. Customers want newer, fresher, more exciting content on a regular basis. That’s demanding for a small business to keep up with.

If this sounds unsustainable, consider a content marketing strategy that collects user-generated content (UGC) from existing customers. The more they share their experiences with others, the more content you have to repurpose on each channel. It’s an effective route to scale your content marketing plan and stretch your editorial calendar if your marketing department has limited resources. Don’t have time to invest in promoting the content you create? Partner with popular influencers in your niche—those whose loyal audience overlaps with your target market.

Plan your marketing resources

Your marketing budget is the dollar amount you expect to spend executing your marketing plan. If you’re bootstrapped, you can run a marketing plan on a tight budget.

As part of your own marketing plan, state whether you intend to use each channel organically or boost it with advertising. Most channels allow businesses to run sponsored content, which is guaranteed to reach your target market across online and offline channels, like door-to-door sales, social media, TV, billboards, and radio.

“I apply for any competitions, press opportunities, and awards to get my small business out there at any given opportunity,” says Terri-Anne Turton, founder of The Tur-Shirt Company. 

The strategy has worked: The Tur-Shirt Company has won a Junior Design Award for best fashion newcomer and a shoutout from media entrepreneur Steven Bartlett after entering his #DeserveToBeFound competition with Facebook.

“I focus on those my target market knows of to build credibility,” says Terri-Anne. “Plus, most of the awards I enter are free or low-cost; they just need some time investment and creativity to take part. It proves my USP to my target market—that my kids’ clothing products are unique—without investing thousands into advertising.”

While you can run a strategy with little to no budget, this section of your marketing plan needs to account for more than any planned advertising spend. Time is a resource that needs to be managed and accounted for. Be sure to detail how much time you plan to spend executing your marketing strategy.

If you have a designated marketing team, it’s also worth noting who will be responsible for each element of your marketing plan. Who’s responsible for this marketing plan? Which team members are executing it? What experience do they have with marketing?

More importantly, detail what you expect from the resources you’re putting into your marketing plan. If you plan to spend $40,000 throughout the coming year, how much revenue will you get in return? If you’re producing a marketing plan for a large or public company, this is what stakeholders really want to see.

Create a measurement and optimization plan

Go back to the KPIs (key performance indicators) you set in the earlier section of your marketing plan. How will you determine whether you’ve met these KPIs? What happens if you’re exceeding or falling short of your target? It’s good to have a plan of action for either case.

Let’s put that into practice and say you expected to increase sales by 20% through your social media marketing plan. Detail exactly how you’d measure this, for example, you could say, “we’ll look at our Shopify sales report once per month and analyze which channel is meeting this KPI. If a channel falls behind, we’ll evaluate why and either adjust our marketing plan or deprioritize it in favor of more effective channels.” 

The best marketers approach their plans with an open mind. The hypothesis you started with might be proven wrong. Don’t take that as a negative. You just got closer to finding what will work. 

Tips for creating your marketing plan

Set conservative expectations

While it’s good to approach your marketing goals with confidence, high expectations often lead to disappointment when we fail to meet them. That disappointment is magnified in a marketing plan, as stakeholders or founders will have already bought into unrealistic predictions and business objectives.

Start small

Don’t overwhelm yourself and your team by trying to generate results with all marketing tactics at once: running Facebook ads, tweeting like crazy, writing daily blog posts for SEO, and making constant changes to site and content strategy to improve your conversion rate.

If you’re very lucky, one of these tactics will bring you consistent traffic and sales. But more often than not, trying everything at once will make you extremely busy without anything to show for it.

Originally, Jameela’s team planned to invest in several marketing channels—online and offline advertising, PR, trade shows, influencer marketing, and blogging included. However, the team changed its marketing plan. They went deep on one channel instead of spreading resources too thin by trying to be everywhere at once.

“We stuck to one course of action that was where our customers were, and ready to buy, and easiest for us to see a good ROI,” Jameela says. “What really worked for us was focusing on a handful of channels that we knew we could do well.”

Go back to your audience research and identify three channels your target audience uses most often. Put most of your energy into perfecting those before overcomplicating things with a more comprehensive marketing plan.

Use historical data as a guide

Past performance can help you temper your expectations for your marketing plan. If you know your click-through rate (CTR) for Facebook ads is 0.1%, don’t stray too far from that baseline with your social media marketing.

The same goes for website content optimized for search: If you’re currently getting 10,000 visitors per month from Google, scaling your traffic up to a million is a tough battle. Instead, 50,000 visitors is a more achievable goal.

Allow for flexibility

The purpose of a marketing plan isn’t to create a never-fail manual. Whether your marketing team has fallen victim to completion bias or focused too heavily on one channel, sticking rigidly to your original plan can be a big mistake.

Imine Martinez, assistant manager at Rainbowly, says: “Our regular campaigns targeting mainly birthday celebrations and anniversaries offered poor return on ad spend and inconsistent results over the months.

“That said, during festive seasons, such as Christmas or New Year’s, our targeted campaigns were particularly profitable, achieving five times return on ad spend with much cheaper cost per click and impression.”

Continuing with the same marketing strategies despite this data would only have resulted in heartbreak. Rainbowly would be pouring money down the drain on ads that wouldn’t perform, just because its marketing plan said to do so.

Creating a marketing plan is the first step

A lot of hard work goes into a successful marketing plan. To create an attainable one, you’ll need to spend hours diving into competitive research, audience data, and channels your target market consults when researching new products.

Most importantly, know that marketing is unpredictable. There are thousands of scenarios that fundamentally change the marketing strategy that’s best for your business. Global pandemics, PR crises, and the emergence of new social media platforms are unpredictable.

Treat your marketing plan like the best-case scenario. Plan SMART goals and strategies but remember to be flexible to give your marketing the best chance of success.

How to Send Marketing Emails

 If all goes well, you’ll have built a robust list of subscribers and leads waiting to hear from you. But you can’t start emailing just yet unless you want to end up in a spam folder, or worse, a blocked list.

Here are a few important things to remember before you start emailing your list.

1. Implement email segmentation.

Once you’ve added people to your list, you must break them down into different segments.

That way, instead of having a monolithic email list of everybody, you’ll have easier-to-manage subcategories that pertain to your subscribers’ unique characteristics, interests, and preferences.

Our subscribers are humans, after all, and we should do our best to treat them as such. That means not sending generic email blasts.

Why should you segment your email list?

Each person who signs up to receive your emails is at a different level of readiness to convert into a customer (which is the ultimate goal of all this).

If you send a discount coupon for your product to subscribers that don’t even know how to diagnose their problem, you’ll probably lose them. That’s because you’re skipping the part where you build trust and develop the relationship.

Every email you send should treat your subscribers like humans you want to connect with, as opposed to a herd of leads you’re trying to corral into a one-size-fits-all box.

The more you segment your list, the more trust you build with your leads, and the easier it’ll be to convert them later.

How to Segment Email Lists

The first step in segmentation is creating separate lead magnets and opt-in forms for each part of the buyer’s journey. That way, your contacts are automatically divided into separate lists.

Beyond that, email marketing platforms allow you to segment your email list by contact data and behavior to help you send the right emails to the right people.

Here are some ways you could break up your list:

Geographical location.

Lifecycle stage.

Awareness, consideration, and decision stage.

Industry.

Previous engagement with your brand.

Language.

Job Title.

In reality, you can segment your list any way that you want. Just make sure to be as exclusive as possible when sending emails to each subgroup.

2. A/B test your marketing emails.

Not all email lists are created equal. Some audiences prefer personalization, and others will think it’s spammy. Some audiences will like bright, eye-catching CTA buttons. Others will prefer a more subtle call-to-action.

You’ll never know what type of people make up your email list until you test the variables. That’s where A/B testing comes in handy.

A/B testing, or split testing, is a way to see what type of email performs best with your audience by analyzing the results of email A against email B. This can be especially helpful when working with templates.

“Since emails often have the same template, A/B testing is smart because you can usually control variables outside of the test and get a solid signal on what performs better,” 

Here’s the step-by-step process for A/B testing your emails:

Select one variable to test at a time, e.g., subject line, CTA, images.

Create two versions of the email: one with and one without the variable.

Allow your emails to be sent out simultaneously for a period of time.

Analyze your results and keep only the version that performed better.

Test a new variable and repeat the process.

When conducting an A/B test, consider these tips:

Test one element at a time.

“For example, try the same email with a different subject line. Or the same email and same subject line with a different CTA,” 

“It might be tempting to make several changes at once, but that makes it harder to pinpoint the true cause of your wins or losses,” 

Don’t try to “eyeball” an A/B test.

A/B test should be run with intention. Making quick changes and approaching results unscientifically can lead to incorrect conclusions.

“You might be tempted to run an informal A/B test by making a change and then casually paying attention to the responses that you get. This unscientific method can easily be skewed by factors outside your control (like seasonality or deliverability),” . “It also leaves out a ton of valuable data, like open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rate, or sharing/forwarding rate.”

3. Analyze your email marketing performance.

Once you’ve got your first few campaigns, it’s time to see how they’re performing.

By diving into your email marketing analytics, you‘ll be able to make better decisions that will help your business’s bottom line, resonate with your subscribers, readers, and customers, and justify your work to the rest of your company.

Here are the best ways to analyze the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.

4. Set email marketing KPIs.

There are four key metrics to pay attention to when evaluating the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign.

Deliverability measures the rate at which emails reach your intended subscribers’ inboxes.

Open rate is the percentage of people that open your email once it reaches their inbox.

Clickthrough rate (CTR) is the percentage of people that click on your CTAs.

Unsubscribes measures the number of people who opt out of your email list once they receive your email.

5. Adjust email components to improve results.

Many factors impact your KPIs, and it will take some experimentation and guesswork to figure out which tweaks to your emails will yield the biggest significance.

If you aren’t getting the desired numbers, try playing with these variables to improve your email results.

Deliverability

Ensure that you’re following best practices regarding spam filters.

Remove inactive people from your email list to keep only engaged subscribers.

Check which emails have bounced and remove those email addresses from your list.

Open Rate

Play with the language in your subject line to entice people to click on your email.

Adjust the time and day that you send your email to see what works best.

Clickthrough Rate (CTR)

Evaluate your offer to ensure that it provides value to your segmented list.

Rewrite your copy to make sure that it’s clear what you want the reader to do.

Try different CTAs, e.g., graphic versus Inline copy, bold versus subtle.

Unsubscribes

First, consider if this is a blessing in disguise, as uninterested parties are removing themselves from your list.

Regularly send an email to inactive subscribers on your list asking if they still want to be a part of it

Evaluate whether the email you sent is aligned with your brand.

Ensure you haven’t performed a bait-and-switch by promising one thing and delivering another.

Make sure your emails are providing value to your audience before trying to upsell.

6. Use an email marketing report template.

Once you’ve got some campaigns under your belt, it’s time to look at how they performed. Your data does no good if you can’t report it in an organized fashion.

An email marketing report is a spreadsheet where you can record your results in one place to help you make inferences from your KPIs and take action to improve them.

Here’s how you should organize your report.

Metrics

Total number of emails sent

Number of emails delivered

Deliverability Rate

Bounce Rate

Open Rate

Clickthrough Rate (CTR)

Click-to-open Rate (CTOR)

Unsubscribe Rate

Data

Subject line

Length of the email body

Offer

CTA (inline or graphic)

List segment(s)

Questions To Ask:

Was your deliverability rate high in comparison to previous periods?

How did your CTR compare to your open rate?

Were your unsubscribe numbers consistent with other emails?

Did a certain subject line perform better than others?

Does the length of the email make a difference in CTR?

Could another style of CTA perform better?

Was the offer appropriate for the list segment?

Email Regulations You Should Know

Email regulations are important to follow as they regulate and protect consumers’ desires to know how and why their information is being used.

If there’s anything we care about, it’s complying with what our customers—or potential customers—want.

There are a few key ones that you should understand:

1. CAN-SPAM Compliance

Technically, CAN-SPAM is an acronym for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (because sometimes the two go together).

In practice, it’s a way to protect your subscribers’ right to only receive emails that they’ve requested.

The law was passed in 2003 and applies to any commercial emails used for business purposes.

Here are the ways to ensure that your emails are CAN-SPAM compliant:

Include your company name and address in every email.

Place visible unsubscribe links within your emails.

Use real email addresses in the “From” and “Reply to” fields.

Write subject lines that indicate the contents of the email.

Please note: This is not to be confused with legal advice. See the FTC’s site for more specific legal information regarding CAN-SPAM laws.

2. GDPR Compliance

While some may view these newly implemented email regulations as burdensome and unnecessary, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) moves us closer to building long-lasting, trusting customer relationships.

GDPR is about giving your customers the right to choose. They choose your emails. They decide to hear from you. They choose your products. And that is exactly what inbound marketing is about.

It is important to note that GDPR only applies to businesses operating in the European Union and businesses that market to EU citizens.

Noncompliance will result in significant fees that aren’t worth the risk, so make sure to read the GDPR guidelines entirely.

Here’s an overview of how you can comply with GDPR laws:

Use precise language when requesting consent to store personal information.

Only collect contact data that is necessary for and relevant to your business.

Store contact data securely and only use it for the agreed-upon purpose.

Retain data for justifiable business purposes only.

Delete contact data on request.

Make it easy for contacts to unsubscribe from your list or update their preferences.

Comply promptly with a contact’s request for access to their data.

Keep company records to prove GDPR compliance.

These regulations will be taken seriously (as they should), so it’s a good idea to create a GDPR strategy for your business before sending emails.

3. Avoid Spam Filters

You spend time creating the perfect email and adhering to regulations, so the last thing you want is to end up in a spam folder.

You’ll want to avoid the spam folder because:

It hurts your deliverability rates across the board.

Your contacts will likely miss all of your emails.

You won’t be able to measure your email marketing effectiveness accurately.

Your analytics will be skewed.

You can avoid being deduced to spam with the following.

Get whitelisted.

A whitelist is a list of approved senders that can reach the subscriber’s inbox. The easiest way to accomplish this is to have your new subscriber add your email address to their address book.

Include directions on how to do this in your welcome email.

Mind your copy.

Avoid using all caps and multiple exclamation points, as well as spam trigger words, like “opt-in,” “click below,” and “order,” that are easily detected and marked down by Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

Use a reliable email service provider.

Your email service provider’s reputation affects your deliverability, so stick to established, well-known companies.

Implement a double opt-in.

Once someone opts in to your email list, send an email asking them to confirm. This ensures that your new subscriber is genuinely interested in your emails and will likely be more engaged.

(Check out more ways you can avoid the spam filter.)

And last but certainly not least, you need to consistently measure the success of your email marketing efforts. There are a number of options you can choose from when it comes to your business’s email marketing analytics.

Email Marketing Tips

While you probably don’t think twice about the formatting or subject line of an email you send to a friend, email marketing requires a lot more consideration.

Everything from the time you send your email to the devices on which your email could be opened matters.

Your goal with every email is to generate more leads, which makes crafting a marketing email a more involved process than other emails you’ve written.

Let’s touch on the components of a successful marketing email:

Copy: The copy in the body of your email should be consistent with your voice and stick to only one topic.

Images: Choose images that are optimized for all devices, eye-catching, and relevant.

CTA: Your call-to-action should lead to a relevant offer and stand out from the rest of the email.

Timing: Based on a study that observed response rates of 20 million emails, Tuesday at 11 AM ET is the best day and time to send your email.

Responsiveness: 55% of emails are opened on mobile. Your email should, therefore, be optimized for this as well as all other devices.

Personalization: Write every email like you’re sending it to a friend. Be personable and address your reader in a familiar tone.

Subject Line: Use clear, actionable, enticing language that is personalized and aligned with the body of the email.

Featured Resource

100 Email Subject Lines We Actually Clicked

Pro tip: Leverage AI for email marketing. By using tools like our AI Email Writer, you can generate copy that suits your goals, saving time along the way.

Personalize your email marketing.

“Personalization isn’t just about adding a contact’s name to the subject line anymore but is all about creating personalized experiences that demonstrate you understand them and have insider knowledge about how they can use your products to succeed,” 

Now that you know who you’re emailing and what’s important to them, sending emails with personalized touches will be much easier.

Sure, you’re speaking to 100+ people at one time, but your leads don’t need to know it.

Personalized emails have higher open rates. In addition, 83% of customers are willing to share their data to create a more personalized experience.

You’ve gathered all this unique data. Your email marketing software allows for personalization tokens. You have no excuse for sending generic emails that don’t make your leads feel special.

“It’s more impactful to base email personalization on two or three factors instead of just what a contact is engaging with on your side,” 

 “Consider personalizing emails based on what you know about your contact, such as their location, industry, employee size, etc., alongside how they engage with your content.”

Here are a few ways to personalize your emails:

Add a first name field in your subject line and/or greeting.

Include region-specific information when appropriate.

Send content that is relevant to your lead’s lifecycle stage.

Only send emails that pertain to the last engagement a lead has had with your brand.

Write about relevant and/or personal events, like region-specific holidays or birthdays.

End your emails with a personal signature from a human (not your company).

Use a relevant call-to-action to an offer that the reader will find useful.

Beginning Email Marketing

While there are many rules to sending a marketing email, the most important is this: Treat the reader on the other end like you’re writing to a friend.

Trust me, you can achieve all of your email marketing goals if you keep this golden rule top of mind in every autoresponder, lead magnet, and subject line.

And remember, the more you help your subscribers, the more they will want to hear from you and look forward to opening emails that you send.

Email Marketing

I know a thing or two about email marketing.

Done correctly, email marketing can be as powerful as any other marketing tactic today. But notice the key phrase: done correctly.

Fortunately, you‘ve get this handy dandy guide you’re reading that will set you up for success in your email marketing strategy.

Without further ado, let’s review the best ways to leverage email marketing. I’ll also cover benefits and statistics that show the importance of email.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is a form of digital marketing that involves sending promotional messages or newsletters to a list of subscribers via email.

The goal is building customer relationships, promoting products or services, increasing brand awareness, and ultimately driving sales.

In my experience, email marketing allows me to reach my target audience directly with personalized and relevant content. It’s also cost-effective, easy to track, and provides valuable data for analyzing campaign success.

Email has been one of the most highly used marketing channels ever since.

This is because email is a flexible yet cost-effective way to reach many people relatively quickly. I can also personalize my message to target specific audiences and generate leads.

Email marketing can take many different forms. These campaigns can include a single email announcing new content, an ongoing newsletter delivered regularly, or contacting customers about product updates.

Email isn’t as shiny as newer channels, like messaging and social. However, email is an effective way to build an audience that gets results.

“Access to someone‘s inbox is sacred, and for a person to welcome you in, there’s already a certain level of trust that you just can’t achieve with other platforms,” he says.

When to Use Email Marketing

Email marketing remains a powerful tactic to:

Build relationships. Build connections through personalized engagement.

Boost brand awareness. Keep your company and your services top-of-mind for the moment when your prospects are ready to engage.

Promote your content. Use email to share relevant blog content or valuable assets with your prospects.

Generate leads. Entice subscribers to provide their personal information in exchange for an asset that they’d find valuable.

Market your products. Promote your products and services.

Nurture leads. Delight your customers with content that can help them succeed in their goals.

Email Marketing Benefits

87% of marketers say that email marketing is critical to business success.

Email is the third most popular owned media platform B2B marketers used to distribute content in the past 12 months.

There are over 4.3 billion email users worldwide, so if you’re looking for a way to reach your customers, email is the perfect place to find them.

The number of global email users is set to grow to 4.48 billion users by 2024.

As of 2022, email generates $36 for every dollar spent.

51% of marketers say email marketing is the most effective marketing channel, according to our Marketing Trends survey.

53% of marketers are continuing to invest in email marketing in 2023.

33% are increasing their investment in email marketing in 2023.

33% of marketers send weekly emails, and 26% send emails multiple times monthly.

Beyond just the statistics, perhaps the best reason to use email marketing is that you own the channel. Outside of compliance regulations, no external entity can impact how, when, or why you reach out to your subscribers.

Time and time again, email proves to be an unsung hero in marketing.

Email Marketing Stats by Industry

Email marketing rules change based on your industry and who you’re marketing to. Below are some email marketing trends for B2B, B2C, e-commerce, and real estate companies that can inform your email marketing strategy.

Email Marketing Stats for B2B

Email is the third-highest owned-media platform B2B marketers used to distribute content in the last 12 months.

44% of B2B marketers say email marketing is the most effective marketing channel.

B2B marketers say email engagement is the fourth most insightful metric when evaluating performance over the past year, more than social media, search rankings, and lead quality.

Email Marketing Stats for B2C

50% of B2C marketers say growing their email list is one of the biggest challenges in their role.

37% of B2C marketers send daily marketing emails to their subscribers.

Email Marketing Stats for Ecommerce

57.2% of marketers say the e-commerce brands they manage have 1,000 to 10,000 contacts on their email lists.

85.7% of e-commerce marketers say the primary business objective of their email strategy is increasing brand awareness.

Roughly 72% of e-commerce marketers say the biggest challenge they face with email is low open rates.

Getting Started with Email Marketing

I know it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the vast possibilities of email marketing, so let’s break down a few key steps to get you started building a solid email campaign that will delight your customers.

You can think of these steps as creating a successful email marketing strategy.

1. Create an Email Marketing Strategy

You can learn how to build an effective email strategy and send emails that people actually want to read. It just takes a plan (one that can be broken down into a few key steps).

2. Define your audience.

Effective emails, whether a campaign or a one-off, start with understanding your audience.

Like everything else in marketing, start with your buyer persona, understand what pain points they’re dealing with, and tailor your email campaign to your audience’s needs.

3. Establish your goals.

Usually, before I think up campaign goals, I gather some context.

I always want to know the average email stats for my industry and use them as benchmarks for my goals. This should be your process as well.

4. Build your email list.

You need people to email, right? An email list (we’ll cover how to build your email list in the next section) is a group of users who have permitted you to send them relevant content.

To build that list, you need several ways for prospects to opt-in to receive your emails which we’ll cover in another section in just a moment.

Don’t be discouraged if you only have a few people on your list. It can take some time to build. In the meantime, treat every subscriber and lead like gold, and you’ll start seeing your email list grow organically.

5. Choose an email campaign type.

Email campaigns vary, and trying to decide between them can be overwhelming. Do you send a weekly newsletter? Should you send out new product announcements? Which blog posts are worth sharing?

The answer is subjective.

I like to start by learning about the types of email campaigns, then I decide which is best for my audience.

I also set up different lists for different types of emails, so customers and prospects can sign up for only the emails that are relevant to them.

If you need help writing your emails, consider using AI to help.

6. Make a schedule.

Decide how often you plan to contact your list and inform your audience upfront.

This way, they’ll know exactly what to expect ahead of time. Forgetting this can lead to high unsubscribe lists and even get you in their spam.

In addition, once you set a schedule, be consistent. It will build trust and ensure you stay top of mind for your audience.

7. Measure your results.

This should come as no surprise. As marketers, we measure everything. Being meticulous about every key metric will help you make small changes to your emails, yielding large results.

We’re going to touch on the exact KPIs to monitor in a bit (or you can jump ahead).

Now that you understand the steps to creating an email marketing strategy, we‘ll look at what’s involved in building your email list.

8. Choose an email marketing platform.

An email marketing provider (ESP) is an excellent resource if you’re looking for any support while fine-tuning your email marketing efforts. Depending on your needs and types of campaigns, there are several paid and free email marketing platforms including HubSpot, Constant Contact, MailChimp or other Mailchimp alternatives.

9. Build Your Email List

Now to my favorite part: filling the email list with eager prospects excited to hear from you.

There are many creative ways to build your email list (and, no, purchasing emails ain’t one).

Tactically speaking, list building comes down to two key elements that work cohesively to grow your subscriber numbers: lead magnets and opt-in forms.

Featured Resources

The Email Newsletter Lookbook

How to Create Email Newsletters That Don’t Suck

Here’s how I build and grow my email list.

10. Use lead magnets.

Your lead magnet is exactly as it sounds: It attracts prospects to your email list, usually as a free offer.

The offer can take many formats, should be valuable to your prospects, and is given away for free in exchange for an email address.

There’s just one problem: People have become hyper-protective of their personal information. You can’t expect to receive an email address without exchanging it for something valuable.

Think about a lead magnet that is relevant, useful, and makes your prospects’ lives easier.

Here are a few types of lead magnets you could create:

Ebooks.

Whitepapers.

Infographics.

Reports or studies.

Checklists.

Templates.

Webinars or courses.

Tools.

If you’re short on resources, you can even repurpose existing content to create lead magnets.

11. Create an enticing opt-in form.

Your opt-in form is how you get a prospect’s information to add them to your list. It’s the gate between your future leads and the incredible asset you created with them in mind.

Here are some tips for creating an enticing opt-in form:

Create an attractive design and attention-grabbing header.

Your form should be branded, stand out from the page, and entice people to sign up. You want to excite readers with the offer.

Make the copy relevant to the offer.

While your goal is to get people to enter their information, it isn’t to deceive them. Any information on your form should be a truthful representation of the offer.

Keep the form simple.

This could be one of your first interactions with your prospect. Don’t scare them away with a long long-form several fields.

Ask for only the most essential information: first name and email is a good place to start.

Set your opt-in form for double confirmation.

It may seem counterproductive to ask your subscribers to opt into your emails twice, but some research on open rates suggests that customers may prefer a confirmed opt-in (COI) email more than a welcome email.

Ensure that the flow works.

Take yourself through the user experience before you go live. Double-check that the form works as intended, the thank you page is live, and your offer is delivered as promised.

This is one of your first impressions of your new lead — make it a professional and positive one.

Next, let’s take a moment to cover some universally accepted email marketing best practices regarding how to send marketing emails.