Take your Shopify eCommerce Store to the next level

For as long as I’ve been speaking to online retailers (and that’s longer than I care to remember), I’ve been passionately trying to persuade them to invest in email marketing. To be honest, most retailers don’t need too much convincing. Email marketing remains the most cost-effective and profitable marketing channel available to online retailers today. Despite this, many marketers fail to engage their email marketing strategy to the level such an important marketing channel deserves.

This lack of engagement often comes down to unrealistic expectations. When evaluating software, too many online retailers are looking for that “magic marketing button” that does everything for them. While that magic marketing button doesn’t exist, there are marketing technologies that push the boundaries of intelligent automation and come pretty close.

Last week, I attended an online demo for an email marketing app called Pathfinder which completely blew me away. As someone who has been around email marketing for as long as email marketing has been around, it takes a lot to get me excited about a piece of software. So when I say that this little piece of technology is the closest thing to that “Magic Marketing Button” you’ve been searching for all these years, you should get pretty excited too.

Before we get into the nuts and bolts about how this email marketing app is going to change your life, let’s remind ourselves why email marketing is so critical to your business success and why so many business owners fail to engage with the technology.

Email Marketing

The rules that have always made email marketing great are as true as they have ever been.

Email marketing is different from most other marketing channels. Email is a low-cost retention marketing channel as opposed to an expensive acquisition channel such as paid search and social media marketing. As savvy business people, online retailers understand that it will always be easier to make money from your existing clients than win new ones. However, along with this knowledge often comes a long line of excuses. When distilled down, these roadblocks typically revolve around four pressing issues. These are time, money, know-how, and fear.

So, let’s examine these individual roadblocks and perhaps find a new route around them.

Time

Time, or the lack of, is by far the most common excuse I hear for not engaging in email marketing. Email marketing is time-consuming and there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to manage and segment all those lists, create all those campaigns, write, test, and optimize all those subject lines, and keep your customers engaged with your emails. Instead, many retailers send out poorly targeted, poorly timed, and somewhat generic emails and wonder why they don’t work. They then continue to pour money into more expensive acquisition campaigns that can often completely erode any profit margin in a product — meaning they have to work even harder for their money. I call these people busy fools, working very hard for very little in return.

The Alternative Route: Pathfinder enables online retailers to set-up intelligent email marketing campaigns, delivering the right message to the right person at the right time with just a couple of clicks. The Pathfinder App integrates with your Shopify store and automatically selects the right products for your campaigns which can include strategies including converting casual browsers, driving repeat purchases, cart abandonment, and lost customer recovery campaigns, as well as your everyday promotional campaigns and newsletters. Pathfinder will even write your subject lines and body text (for your approval), meaning campaigns can be set-up and approved in a matter of minutes instead of hours. If you are in any doubt about how much time Pathfinder will save you, the software shows a running total of hours saved through engaging the app when compared to standard email marketing solutions.

Money

While email marketing is typically a low-cost marketing channel, advanced marketing techniques such as marketing automation and cart abandonment can be expensive. Then there is the problem of return on investment. If your email marketing campaigns aren’t firing on all cylinders, the returns can be negligible. This doesn’t take into account all those retailers who don’t carefully monitor their analytics and understand fully where their sales come from. If you are not carefully attributing your revenue to the correct channels, your marketing will never truly be optimized and more expensive than it needs to be.

The Alternative Route: Pathfinder offers incredible value for money. For as little as $38 per month, online retailers can access advanced AI and marketing automation features that “enterprise” software companies charge many thousands for. Pathfinder also monitors how much revenue your email campaigns generate for your business and displays the running total prominently on your dashboard, meaning you’ll never doubt the return on your email marketing activities again. With 92% of Pathfinder users achieving positive ROI in just one month, the app basically pays for itself.

Know-How

Marketing automation technology can be a somewhat misleading description of what is often highly complex software solutions requiring expert engagement. If time and money are already a problem for your business, the opportunity to hire someone with the know-how to operate such a system is not going to arise. Sure, you could train someone on your team — but in reality that rarely happens, and with so many other things going on, that user is highly unlikely to use that expensive software at its optimum level. I meet business owners every day who invest in enterprise-level software and never really use it because they don’t know-how.

The Alternative Route: Pathfinder enables you to set-up and launch incredibly powerful marketing automation workflows with just a couple of clicks. Like your very best employees, the app learns and optimizes the way it does things based on how your customers engage with your online store. Pathfinder is so convinced that you’ll be using their software in next to no time, they are offering a free seven day trial (no credit cards required) of the app — more than enough time to get you up and running.

Fear

Fear is perhaps one of the biggest roadblocks preventing online retailers from navigating the road to profitability. In terms of email marketing, the biggest fear that many online retailers share is that they don’t want to “SPAM” their customers. I would argue that no reputable business would want to Spam their customers. Amazon doesn’t SPAM their customers, they do however engaged their customers with highly relevant and welcome email marketing campaigns that people want to engage with.

The Alternative Path: Rest assured Pathfinder hates SPAM as much as you do. Email marketing is no longer about delivering a bulk message to your entire list. It’s about sending the right message to the right person at the right time. The fact is, as long as your emails are timely, relevant, engaging, and MOST IMPORTANTLY permission-based, they will never be considered as SPAM. The only thing you’ll have to worry about when using Pathfinder is how much time it will save you and how much money you’ll make.

Learn More

Are you ready to take your Shopify online store to the next level? Click here to learn how Pathfinder can help you save more time, make more money, and become a more successful online retailer.