If we were to describe e-commerce email marketing in three words, they would be to connect, inform, and promote. As one of the most conversion-rich and cost-effective strategies available today, email marketing is a persuasive way of reaching out to a world of digital users. Let’s find out how you can drive sales with ecommerce email marketing.
Table of contents
Getting started with email marketing for your ecommerce business
Types of emails for e-commerce marketing and their applications
11 types of e-commerce email marketing campaigns you can’t skip
How to create a successful ecommerce email marketing strategy
What is ecommerce email marketing?
Ecommerce email marketing is a marketing tactic online stores use to promote their products and services to their potential and existing customers through email campaigns. It can be done through personalized and targeted email communication like announcements, newsletters, etc.
Getting started with email marketing for your ecommerce business
With an average ROI of 122%, email marketing has proven 4x more successful than other digital marketing strategies. Sounds too good to be true? That’s because you haven’t tapped into the true potential of email marketing and its influence on your ecommerce business.
With close to 4 billion email users, the opportunity to source prospects and leads and engage them is unparalleled, making it critical for your e-commerce business to make its presence felt. Email marketing directly impacts your revenue generation as it helps in lead generation, nurturing, and ensuring that your leads make their way through the sales funnel.
Why is e-commerce email marketing important?
According to Statista, the number of emails sent out and received has been projected to increase to 375 billion by 2025.
The numbers are jaw-dropping when considering the expected growth versus the unchartered territories that e-commerce email marketing has yet to explore.
The truth is that good email has great potential to generate action, develop customer loyalty, and ensure engagement and retention—factors that ultimately deliver a high ROI. If you’re not sold on it yet, we’ll explain why e-commerce email marketing is important.
Create a strong communication channel—Email is one of the most reliable channels for businesses to communicate with their audience. Ninety-nine percent of people still check their email every day.
Build your database - Email marketing allows you to create a strong database over time, which remains its property. The same can’t be said for followers gathered on other social media platforms.
Get high conversion rates - Emails outperform social media in terms of reach and see 50 to 100 times the click-through rates.
Get high ROI - For every $1 spent on email marketing, they receive $36 in return. [Litmus]
Types of emails for e-commerce marketing and their applications
E-commerce is a highly dynamic environment. On a daily basis, it undergoes massive changes and updates, and each user’s journey on an e-commerce site is unique, making it essential for the business to take a personalized approach to the user’s needs and requirements. Automation is how you can deliver it.
There are two categories of emails you need to know about and when to leverage which.
Transactional emails: Functional emails are shared one-on-one with users as a response to their interactions to complete a process they may have started.
Promotional emails: Sent to a database of users who have opted-in to receive promotional messages, meaning your email list.
Lifecycle emails: Lifecycle emails are the emails that are sent to customers during the various stages from subscription to purchase.
11 types of e-commerce email marketing campaigns you can’t skip
Contrary to popular belief, email marketing isn’t just about planning and strategizing correctly - it’s also about the right timing and sequencing. It comes down to tracking your user’s journey and sending out the right email campaigns at the right time to keep them engaged.
Incorrectly sequencing emails (or sending irrelevant content) could lead users to opt out of your emails or even seek a competitor.
So we have compiled a list of ecommerce email campaigns that can be used chronologically.
1. Welcome emails
Type: Lifecycle email
Treat a welcome email as your shot to make a lasting impression. A welcome email for your new subscribers makes or breaks your customer’s experience in setting expectations and ensuring your subscriber base grows. These emails are sent out when a customer signs up or buys from you for the first time. Welcome email series have unusually high open rates, about 50%, so e-commerce businesses use welcome emails creatively to attract and wow their users.
2. Engagement email
Type: Lifecycle email
Grabbing user attention is perhaps one of the toughest things today, but you can achieve that with a strong, engaging email. Customer engagement emails build customer relations to encourage them to interact with the business. For example, offering free shipping or free trials to get a user to take action.
3. Referral email
Type: Lifecycle email
Lead generation is an important aspect of email marketing - and one of the best ways to do that is to incentivize your current and loyal customers to hook their friends and family onto your business. Many e-commerce brands have been known to invest in referral programs by offering freebies and a discount code to their existing customers and referred customers.
4. Discount email
Type: Promotional email
Aren’t you more likely to be lured by a discount on a product you’ve had your eyes on? Your users are the same. Many e-commerce businesses use emails to give out discounts as a means to increase purchases on abandoned cart products or generally across their stores.
6. Cart abandonment email
Type: Lifecycle email
Lack of attention or distraction on the user’s part is one of the biggest fears that most e-commerce businesses have. Users can get disinterested or disengaged extremely quickly and abandon their shopping cart. Other reasons can include high hidden costs during checkout, such as shipping and taxes, complicated checkout processes, slow delivery, and required sign-ups.
But hope isn’t lost. Send them a personalized cart abandonment email to nudge them that their potential purchases are waiting. You even send cart abandonment emails with promos or offers to reduce shipping or delivery fees in an effort to prompt user action.
7. Order confirmation email
Type: Transactional email
In a digital world, it is easy to be duped. To reassure your users, send out order confirmation emails. These emails also help customers track their orders and feel more confident about their purchase and, by extension, your brand.
8. Upsell email
Type: Promotional email
Ever wondered how to increase your customer’s overall purchase value? There’s a word for it, upselling. A great example of this in action is in the food space. Brands often ask customers whether they’d like to add a side order or a beverage to their final cart. Most e-commerce websites also give customers recommendations a step before checkout by providing ‘frequently bought together’ or ‘you’d also like’ options - to increase the cart value. An email can help you do the same.
9. Win-back email
Type: Lifecycle email
It’s natural to lose some users on your email list even as it grows. Often, customers opt-out or unsubscribe to emails because they don’t feel engaged or just don’t open the site or app anymore. A great opportunity to reconnect with them is to send out win-back emails in an effort to, you guessed it, win them back. E-commerce businesses send extra credits, discounts, or promos to get customers restarted.
10. Survey email
Type: Lifecycle email
Survey emails are quick tools for understanding consumers. They are an excellent way to gain feedback and gauge your standing vis-a-vis competitors. By sending out specific survey emails, you can gain insight to help you improve your email marketing and products or understand what your customers need. If you listen to your customers, they’ll likely feel more wanted and trust you more.
You can take your engagement a step further with AMP survey emails. These help your audience answer the survey right from their inbox without switching to another tab or getting into lengthy sign-ups.
11. Thank you email
Type: Transactional email
Expressing gratitude can be extremely beneficial - especially when it is personalized. Customers are a huge reason why your e-commerce business exists and thrives, and it’s important to thank them and make them feel valued. Express thanks through offers and promos, or just check in to see how your customers are doing. It’ll take you a long way.
How to create a successful ecommerce email marketing strategy
Creating a successful eCommerce email marketing strategy involves careful planning, segmentation, personalization, and a focus on building relationships with your target audience. Here's a step-by-step guide to help you develop an effective eCommerce email marketing strategy:
1. Choose an ESP
ESP, or an email service provider, is the first and foremost step of your e-commerce email marketing strategy. You need to make sure the ESP or email marketing service you choose is robust enough to meet your expectations.
Mailmodo is an email service provider that offers you a strong and easy drag-and-drop editor to create beautiful emails, email templates, and various easy integrations with your favorite CRMs. Learn more about creating an interactive ecommerce store here.
2. Build your email list
After choosing a reliable email service provider, it's time to create an email list relevant to your business. This includes collecting relevant data. You can gather customer information, such as purchase history, preferences, and demographics.
Want to build your email list from scratch? This guide can help!
3. Compliance and permission
Following email marketing regulations and obtaining proper consent from subscribers is essential for sending emails with a badge of reliability. Want to know more about how to get compliance and permission from your customers?
There are various legal acts and regulations you need to be aware of in order to send emails legally. Learn more about this in the CAN-SPAM, GDPR and CPRA guides here.
4. Send compelling content
Taking permission is the first step to gaining the trust of your customers; the second most important thing is the content you decide to send out to your customers. Ensure the content you send is engaging, not misleading, has a touch of personalization, and is visually attractive to impress and keep your customer's trust intact. Ecommerce businesses should consider sending relevant content, for example, product recommendations through personalization.
5. Track and measure your performance
Last but not least, you should track and analyze your email performance for your ecommerce brand to improve and adapt. This includes looking out for various email metrics:
- Open rates'
- Click-through rates
- Conversion rates
- Bounce rates
- Time/Day of the week engagement
- Unsubscribe rate
Learn more about email metrics and KPIs in this guide.
Email flows for your ecommerce store
Want to get started with ecommerce? Our email flows for ecommerce can help you create a lifecycle for each type of ecommerce email, including transactional and promotional. All you need to do is follow the email flow. Here are some email flows you can try for your ecommerce marketing efforts and get superficial results:
Welcome email
2. Product recommendations email
3. Browse abandonment email
4. Abandoned cart email
5. Feedback email
Find more ecommerce email flows here.
E-commerce email marketing: Best practices
E-commerce is one of the fiercest markets out there with a bevy of competitors popping up every other day, it’s important to ensure your business remains afloat, and top of their marketing game. To maximize your visibility and optimize conversions, explore some e-commerce email marketing best practices that can help you grow your email lists, increase your open rates, and boost sales.
- Track unopened emails: Wonder why? To resend them, of course. To increase the chances of higher open rates, track unopened emails, and resend them to the segment that didn’t open them. To get better results the second time, use effective subject lines using A/B testing and gauge how users respond.
- Ensure personalization and follow-ups: Personalization helps businesses to become more friendly and approachable towards users. Great ways to be personal and follow up are through sending users welcome series, onboarding emails, and thank you emails.
- Use social media to target email subscribers: Don’t be shy; approach your email subscribers on social media platforms by integrating the database. This can help you automatically target and engage your proactively built audience. You can uncover more specific information about their behavior and interests, which can help you create more specific segments for sending out email campaigns to personalize even further.
Read more about how to segment your audience to optimize your e-commerce email marketing campaigns.
How Mailmodo can simplify email marketing for you
Mailmodo is an email marketing software that can help you boost your email marketing efforts by helping you send interactive emails with easy integrations so that you are never behind. Here's how Mailmodo can help:
AMP emails for e-commerce email marketing
People crave interaction. It gives them a feeling of belonging and makes them want to participate. In the world of engagement, one of the best forms of personalized interaction without human intervention is through dynamic AMP emails, something the e-commerce industry has increasingly utilized to leverage its market position.
E-commerce email marketing through AMP emails opens the door to various possibilities.
Provide users with status updates, including such as notifications about increases or drops in prices of products in their carts, app-related updates, or information about order changes.
Browse products within an email, thereby reducing the distraction associated with being diverted to another site or page to browse.
Channel through the sales funnels by nudging customers to complete the checkout process within an email for products abandoned in their carts or by providing recommendations based on past purchases.
Running campaigns and gaining customer feedback quickly through emails.
Read more about the power of AMP emails for e-commerce and how it can help your business grow.
Email marketing automation (AI-powered)
As a one-stop shop for e-commerce businesses, Mailmodo helps in sending out various kinds of email campaigns by enabling email automation, user journey creation, and automatically triggering schedules, as well as integrating API within newsletters and email content.
Users can integrate their Shopify stores with Mailmodo and send out product-specific emails. For example, they can customize and send out email campaigns to enable users to browse products, revert to their abandoned carts, or educate users about certain products. With all this and more, Mailmodo is a boon for e-commerce businesses looking to boost sales by establishing impactful digital marketing strategies. Not only this, but you can use AI to create compelling email subject lines and body copy in seconds while staying on brand.
You can learn more about our Shopify email marketing here.
