Marketing Your eBay Store to Repeat Buyers
by Andrew Martinez-Fonts
eBay Stores Product Management

If you own an eBay Store, you already know that the benefits of having a Store go beyond having an attractive destination for eBay marketplace shoppers to view all your items for sale. Because your eBay store has its own URL (web address) and customized look and feel, it's the perfect platform for building your brand on eBay and showing buyers that you're an established, committed merchant.

eBay Stores has been an increasingly effective platform for attracting new buyers, whether they're on eBay or off-eBay. Now, with the help of new tools, you can go a long way to retain and attract repeat buyers.

Why is repeat business important?
In the evolution of any successful business, growth in the early days comes primarily through acquiring new customers. If you're starting out, the only way to go is up, and chances are that most of your first customers will be brand new. However, as your business grows and matures, it becomes harder and harder to attract new customers to fuel the growth of your business. In addition, the cost of acquiring new customers also increases.

Repeat buyers are the answer.

Repeat buyers are interested in your wares, have experienced your (hopefully) excellent customer service, and are already familiar with your products. Because they trust you as a merchant, repeat buyers will also tend to require less “hand-holding” than new buyers who may have a lot of questions and special requests. The more repeat buyers you can attract to your eBay Store, the better your eBay business will be poised for growth.

How can eBay help me engage repeat buyers?
With the recent release of Stores Email Marketing (known to buyers as “Stores Newsletters”), you have at your disposal an effective and easy-to-use tool for engaging repeat buyers. Now you can send professional-looking email marketing campaigns to your buyers, encouraging them to come back to your eBay Store.

Using the powerful new Email Marketing tool, you can start increasing business from your repeat buyers in these three easy steps:

1. Set up mailing lists and attract subscribers;
2. Create effective email marketing campaigns;
3. Track your progress and measure success.

1. Set up mailing lists and attract subscribers
Before you can send email to prospective repeat buyers, you have to build up your mailing lists. The Stores Email Marketing tool helps you make sure that you have the right mailing lists set up. Customizing your mailing lists helps you understand the different segments of your buyer base and fine-tune your email marketing campaigns. You'll be able to send prospective buyers in each segment just the right marketing message and offers that appeal to them.

By default, you will have one mailing list named “General Interest” in the tool. So even if you don't do anything to set up different mailing lists, you'll still have one mailing list containing all of your buyers who have subscribed so far.

eBay Store sellers can have up to five different customized mailing lists. Mailing lists can be customized in many ways. For example, you can customize them by segmenting your buyers by product category, demographics, or promotional interest.

As someone who knows their business better than anyone else, you have the freedom to customize your mailing lists in ways that work best for your business. For example, if you sell movies, you may want to create mailing lists entitled “Comedy”, “Action”, “Horror”, “Classics”, and “Family.” This category-based segmentation will allow you to market your comedies to subscribers on the “Comedy” list, and action thrillers to subscribers on the “Action” list. Making mailing lists as specific as possible in terms of your buyers' interests will increase the appeal for your buyers to subscribe to lists that they're interested in.

Once your mailing lists are set up, you'll need some subscribers. Buyers can easily subscribe to your mailing lists by clicking the “Add to Favorite Sellers” link on the item page. We've placed links to this page throughout the eBay website, but if you're interested in promoting your mailing lists, you can also create your own links to this page. You can even have the text on the link say: “Sign up for my email newsletters to learn about special promotions!” to encourage subscribers to join your lists.

2. Create effective email marketing campaigns
Creating email marketing campaigns with the Email Marketing tool is a snap. Just go to “Manage Your Store” and click on “Email Marketing” under Promotions. On the “Sent Email” page, click “Create Email.”

On the email creation page, you can choose which mailing list (or lists) will receive your email. After this, enter text in the email subject line, include a personal message, and choose the items from your eBay Store to feature in the email. Once you've seen a preview of your email and are satisfied with your message, just click “Send”, and the message will be on its way to your subscribers!

If you don't want to use the eBay email template, you can create your own email layout by inserting your own HTML in the personal message section and turning all of the other sections off. You can even use eBay HTML tags in the personal message to easily add item lists and search boxes.

3. Track your progress and measure success
Once you've sent out your email, you'll probably be wondering if anyone is reading it. Most importantly, you'll want to know – did anybody buy anything? The Email Marketing tool lets you get this information easily. Just go back to the “Sent Email” page and click on the email title to view a report for any of your sent email. The report will include data on how many emails were sent, how many were opened by your customers, the number of clicks on the links in the message, and how many items were bid on or bought directly from the email.

How much does it cost?
Email Marketing is available to all Stores owners. Depending on your store subscription level, you will receive a block of free email for your use every month. Basic Store owners get 100 free emails a month, while Featured Store owners get 1000. If you're an Anchor Store owner, you'll get 4000 free emails per month. You can increase your email availability by purchasing more emails at a charge of $0.01 per email.

How do I get started with Email Marketing?
You can access Email Marketing through the Manage My Store page. Once you're on the Manage My Store page, you'll see a link to “Email Marketing” in the Promotions section. You can also check out a step-by-step Email Marketing tutorial.

Next month: New Year, New Store, More Sales! Let us show you how the new features in Stores can make 2005 your best selling year yet!