If you have an eCommerce store, you’re probably wondering how you can increase revenue without spending tons of money on additional marketing. Email marketing is a perfect option! With the eCommerce email marketing tips we’re sharing here, you’ll be able to grow your email list, engage your subscribers, do more with less time through automation, and reach out to lapsed customers to bring them back to your business.
If you’re not already using email marketing, you’re missing out. A strong eCommerce marketing strategy should absolutely include email marketing to create and nurture important relationships between you and shoppers or existing customers.
In this article, we’re going to share six of the best eCommerce email marketing tips you can start using right away to get more customers and turn your existing customers into brand evangelists.
Let’s get started with a quick look at what email marketing is and why it matters for eCommerce businesses before diving into our eCommerce email marketing tips.
6 eCommerce Email Marketing Tips to Boost Your Revenue:
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is the practice of sharing your marketing messages with existing customers and potential customers via email. The purpose of email marketing is to educate, increase brand affinity, and of course, to sell more.
Why eCommerce Businesses Need Email Marketing
Before we get to our eCommerce email marketing tips, let’s talk about why eCommerce business owners should be excited about email marketing in the first place.
Consumers Enjoy Brand Emails
Despite what people may say, they actually love getting emails from brands they’re interested in. Based on the Research Report on Consumer Engagement 2020 by Twilio, 83% of consumers prefer to get communications from businesses via email.
Email Has a High ROI
According to Litmus, email marketing has a return on investment of 4200%. That means, for every $1 marketers spend on email marketing, they have the potential to earn $42 back from that spend.
Emails Are Low Cost
A big part of the appeal of email marketing is that it doesn’t require much money to get started. If your list is on the smaller side, there are even some great free email marketing tools you can use to share your marketing message and drive sales. But, even if you have to pay for it, most email marketing services are inexpensive as far as marketing costs go.
Emails Drive Traffic
Email marketing is great for driving traffic to your website. Typically, eCommerce businesses will send emails to their subscribers to announce new products, promotions, events, and more. This, in turn, is a huge driver of sales.
Email Is Great for Nurturing Leads
Email marketing is one of the best ways to nurture leads and move them through your marketing funnel—especially if you’ve taken the time to map out your buyer journey and create emails for each stage of that journey.
Running an eCommerce business is hard and involves a lot of moving parts. One of the best things you can do for your business, though, is to put an email marketing strategy in place. These eCommerce email marketing tips will help you build that strategy using highly effective tactics that will help your eCommerce business grow.
1. Grow Your Email List
Growing your email list is the most important of our eCommerce email marketing tips but it’s important to remember that you don’t have to wait until you have a large email list before you start email marketing. We recommend starting from the moment you have your first subscriber. What’s most important is that you continually grow your email list. This matters because your subscriber list is naturally going to decline by about 22% every single year. Fortunately, there are tons of ways to keep your email marketing list growing. On your website alone, you have the option of putting an opt-in form in headers, footers, your sidebar, and any number of places.
Getting subscribers to opt-in isn’t necessarily hard but it is vitally important if you don’t want to get into trouble and have your reputation tank. With GDPR and privacy laws, you’ll want to make sure that you’re getting permission from subscribers before sending emails. Here are some ways you can make sure your email list is filled with people who actually want to hear from you.
Ask for Opt-ins During Checkout
Checkout is a great time to ask customers to subscribe to your marketing emails since they’re feeling good about their decision to buy from you and you already know they value your products and services.
Ask for Signups in Transactional Emails
Transactional emails (order confirmations, shipping confirmations, and the like) are often overlooked but they’re marketing goldmines. You could easily add a link to your opt-in to make it easy for recipients to subscribe from those emails.
Ask your Facebook Followers to Opt-in
If you have a Facebook page for your business, add a sign-up button by hovering over the button and selecting Edit Button from the drop-down menu.
You can also use a tool like Woobox to create a custom form that you can then embed on your Facebook page, giving you a custom option to collect email addresses and other information you need from your subscribers.
2. Send a Welcome Email Series
Coming in at number two on our list of eCommerce email marketing tips is welcome emails. Did you know that welcome emails have 86% higher open rates than other emails? They also generate an average of 320% more revenue per email than any other promotional emails. Welcome emails can be a game-changer for your eCommerce business.
The best time to reach out to your new subscribers is immediately after they sign up for your emails. They’ve just signed up, so they’re expecting to hear from you so give them what they want!
We recommend creating a welcome email series of 3–5 emails so you can share a bit about your brand with your new subscribers, set expectations, and build some brand affinity before shifting them to your regular email newsletter. You can even use these welcome emails to segment your new subscribers so the emails you send in the future are relevant to their interests. We’ll talk more about segmentation in a bit.
3. Automate Your Emails
If you’re manually crafting every email and sending them manually, you’re going to burn out or lose control fast. Instead of trying to stay on top of manually sending emails to your growing list of subscribers, automate some of it. There are several situations that will be the same across customers and automating those emails will save you tons of time while still nurturing those relationships.
We just talked about one such situation in which automated emails can be implemented with the welcome email series. So, now let’s take a look at a few more ways you can automate your email marketing.
User Behavior
When you have an email marketing service that integrates with your eCommerce platform, you’ll be able to send emails based solely on user behavior. This means that certain page visits, searches, or clicks on your website can trigger an email or series of emails to nurture that lead to completing a purchase or other action. Even if you don’t integrate your website, you can still use clicks in an email to trigger additional emails.
One of the most common uses of email automation based on user behavior outside of transactional emails is abandoned cart recovery emails which we’ll talk about momentarily.
Milestones
You can automate emails to send based on your subscribers’ sign-up anniversaries, birthdays (if you ask for that information on your sign-up form), or even send your customers a special offer to celebrate the anniversary of their first purchase with you! These emails go a long way towards building brand affinity and if you offer a discount to celebrate the milestone, boost your revenue.
Abandoned Cart Recovery
There are few things more important for eCommerce businesses than recovering abandoned carts. Roughly 70% of carts are abandoned across eCommerce businesses, resulting in billions each year of lost revenue. With an automated abandoned cart recovery email or series in place, you can get back some of those so-called “lost” sales.
After the Purchase
Once your customer completes a purchase, we recommend sending out an email or series to keep your brand on their mind. A great way to do this is by asking for feedback. You can send an email thanking them for their purchase and reinforcing the benefits of what they’ve bought before sending a separate email a few days later asking for feedback on their purchase.
After a purchase is also the best time to talk about your customer loyalty program. You could even set up another automated email series to send regular updates to your loyalty program members to share reminders about their points or rewards, how to use them, and how to earn more, as well as special promotions for loyalty program members.
Post-purchase emails are also useful for upselling and cross-selling. If you sell clothing, you could try “complete the look” emails promoting other products that will complement what the customer has already purchased. You can also use post-purchase emails to offer parts, warranties, share similar products, and more.
4. Segment and Personalize
Like setting up automations, segmenting and personalization is one of our eCommerce email marketing tips that takes some time and energy to get set up. But once you get it going, you just have to check your performance and tweak it to keep it running.
Segmenting your email list means dividing your larger list into smaller groups or segments based on specific criteria like location, purchase history, interests, and more. Segmentation is important because you can learn a lot of information about your subscribers that will help you create better, more effective marketing messages. You can collect data using your email subscription forms, though we recommend keeping those forms as minimal as possible to encourage sign-ups. Segmenting your list after signup is a little harder but easily accomplished using your welcome email series and user behavior.
Segmenting is going to make personalization a whole lot easier. And personalization gets results. In fact, emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened (Campaign Monitor) and personalized emails get 6X higher transaction rates (Experian). That’s probably why 94% of customer insights and marketing professionals across industries said personalization is “important,” “very important,” or “extremely important” for meeting their email marketing objectives (Conversant Media).
5. Send Promotional Emails
No list of eCommerce email marketing tips would be complete without a tip about promotional emails. We recommend sending promotional emails to all of your subscribers as well as sending exclusive promotional emails to your VIPs. An easy way to get started with promotional emails is to create sales around seasonal and holiday themes. Once you have a couple of holiday and seasonal promotions under your belt, the sky’s the limit! You can create your own events to promote around or run scheduled sales (be sure to automate those emails!) to keep your revenue steady throughout the year.
Depending on your eCommerce platform and email marketing service, you can set up coupons or discount codes to automatically apply to your cart. This makes it super easy for your subscribers to become customers.
6. Run Winback Campaigns
Sometimes, despite your best efforts, customers and subscribers just drop off. However, it’s much more beneficial to your bottom line to work on retaining your existing customers rather than mining for new ones. Plus, it’s no secret in the marketing world that acquiring a new customer costs a lot more in terms of time, money, and other resources than working to keep the customers you already have.
A winback campaign is an automated email marketing series that seeks to re-engage lapsed subscribers or customers. And they’re really beneficial. According to PriceIntel, lowering your churn rate by just 1% can get you a 7% boost in profits!
Your email marketing service and eCommerce platform are helpful to identify lapsed subscribers and customers. Make a list of the criteria you want to use and create a segment for your email list based on that criteria. For example, you might consider a lapsed subscriber someone who hasn’t opened or clicked on any of the last 10 emails you’ve sent or a lapsed customer to be someone who hasn’t made a purchase with you within the past six months. The criteria you choose are going to be specific to your business so consider your goals when outlining your winback campaign criteria.
Final Thoughts on eCommerce Email Marketing Tips
Email marketing is vital to the success of your eCommerce business. It’s been around for 40 years and shows no signs of slowing down. And the ROI is huge! Using the eCommerce email marketing tips we’ve discussed here will help you get the most from your email marketing efforts, increasing your engagement, and boosting your revenue.
