How email marketing helped Zepto with cart abandonment, ET BrandEquity

Since email marketing is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing, its relevance is being questioned in this day and age. A staple of marketers' strategies – many question its relevance compared to other forms of digital marketing such as social media marketing and his SEO marketing. However, industry experts still rate email marketing as one of the most effective and cost-effective ways to reach and engage with customers. There are many types of personalized messages that brands can send to customers using email marketing. Some of them include welcome emails, personalized emails based on product preferences, abandoned cart emails, special promotional offers, informative newsletters, etc. His Zepto, a quick commerce brand, understood the importance and effectiveness of email marketing, especially when it comes to abandoned cart space.

For Zepto, email marketing has helped them effectively engage with customers in a way that fosters relationships and drives transactions. The starting point for your brand's email marketing strategy is a robust database of customer data. Zepto relies heavily on first-party data collected from customers who install the app and interact with the business.

Amritanshu Nanda, chief marketing officer at Zepto, says email marketing is a low-cost, high-ROI medium. Many users don't feel comfortable sharing their contact number with brands, but are comfortable sharing their email ID. This audience cohort interacts well with email marketing messages.

The brand allocates about 1 percent of its marketing budget to email marketing, but it's still very effective. “Media spend per unit is very low. If you want to reach 10,000 people and send an email, it costs him less than Rs 100,” Nanda said.

Zepto approaches email marketing as a channel that helps both consumer retention and engagement. Nanda called email marketing a highly evolved and effective performance marketing channel that provides effective communication without being too intrusive. The various parameters that can be measured include email open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, traffic, and revenue, i.e. the amount of transactions completed from email messages.Abandoned carts are a big problem for most marketers in the mobile or online space. Nanda and his team have found that email communication that addresses customer abandoned carts in a personalized manner is an effective way to ensure customers complete their transactions.

If a customer abandons the cart without completing the transaction, they will receive an email with a set of related products similar to the one added to the cart. In this case, email mimics a subsection of the app, which Nanda calls an effective marketing tool in its own right.

“While most marketers these days tend to view email marketing as an outdated tool, the scope of personalization that is possible with email means that this medium also has the potential to deliver high ROI. It's also one of the most measurable email marketing channels available to marketers today,” Nanda said.

You can expect a 15-20x ROI benchmark for email marketing campaigns. Nanda acknowledged that this channel is not scalable but has a high return on investment.

Everyone checks their email inbox at least once a day, so being present in that digital space helps your brand recall even if users don't open your email. According to Nanda, the open rates for his branded email campaigns generally hover between 8 and 12 percent. This means that 1 in 10 of the user base that receives email is also interested in the content of the email. Among them, click-to-open rates can also vary between 10-20%, which he called “his incredible CTR.”

Designing an email message itself can be difficult, and this is where creativity comes into play. When a well-designed email with a relevant message and a witty subject line lands in a consumer's inbox, they're more likely to open the email and interact with you. . Brands and their products will increase exponentially. The cherry on the cake is the subject line of your email marketing efforts. Attractive subject lines go a long way in encouraging consumers to open your email and interact with your brand.

Every day, customers interact with hundreds of brands. Especially on digital platforms where ads are everywhere. The idea is to generate recall within that email channel. This may take a backseat to business growth or his ROI, but the more fragmented an email campaign and its communications are, the easier it will be for the email sender to stand out among the clutter. It means that.