Ecommerce Email Marketing: 5 Campaign Strategies Your Shopify Store Needs
Ecommerce email marketing might seem like an old-fashioned promotional strategy in an age of push notifications, video advertising, and social media, but it’s still insanely powerful.
In fact, statistics regularly show that email marketing drives a higher ROI (Return on Investment) than virtually any other form of marketing strategy ($36 for every $1 you spend). As customer acquisition costs continue to skyrocket, email could be one of the most cost-effective ways to boost your sales.
The good news? If you’re using Shopify as your ecommerce platform, launching an email marketing strategy is easy. Not only does Shopify has its own email tools for transactional and automated emails, but it integrates with dozens of email and SMS platforms.
Of course, before you can reap the benefits of an ecommerce email marketing strategy, you’re going to need to figure out which campaigns to prioritize.
Fortunately, we’re here to help.
Why Invest in Ecommerce Email Marketing?
There are plenty of ways to advertise your Shopify store, but few have the power and potential of ecommerce email marketing. Email is one of the few “owned” marketing channels you have as an ecommerce vendor, which means changes to SEO algorithms and social media rules aren’t going to affect how you interact with your target audience.
Plus, email marketing comes with a host of other benefits, such as:
- Excellent engagement: People check their email inboxes constantly, whether it’s on the web, or via their smartphone. In fact, the average open rate for email is about 33.02%, which means you have a good chance of reaching your target audience regularly.
- Great personalization: With the right email marketing tool, you can easily divide your contacts into segments based on their purchasing habits, locations, demographics and more. This makes it easy to personalize marketing messages, something 73% of customers expect.
- Better brand recall: Emails can boost brand awareness and brand recall. You can brand everything from your sender name and email address to the subject line, the design of your template, and anything else you can think of.
- Increased sales: Email is effective at driving sales. In fact, Campaign Monitor reports that 64% of small businesses use email as their main channel for acquiring and retaining customers. It’s a great tool for promoting deals, sales, and new products.
- Boosted growth: Email has an impact on three of the biggest growth multipliers for ecommerce brands: the total number of customers they drive back to their website, the total number of purchases customers make, and their average order value.
The Top 5 Ecommerce Email Marketing Campaigns You Need
A lot of your ecommerce email marketing strategy will depend on a range of different factors, from your current business goals to your budget. However, there are certain types of email campaigns that drive results for every ecommerce business.
Here’s what you should be focusing on when you’re getting started.
- Welcome Emails
Welcome emails are often overlooked by business leaders, but they’re one of the most powerful types of email you can send. They even achieve average open rates of around 90.09%, and click-through rates of about 27% - making them incredible tools for customer engagement.
Welcome emails are a great way to introduce your customer to your company, showcase what makes you special, and build the foundations for a stronger relationship. They should clearly outline what your customer should expect from being subscribed to your email list, without being overly promotional. Here’s a great example from Fulton, the Shoe Insoles company:
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When crafting your own welcome emails:
- Deliver instant value: Don’t immediately bombard customers with promotional messages. Instead, provide other forms of value, like insights into your industry, links to valuable blog posts, or information about your brand.
- Send emails quickly: As soon as your customer fills out a form and gives you their email address, respond immediately with a welcome email. This is particularly crucial if you’ve offered your customer something in exchange for their details, like a discount code.
- Set expectations: Make sure your customers are aware of what you’re going to include in future email messages. Where possible, give them the opportunity to choose the kind of emails they want to receive, with a “preference center”.
- Promotional Ecommerce Emails
It probably goes without saying, but promotional emails should form a significant part of your ecommerce email marketing strategy. These emails come in many forms, as your company can promote a range of different things, such as:
- New products or services
- Time-sensitive deals and sales
- Upcoming events
- Subscriber-only discounts and rewards
- Seasonal events (like Black Friday)
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The key to creating great promotional emails is personalization. If you’re using a popular email marketing tool like Klaviyo, you should be able to connect it to your Shopify site, and segment your subscribers into lists based on previous purchases, locations and interests.
This will help you to design promotional campaigns that are more relevant to your target audience. You can even customize each individual campaign, sending one template for your latest product to new customers, one to existing customers, and so on.
Other quick tips for success include:
- Optimize the subject line: Use the subject line to immediately tell your customer what your message is about. Highlight the offer or deal they’re going to get, so they’ll be more inclined to click on your messages.
- Get straight to the point: Don’t fill your promotional emails with links to other content (like your blogs), or too much content. Focus on one promotional message at a time, and use clear CTA buttons to drive action.
- Make it visually appealing: Use GIFs, videos, and images to showcase the products you’re promoting. Visual emails can significantly increase click-through rates, and boost your chances of conversions.
- Abandoned Cart Emails
Even if your website is perfectly designed to deliver an excellent experience, and boost conversion rates, there’s a good chance you’re going to see some “abandoned carts”. The average shopper faces dozens of distractions online, meaning the average cart abandonment rate usually sits just under 70%.
However, just because a customer leaves a cart without making a purchase doesn’t mean you can’t make another attempt to convert them, with the right email. An abandoned cart email is instantly triggered as soon as a customer leaves items waiting in their basket.
While they won’t allow you to recover 100% of your lost sales, they can reduce missed opportunities and increase your conversions, making them essential to your ecommerce email marketing campaigns.
To boost your chances of success with abandoned cart emails:
- Show the products: Use dynamic emails to showcase the products your customers added to your customer’s cart. This will remind them of what they were going to purchase, and hopefully convince them to return to their cart.
- Provide an incentive: Consider offering an incentive to encourage the purchase, such as a limited time discount, or free shipping. If you can’t offer a discount, try to instil urgency by letting your customers know if an item is running out of stock.
- Use compelling CTAs: Always include a clear call to action asking customers to return to their basket and complete the purchase. Make it easy to click back through your website and continue their shopping journey.
- Transactional Emails
It’s easy to overlook the importance of transactional emails when you’re designing ecommerce email marketing campaigns. These messages aren’t directly promotional, so they won’t immediately add to your conversion rates and profits.
However, they do improve your relationship with your customer, help to build trust, and boost your chances of future transactions. Most transactional emails are informative, they confirm orders, let customers know when a product is shipping, and share details on delays.
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This helps to minimize the post-purchase anxiety felt by 50% of consumers, and shows customers that they can trust your organization. When creating transactional emails:
- Be clear and informative: Provide as much valuable information as you can, from insights into estimated delivery times, to pictures of the products your customers ordered. However, try to keep the email short and sweet.
- Look for opportunities to upsell and cross-sell: You may be able to increase average order values by promoting additional, related products in your transactional “order confirmation” and “shipping confirmation” emails, particularly if you include an offer.
- Ask for feedback: Consider requesting feedback from your customers about their shopping experience, or provide a link to your contact page so they can reach out to you if they have any additional questions.
- Life Cycle Emails
Finally, life cycle emails are another type of email ecommerce marketing campaign that may not seem to have a direct impact on your revenue straight away, but deliver exceptional results in the long-term. These are the emails you use to nurture relationships with customers.
They might include celebratory emails, such as messages you send to your customers on their birthdays, or after they spend a certain amount of time with your company (anniversary emails). They can also include emails directly related to your customer’s relationship with your business.
For instance, if a customer adds a product to their wish list and it’s back in stock, you can send them a message letting them know. If they regularly purchase the same product, you can send them reminders when that product goes on sale, or when they haven’t made a purchase for a while.
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These emails help to keep your organization “top of mind” with your customer, and boost your chances of long-term, lucrative relationships. Remember to:
- Personalize every message: Every life cycle email should be unique to the customer and the relationship they have with your company. Reference important dates relevant to them, show them products you know they’ll be interested in, and build deeper relationships.
- Reward loyal customers: Constantly look for ways to reward your most loyal customers, with birthday and anniversary discounts, special offers, access to loyalty programs, or even exclusive early access to sales.
- Keep the conversation going: Regularly request feedback on products and services, and ask your customers to join your community wherever possible, even if that means just encouraging them to follow you on social media.
Get Started with Ecommerce Email Marketing
Ecommerce email marketing is a valuable resource for any online seller. While there are many other types of email campaigns you can add to your strategy, starting with the five options above should help you to nurture stronger relationships, and increase your conversion rates.
If you’re struggling with your email marketing strategy, or you need help creating more comprehensive marketing strategies for ecommerce, the right expert can help.
Reach out to Storetasker to be matched with an ecommerce marketing expert that can take your Shopify store’s profits to the next level.
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