Most people won't buy big things the first time they visit a website
That is probably an easy sentence to agree with. The bigger the purchase, the more time someone might need to make that purchase.
The thing is, even small purchases might take some time.
The issue is that the smaller the purchase, the more likely it is that someone might forget entirely that your product exists.
Which is why you need to remind them.
You need an email automation strategy.
Where to start
I generally recommend you ask people for their email at the very beginning of a purchase flow. Either in a multi-stage lead form or when they are literally making an ecommerce purchase.
In that stage, get their email (following all local laws of course) and then ask them to opt in to email messages from you.
From there, you should have a strategy of reminding people of your product or service.
There are some questions you need to answer, though:
How often do people want an email?
Likely they want emails from you far less than you expect. Respect their inbox and don't do daily or even weekly emails. Focus on higher quality, less frequent emails. You'll still remind the person while also showing you respect them, increasing the likelihood they will purchase from you.
What value can you actually bring to your customers
This is where email becomes part of your content strategy (talked about in more detail later). You can't just "remind" them of your existence. You need to provide value.
Sometimes this is as simple as letting people know about sales or new products.
Other times it's content specific to your niche that may be helpful for them.
What's the next action you want someone to take?
If you want someone to make a purchase, make it as easy as possible to do within the email itself.
Heck, you could ask them to reply to the email to move to next steps.
What about newsletters?
In terms of collecting emails, the above-mentioned way (within the sales process) I find is best, but people have found other ways.
Some of these ways include popups asking you to sign up for a newsletter.
I would caution on this one. Firstly, how much value could your newsletter actually bring to someone? If you can give a TON of value, then go for it. If not, then don't bother.
The other caution is that anything you do that isn't making it easy to make a purchase, will take away from a purchase.
If you have a newsletter or social media buttons or any other action on your page that isn't a lead or sale, it will lower your conversion rate. At least, in all of the tests I have done in my career, I have found this.
Important: know your local laws
Email has an age-old problem with spam. In the olden days it was far worse than it is now and one of the reasons why is that many places have enacted anti-spam laws.
These laws aren't universal, so I can't get exact advice around them but I do want to make you aware of some of them.
An important note is that often the laws apply to anyone sending an email to a citizen of their country and it does not matter where your business is based.
**Basically: **just because you are USA based, doesn't mean you can ignore these laws.
Europe has GDPR amongst other things
If you are in Europe, I would recommend reading up on GDPR and making sure your email automation (and all data collection you do) follows it. Luckily, at this point most tools have made it easy to be compliant, or are compliant by default.
GDPR can be complex, but it, like most anti-spam laws, boils down to consent: you need to make sure the people who get the emails, want them.
Canada has CASL
I am based in Canada, so this one impacted me and my Canadian customers pretty heavily. It is similar to GDPR but slightly less overreaching.
Most email tools that are GDPR compliant are also CASL compliant, but that is not a universal truth.
An important note here is that the fines for not following CASL can be enormous, up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per day for non-compliance.
California and other state specific laws
The United States gets a little more complex because the laws are not at a federal level and instead are based on each specific state. This is where I would recommend looking up the laws in your own state or where you mainly do business.
Almost all of these laws are similar to the above in that they are mostly based around consent: the user must specifically want to get emails from you.
Almost all of the above laws require an easy way to unsubscribe from emails as well as full consent from the user, sometimes in the form of a double opt-in.
The easiest way to stay compliant is to pick a tool that is already compliant with all of the above. This usually costs a little money, but can save you a ton of headaches in the long run.