Email Marketing is becoming very popular in digital marketing strategy. Without email marketing you cannot make a good relationship with your customers. If you want to know the best eCommerce email marketing tips, you are at the right place. In this article, we’ll lay out 10+ eCommerce email marketing best tips that will help you to grow your sales.
Studies shown that email marketing helps generate even more sales than social media giants like Facebook and Twitter.
For every single dollar companies spend on email marketing, they’re able to generate minimum $40 in sales.
According to Monetate, the conversion by email marketing is even close to twice as high as organic search.
So, let’s start with the discussion how you can improve your email marketing efforts.
First, let’s review the types of emails you might send to your customers:
Marketing Emails
These types of emails are usually informational or promotional messages. It is sent to people who asked you to keep them updated, such as prospects, clients, reporters, vendors, affiliates, etc. Marketing emails encompass a variety of content most are used to send newsletters, sales promotions, announcements, press releases, follow-ups, and surveys.
Transactional Emails
This type of email is usually sent after the successful transaction by any customer. Transactional emails include welcome messages, order tracking, received payments, registration confirmations, etc. These are trusted emails that provide plenty of opportunities for engagement and cross-selling.
Operational Emails
These types of emails consists of important information about your business, such as holiday closures, maintenance plans, or changes to your service availability. It’s important to be consistent for the sake of trust, engagement, and thoroughness.
Simple eCommerce Email Marketing Tips
Here are the simple eCommerce email marketing tips to skyrocket your sales.
1. Start With a Welcome Email
When new visitors sign up for your eCommerce newsletter, they expect to hear from you. That’s why they signed up to your site.
The perfect time to reach out to new subscribers is right after they’ve signed up and that’s why the welcome message or emails came.
Welcome emails have 86% higher open rates than other emails and up to 320% more revenue per email than other promotional emails.
For example, Pandora rewards new subscribers for signing up by offering a 10% discount for next online purchase:
2. Use Personalize Emails to Target Audience
You may want to reach more than one target audience. It’s not uncommon for a product or service to appeal to more than one customer.
Personalize emails can drastically improve open rates, clicks, and engagement while reducing bounces, unsubscribes, and spam reports.
Sending personalize emails with content that’s tailored to each audience segment is a great way to keep your subscribers happy. And the happy subscriber will definitely buy from you.
You can segment your email list into the standard demographics like age, income, education, and maybe gender. Demographics tell you easily-discover-able details about your subscribers like their values, personality, and interests.
This altogether creates a complete and incredibly valuable picture of your subscriber and how to communicate with them.
You can also segment your subscribers in Constant Contact by contact details, behavior, Shopify activity, and click habits.
Take a look at some available criteria in the below image.
3. Send Curation Email
The curation email is popular among eCommerce marketers. For those who haven’t any idea about curation email, it share a brand’s best assets.
Let’s have a look what One King’s Lane does:
You can also send curation email that Huckberry does in their email:
Curation email works best because it allows subscribers to choose what they want to learn more about.
That’s why many websites have “start here” pages.
Here’s another reason why it’s effective:
It allows email marketers to segment recipients based on their interest.
Here’s an example:
Imagine that you’re running an online furniture store and your newsletter curates the best furniture under the following categories:
- Chair
- Table
- Cabinets
- Serveware
- Other
4. Referral Email
It’s a great idea to invite customers to refer friends and family to a brand.
According to a survey by Ogilvy, 74% of customers identify word-of-mouth as a key influencer in their purchasing decision.
It’s not difficult to realize why brands invest time in setting up good referral programs.
Just have a look how Bombas use their referral mail to attract customers.
5. Send Discount Email to Loyal Customers
Try to keep your loyal customers coming back to your store again and again with a loyalty program. Offer discount is the most effective loyalty program to attract loyal customers.
Study found that 72% of Millennial shoppers are open to re targeting via discounts. And 54% of shoppers are likely to purchase abandoned products if they’re offered again at a discounted price.
Be warned, though discounting is effective, you need to strike a balance. Don’t offer discount too often.
6. Promotional Sales Emails
Promotional sales email marketing campaigns are a great way to get the attention of subscribers who haven’t yet taken the step from window-shopper to consumer.
For example, send such type of email in Black Friday & Cyber Monday phenomenon and seasonal holiday shopping that happens during November and December.
These two months is the perfect time that alone account for 25% of annual retail sales. Email marketing plays a vital role on the annual retail sales.
You can pretty easily set up the coupon code to automatically apply to the cart with Dokan, Shopify, and WooCommerce to make it REALLY easy for subscribers to buy.
7. Responsive and Well-Designed Email
All emails that you are sending from your online store should be responsive and well-designed. It doesn’t mean that every email has to have images and GIFs. Only text emails do really well if they are interesting.
To create responsive and well-designed email we have summarized the following points:
Be Visually Appealing
With images you can do it, but you can also use non-image formatting like headings and bullets to break up text and make your emails easy to read.
Look Good on Mobile
Make sure that the responsive templates should look good on mobile device. There are several plugin to check this like Constant Contact. With this you can preview or send a test email to make sure things look the way you want.
Be Easy to Understand
Try to send email as simple as possible, so that it can be understand by anyone easily.
Capture the Reader’s Interest
Use your power of words. Make sure your email copy pulls your reader deeper into the email as you go.
8. Send Cart Abandonment Email
Around 75% of shoppers will abandon carts. This is a common fact. But that doesn’t mean that those customers are gone forever.
If you’re collecting email addresses and tracking site usage, the next logical step is to send an abandoned cart email when shoppers leave without completing their purchases.
9. Send Order Confirmation Email
After analyzing 100,000+ email receipts Conversio discovered that “Every order confirmation email earns e-commerce stores $0.25 of extra revenue”.
Order confirmation email is another way to grow sales, it’s also a way of setting customer expectations.
Remember that your order confirmation email is more than a digital receipt. It’s also a way to remind shoppers that buying from you was the right decision.
10. Build Your Email List
It is very important to build your email list as your subscribers increase. There are so many places to put options to build your email list like your site’s sidebar, headers, footers, etc.
But, there are also some other places that you can capture leads too. Some of them are:
Catch Customers Email During Checkout
During checkout is a great time to ask customers to subscribe since they’re going to purchase from you. So it’s very clear that they value your products.
Ask for Signups in Transactional Emails
Transactional emails are a great place for up-sells and cross-sells. You should also include a way for customers to stay in touch with your brand.
11. Send Up-sell Email
You might have some idea on up-selling and cross-selling. If not let’s refresh:
When you invite a prospect to buy a more expensive item in a bid to boost their average order value is known as up-selling.
And when you recommend a related or complementary product is known as cross-selling.
You might have notice that McDonald ask, “Do you want fries with that?”. Amazon also shows you products that are often bought together like memory card with camera.
Not only McDonald or Amazon, many eCommerce brands regularly up-sell products to customers who have already made a purchase.
12. Use eCommerce Email Marketing Automation
Email marketing automation is the best way to keep your email marketing scalable and consistent without sacrificing relationships.
According to Venture Beat, entrepreneurs that have adopted email marketing automation, the average conversion rate can reach up to 77%.
It is considered as the huge opportunity for all eCommerce merchants like you to increase sales and nurture the engagement with customers.
13. Send Survey Email
If you don’t ask your subscribers what they’re looking for, how can you expect to give them what they want?
Surveying your customers does more than the discount that you offer to them. It also gives you an opportunity to improve your email marketing.
Asking what your customers want works for many brands, and it can work for yours as well.
14. Send Thank You Email
Sometimes, we don’t say thank you to our potential customers. Even we do, rarely we do to mean it.
Thanking your audience goes beyond thanking them for subscribing to your site or making a purchase; it’s about recognizing they are the reason why you’re in business.
It’s very easy to get caught up in the minutiae of everyday business life. But sometimes, thanking your customers goes beyond all.
eCommerce Email Marketing Tips: Final Words
That’s all about the best eCommerce email marketing tips to get the most out of your customer relationships and send your sales soaring.
These tips can help boost conversions, build brand awareness, loyalty and a customer base that can explode in less time than you’d think.
Just make sure to study your visitors data, segmentation, and show value to your customers. Also don’t forget to offer discount, loyalty programs, excellent customer service and thank you mail. Follow these tips and your customers will be coming back to you time and time again!
Fantastic tips for Ecommerce Email Marketing! Personalization and A/B testing are game-changers. Mobile optimization reminder is key. Thanks for the concise and insightful post!