E-commerce email marketing is one of the most effective ways to boost your online sales and build long-term relationships with your customers. But how do you create email campaigns that stand out from the crowd and drive conversions? In this article, we'll share some tips and best practices for e-commerce email marketing that will help you increase your revenue and loyalty.
Before you start sending any emails, you need to know who your audience is and what they want from you. You can use tools like Google Analytics, customer surveys, and email segmentation to collect and analyze data about your subscribers' demographics, preferences, behavior, and feedback. This will help you tailor your email content, design, and timing to match their needs and interests.
At the highest level, remember your emails are made up of 1/ customers and 2/ non-customers. This is the place to start with any segmenting and / or content. Also the 80/20 rule will always apply, meaning a small portion of you list will drive a large portion of your email dollars.
To know your audience through analytics and surveys is very powerful, but it’s not everything. Before even start building an audience and collecting emails, you should tune your voice and style of communication based on the persona you’re trying to target. Building the right persona can be done as part of the branding creation, taking into account what products you’re offering and the ideal customers you want to attract. Make sure you find the right balance between using your real voice and adapting it to better communicate with your specific demographic.
E-commerce email marketing is more than just sending out messages to your list; you need to have a clear strategy and purpose for each campaign, and measure its performance against your goals. Common objectives include increasing brand awareness, driving traffic, generating leads, educating your audience, encouraging repeat purchases and referrals, and reducing cart abandonment and churn rates. To track your progress and optimize your campaigns, you need to define and monitor key metrics such as open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, revenue per email, customer lifetime value, unsubscribe rate, and bounce rate.
Right now metrics for ecommerce lists should be sales, with a secondary of clicks to optimized landing pages. Email as retention offsets rising CAC costs. Also axe open rates as a metric, with iOS + privacy restrictions this number is no longer accurate. Watch unsubcribes to help determine the threshold your audience has for frequency.
Think about the core question: why do you want to do email marketing? Each of your answers will indicate a metric you can track to verify your success: - You want people to buy again from us: Returning customer rate - You want to maximise the revenue you get per client: Customer Lifetime Value - You want to educate the public: open rate, subscribers and unsubscribing - You want to increase average order value: conversions post purchase Etc, etc… Be creative and find the right goals to measure data against.
E-commerce email marketing is not a one-size-fits-all approach and requires the selection of the right type and frequency of emails for your audience and goals. Common types of e-commerce emails include welcome emails, promotional emails, transactional emails, educational emails, and re-engagement emails. Welcome emails are sent to new subscribers to introduce your brand and provide an incentive or discount. Promotional emails are sent to announce a new product, service, offer, or event. Transactional emails are sent to confirm a purchase, delivery, or refund. Educational emails provide valuable content and tips to establish authority and credibility. Re-engagement emails are sent to revive interest in inactive subscribers. The frequency of your emails should be based on your audience's expectations, behavior, and preferences as well as your goals and resources. It's recommended to send at least one email per week; however, testing different frequencies may prove beneficial.
In my experience most brands are tentative to throttle emails (often rightly so). With beloved brands I've always been pleasantly surprised how often you can send. Make sure your email flows are dialed - this is money in your sleep, triggered by customer behavior.
Frequency may even change throughout the year. Customers are okay for you to contact them more during a specific sale or season. But the important is to set specific regular activities that: you can manage to maintain in the long term + your customers are willing to engage with. Here are some activities you may consider: - Monthly/weekly/bi-weekly newsletters - Welcome flow - Thank order / cross sell flow - Special promo flow - Sunset subscriber flow And many more :)
The subject line and the preheader are the first things your subscribers see when they receive your email, and they determine whether they will open it or not. Therefore, you need to craft engaging subject lines and preheaders that capture their attention and curiosity, and entice them to click. When writing effective subject lines and preheaders, keep them short and clear (6-10 words for the subject line, 10-15 words for the preheader), use personalization to make your subscribers feel special, add emojis to add some personality and emotion, use power words to trigger an emotional response, ask questions to spark curiosity, include numbers to make it more specific and credible, and A/B test different versions to optimize your email campaigns.
TL;DR - be clickbaity but cool. You need to improve and test variations of copy in order to optimise your opening rates. You don’t want to be the email that gets archived immediately after being received. However, don’t trick your subscribers nor oversell the content with a tricky title. That can lead to frustrations and make people unsubscribe.
Tease, entice, be overt, use intrigue... subject lines are made of the hooks that currently flood the LinkedIn feed. Remember: The pre-header matters too - and gives you some bonus space. A/B test every time.
The design of your email is just as important as the content, as it influences how your subscribers perceive and engage with your message. You need to create responsive and attractive emails that look great and function well on any device, screen size, or email client. To achieve this, you should use a mobile-friendly template that automatically adjusts to the device being used. Additionally, you should opt for a simple and clean layout with a clear hierarchy and structure of elements. Using high-quality images and videos with high resolution, relevant content, and fast loading speed can help enhance your email message. Contrasting colors and fonts with a high difference in brightness, hue, or saturation can help highlight your brand identity or emphasize key points or calls-to-action. Finally, ensure you have a clear and compelling call-to-action that tells your subscribers what to do next and why they should do it. This can help drive conversions, increase engagement, or provide value or incentive.
Note: Please don't make every email a one-off. Devise modular templates. Also know that a text-only email can beat a well designed one if the timing and message is right.
If you don’t have the resources to be super fancy with your email design and graphics, don’t exasperate. Focus on your copy and do your best to bring value to your readers. Even if you send only simple text emails, make sure you speak authentically and concisely express your ideas and the CTA you want susbscribers to engage with. If you have the capacity definitely invest in nice professional designs to convey trustworthiness.
The last step in e-commerce email marketing is to test and optimize your emails before and after you send them. This can help improve deliverability, open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, and revenue. To do this, you should check for spelling and grammar errors with tools such as Grammarly or Hemingway. Additionally, you should check for broken links and images with tools like Litmus or Email on Acid. You should also check for spam filters and blacklists with tools like Mail Tester or Glock Apps. Furthermore, you should check for compatibility and rendering with tools like Litmus or Email on Acid. Additionally, you should analyze and measure your results with tools like Google Analytics, Mailchimp, or Hubspot. Finally, you should experiment and iterate your email campaigns with tools like Mailchimp or Hubspot. This will help inform and reassure stakeholders, as well as provide valuable insights for improving your cloud security posture.
Email being a marketing activity isn’t something you do once and forget about it forever. It’s better to do that than doing nothing. If you set the right automations, it will always make money and improve your business. But to really take the most out of this activity, you should work with email as with any other marketing activity: allocate a recurring budget to continually optimise your solution. Most email marketing tools provide their own analytics to make sure you see the outcome of your efforts. Focus on specific metrics and experiment to get better results.
I find that many brands "set and forget" their triggered email flows. They leave a LOT of money on the table. Don't be like those brands. Revisit & optimize your email flows.
Another aspect that may be tough when starting email marketing for Ecommerce is to choose the right tool or platform. In the end of the day you should choose something that you’re comfortable with and that’s affordable for the operation you’re running. That doesn’t mean to always look for the cheapest option out there. Sometimes more expensive tools can generate a better ROI. My personal preference is Klaviyo, and all my clients that migrated to it are super satisfied with its capabilities and results.