Email marketing in FMCG business: effective strategies to increase sales

The efficiency of any business, regardless of its volume or main niche, directly depends on how stable sales of goods and services will be. This means that company owners and marketers have to put a lot of effort into attracting a user audience and stimulating them to make purchases. The methods and technologies that are used in practice largely depend directly on what products are to be worked with and what audience they are aimed at.

In this review, we will pay attention to working with such a product category as FMCG. Get to know in more detail what sales are in this case and what you need to consider when working with them. Let us describe in more detail the email marketing strategies that are widely used in practice today, ensuring the highest possible results in promoting goods and services. We will describe 4 proven tactics that will help FMCG brands stimulate sales, thereby increasing their own income. We'll tell you how to organize these works, including local sales as efficiently as possible without risks and other restrictions.

What are FMCG sales

FMCG — It is a category of goods that are widely purchased by people for personal use. This term stands for Fast-Moving Consumer Goods, which in translation sounds like “everyday goods”. This category includes food, household chemicals, cosmetics, oral, hair, skin care products, office supplies, batteries, personal hygiene items, and many other products. That is, this is everything that customers constantly require. What they use in their everyday life: at home at work, while studying, traveling, etc. The most prominent representatives of the market working in this niche are corporations such as Johnson&Johnson, Nestlé, Unilever, Coca -Cola, Colgate, PepsiCo, Danone.

Moreover, a distinctive feature of FMCG products — This is not the mass of purchases, but their immediate regularity. Here, sales are primarily focused on the behavioral factors of buyers. Imagine a situation where you go to a store to buy a bottle of water. Here you will not analyze absolutely all the offers that are presented on the showcase. With a high degree of probability, you will pay attention to a product of a well-known brand or to water, which is currently at a discount. That is, here it is necessary to organize the sales process so that the buyer chooses your products from the general mass supply.

If you analyze the general behavior of buyers in the FMCG goods niche, it will depend on a number of factors:

1. Seasonality of consumption. As an option, water and ice cream are purchased more often in summer rather than in winter. Souvenirs and various gifts are purchased on the eve of the New Year holidays or on March 8th. The best time to sell seeds — this is the end of winter - the beginning of spring.
2. Habit. Most buyers rely on brands of products with which they are already familiar. That is, they have already bought them once and were convinced of the quality and that they correspond to individual tastes. Then the person has no desire to experiment and change the proven solution to another product.
3. Spontaneity of decision making. For example, you are walking around the city, you wanted to have something to eat, you went into a store and bought some kind of snack, yogurt. In this case, you choose what you like best at a given time. You won't buy sausage if you want chocolate.

Only a marketing strategy thought out to the smallest detail will ensure the most successful sales of such a product category as FMCG. Here, marketers work hard to create a desire among the consumer market to purchase a specific product from a specific brand. Make it so that, standing in front of a display case with drinks, he chooses exactly the bottle from the “right” one. manufacturer. In practice, in many ways this marketing strategy manifests itself in the placement of goods in the most advantageous areas, mainly at eye level of buyers. Then his attention will be primarily focused on this product and with a high degree of probability he will purchase it.

TOP recommendations for promoting FMCG products

In any case, the sale of FMCG products should be carried out on the basis of a strategy thought out to the smallest detail, because this is the only way to get the maximum effect. And when developing it, it is necessary to take into account a number of key aspects:

• Research of buyer behavioral factors. It is necessary to understand for what purpose a particular person purchases this product.
• Development of advertising aimed at the widest possible audience. It is necessary to launch a company that could inform customers about the value of a certain product, highlight its key advantages over analogues and significantly increase recognition.
• Appeal to potential buyers through familiar and relatable images. Mostly this is home and family, pets, some significant dates. That is, if you manage to make sure that when a buyer looks at your product, he immediately associates it with something close, with a high degree of probability he will purchase it.
• Appeal to emotions. In this case, we are talking exclusively about creating a positive reaction. The product should be presented in such a way that buyers associate it with joy, care, love, and harmony.
• Formation of loyalty on the part of the consumer audience. This is what we already talked about above: if a person appreciates your product, he will look for it in the store, not paying attention to the products of related brands.
• The attractiveness of the packaging is its convenience. There should not be any clunkiness or excessive flashiness here. The packaging just needs to be concise and at the same time attractive. It should provide convenient access to products. Alternatively, the presence of a reusable adhesive closure on packaging with coffee, tea or cereals will greatly simplify their subsequent use and eliminate the need for additional storage containers.
• Attractive prices. Even the highest quality, but expensive product will not cause a massive response from the audience. Therefore, if you want your FMCG products to be in demand among a wide segment of the consumer market, pay decent attention to optimizing your pricing policy.
• Placement in retail outlets in the most visible places. We have already said above that products placed on shelves at eye level attract the most attention. Also, original placement and any other solution that will attract attention will provide significant help here.
• Launch of special offers that will attract the attention of the consumer audience. We are talking about launching any promotional offers, providing coupons, taking part in interactive events, and sweepstakes. Discounts — this is what will force a potential buyer to pay attention to your product.
• Establishing cooperation with well-known chain stores. This is one of the best solutions that allows you to organize stable sales of FMCG goods. Thanks to this, buyers will be able to find your products in any area of the city or in other regions of the country.

Today, the FMCG goods market — it is one of the most highly competitive and dynamic in development. And this is not surprising, since there are goods here that are bought frequently and constantly. They are sold in large volumes, but new brands are constantly appearing and making a lot of efforts to displace competitors and take their rightful place in this niche. Another difficulty when working with such products is that it is very easy to replace one product with another, which will not be inferior to it in quality, price and other characteristics.

All this requires the FMCG market to quickly respond and adapt to new trends and the ever-increasing demands of the user audience. Thus, many manufacturers today rely on healthy food products and the creation of environmentally friendly, quickly degradable packaging. Today you can often see how native advertising from bloggers is launched, on various cooking shows, in recipes for this or that product. Manufacturers use different strategies to promote FMCG products. Today, significant emphasis is placed on publications on social networks, podcasts and blogs. But at the same time, such a direction as email marketing does not lose its relevance. And now we will dwell in more detail on its features.

Features of email marketing in the context of FMCG business

By email marketing in this case we mean a fairly impressive set of tasks and step-by-step recommendations for solving them. This is what will ensure constant interaction with potential buyers and will help in promoting the brand and its products. According to the latest statistical studies, investments in email marketing provide a 40-fold return. That is, if you invest $1 in it, you will get a return of $40. But in this case, it is necessary to rely on the strongest and most thoughtful strategies. If you make a flaw or mistake somewhere, then your actions will be doomed to failure. This is also true for the FMCG goods market.

Among the main advantages characteristic of email marketing, we highlight:

1. Provide assistance in planning advertising campaigns. Using an email newsletter, you can provide your potential customers with information about your new products, promotional offers and other information that may interest them. You will be able to send letters that will encourage you to take one or another targeted action: purchasing a product at a discount, signing up for a free master class, seminar, trial lesson. This is accomplished by developing a short series of letters. Often there are 3 stages involved. On the first, an announcement of a particular product is launched, indicating its advantages; on the second, – it is reported that it enters the market, possibly in a week, and already on the third week information is provided directly that this product can be bought tomorrow or the day after tomorrow in a particular store. That is, what is important here is not so much to ensure a sale, but to arouse interest among potential buyers and captivate them. By implementing such actions, you are able to determine the interests of the audience and subsequently perform mailing segmentation, making the letters more personal. This will increase the level of loyalty and will help strengthen the relationship between the brand and customers.
2. Correct goal setting and comprehensive assessment of progress. In order to effectively manage any email strategy, you need to clearly understand what goals you would like to achieve with its help. This is the only way to develop a plan for implementing the idea. Also, using an email marketing strategy, you can evaluate how effective a particular campaign you launched was and determine the feasibility of its subsequent use.
3. Help in choosing the right tactics. Through a short series of email campaigns, you will be able to see which of your solutions evoke the greatest response from your potential audience, and which, on the contrary, pass by their attention. By analyzing the results obtained, it will be possible to develop a strategy that will really attract potential customers and encourage them to find a product of a certain brand in stores.

The nuances of developing an email marketing strategy

In order to build a successful email strategy in the FMCG market segment, it is necessary to consistently implement a number of stages:

• Define goals. Here you can focus on increasing customer involvement, increasing customer loyalty, intensifying sales, improving brand awareness, and ensuring stable interaction with the user audience.
• Choosing the target audience. The result of any advertising strategy will only be if you can interest a person. That is, this product must be necessary for him. In the context of FMCG goods, this obviously should not be a problem, since we are dealing with the most popular market niche.
• Selecting the most suitable tools for mailing. In this case, it is necessary to use exclusively reliable email services. This is the only way you can be sure that your customers will receive the emails sent to them. It is also optimal to control the delivery of the mailing, as well as what actions a person performs with the received letter.
• Segmentation of mailings. Thanks to this, you will be able to send relevant e-mails based on the real location of the potential buyer, his gender, age, and type of activity. This is what will allow you to make messages as personalized as possible.
• Develop appropriate tactics for collecting email addresses. Here you can use the registration of customers that they leave in a particular store to receive discounts and sign up for subscriptions. Today, so-called multichannel subscription forms are actively used, as a result of which customers can receive your messages not only by email, but also in the form of SMS messages, newsletters on social networks, instant messengers, as an option on Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, etc.
• Selecting the appropriate type of letter. Here you need to proceed from what goals you set for yourself. If this is a new brand or product entering the market, then this could be a welcome letter. If you want to draw attention to discounts, then this is already a commercial newsletter.
• Schedule your email campaign in advance. In this case, you will have to experiment to find the time interval for sending emails when you will see the highest engagement. This means that the largest number of letters will be opened and read.
• Format your emails. To convince the user audience of your reliability, responsibility, to prove your respectability and reliability, you need to make your newsletter look as presentable and impressive as possible. To do this, you can try playing with fonts and formats. Today there are quite a lot of templates and designers for letters. Perhaps in them you will find solutions that will be most effective for you.
• Optimize your newsletter for viewing on smartphones and tablets. Most modern users rely on personal gadgets. This means that if you don’t want to miss out on any of the views, you need to optimize your mailing for mobile devices. In this case, it is worth reducing the text content as much as possible and setting the width limit to no more than 600 pixels. Your email must include only one column and must contain a CTA button. An image is also acceptable: clear, but small in size. But the font, on the contrary, should be about 13 pixels.
• Track your statistics. At the first stage of launching an email campaign, you will have to experiment a lot in order to choose the most suitable letter option. Once you see which solution works better than the others, you can safely take it as a basis and launch a mass mailing. But still, in any case, you will have to track reviews, reports, responses. You need to understand how many of your emails were delivered, how many were opened, how many people clicked on the link, and how many — left complaints about spam, etc. Based on the data received, you will be able to make adjustments to your strategy, increasing its effectiveness, while minimizing costs.

Email marketing tactics that can be applied to FMCG brands

One of the main difficulties faced by companies working with FMCG brands is that they do not have their own trading platform. That is, establishing a connection with the user audience is often very, very difficult. It turns out that consumers need to make a purchasing decision as quickly as possible, literally while in the store. And to evaluate the product they use only 2 main criteria: visuals and price. That is, in such conditions it will be extremely difficult for FMCG brands to influence user opinion. And this is where modern CRM marketing tools, in particular email strategies, come to the rescue.

If we analyze all the solutions that are presented today in this market segment, we can highlight 4 solutions that have proven themselves to be excellent in practice and have proven their high efficiency and reliability:

1. Using trigger mailings. By such a concept as trigger mailing, we mean automated emails that will be sent as a response to certain user actions or events. This is exactly the solution that will allow you to most unobtrusively attract the attention of the user audience and provoke them to communicate, helping to increase recognition and the level of loyalty. For the most part, communication should begin with a short chain of letters of a welcoming nature. In them you tell the audience about your brand and the products themselves. This is something that will introduce people to a completely unknown product and prepare them for subsequent more active actions. That is, with the help of trigger mailing you will create a platform for subsequent communication with your audience.
2. Use dynamic AMP emails. These are the same email messages, but only with the inclusion of dynamic and interactive elements. This technology first appeared on the market more than 9 years ago, but increased interest in it began to be observed just recently. The main difficulty here is the lack of specialists who could implement fairly complex mechanics in practice. That is, today only a small number of brands use such a solution in practice. The technology is still considered innovative. This means that it will arouse increased interest among users. Unusual solutions implemented in email newsletters will help increase the level of loyalty from the user audience.
3. Get your subscribers to want to communicate online with you. In practice, there are often cases when FMCG brands call users for offline communication. Examples of such a solution include the same promotions that are organized in stores, distribution of leaflets, and product tastings. On the one hand, this gives a good result, but on the other hand, it does not allow tracking target actions. Therefore, interaction with a potential user audience on the Internet will still be more effective. Alternatively, you can send out a newsletter with a particular promotion and offer to get to know it in more detail on the landing page. This way you stimulate the audience to take a targeted action, in particular to go to your website. Thanks to this, you can easily track the conversion of those who received the newsletter and actually took part in your promotion or purchased this or that product.
4. Regular sending of content newsletters. To interest potential buyers, you must offer them some kind of personal benefit. So consider adding additional content to your email newsletter that might interest people. Alternatively, you can simply choose a range of topics that will broaden people's horizons. If you can interest them, you can be sure that users will look forward to new emails from you. In this case, material that evokes positive emotions works well. This way you can build a relationship between pleasant impressions and a specific product, which will ultimately have a positive impact on the perception of both the individual product and the brand as a whole. As a result, this will certainly affect the choice of consumers directly at the time of purchase.

To summarize

Practice shows that email marketing — this is what gives excellent results in practice when working with FMCG brands. With its help, you can build fairly trusting relationships with potential buyers, set people up for feedback, and increase awareness of your brand and specific products. It will also be possible to identify the activity of potential buyers not only offline, but also online. That is, email marketing will help you attract and retain the attention of your user audience and survive in a highly competitive market.

But when working with a custom audience, it is important to ensure the highest possible stability and reliability of access. All your slaves must be performed regularly. Only through consistency can you keep the attention of potential buyers. In some cases, work must be carried out with representatives of different countries and regions of the world. At the same time, it is also important to ensure a sufficiently high level of anonymity and security when working on the Internet. All these features can be provided by mobile proxy servers, as an option from the MobileProxy.Space service https://mobileproxy.space/user.html?buyproxy. In this case, you have at your disposal a reliable intermediary server that will ensure the effective replacement of your IP-address and geolocation with your own technical parameters, which will ultimately create for you a completely different digital identity that has nothing to do with you, at least with sides of the system.

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