By: Mark MacDonald
What is eCommerce Email Marketing?
eCommerce email marketing is the practice of sending marketing messages to potential and current customers via email with the intent to sell, educate, and build customer loyalty. Email is considered a “owned” digital marketing channel, where the sender has complete control over the content and distribution, and is often effective when used to send personalized and relevant messages to segmented recipient lists.
Email is a particularly important tool for eCommerce, as it is used to send transactional, promotional, and lifecycle messages. It is a smart way to communicate with people on their mobile devices and maximize your marketing efforts.
3 Types of eCommerce Email Marketing
Let’s explore three types of email marketing used by eCommerce merchants.
1. Transactional Emails
Transactional emails are sent during the checkout and other purchasing processes. They are more functional in nature, providing essential information to individual customers. Transactional emails are expected and desired, as customers look for them. Order confirmation and receipt emails can help retain the customer after the initial sale. Ensure that email receipts answer the basic questions customers have, like when they can expect their order, the shipping address, and where they can ask questions. Basic experiences must be in place before you start experimenting with add-ons. For repeat customers, try suggesting related products or including an option to add an accessory to buy before shipping.
2. Promotional Emails
Promotional emails aim to increase awareness of a specific deal or promotion. Broadcast emails are sent to the entire subscriber list or, more commonly, to a segment of your email list. Examples of broadcast emails include new product launches, monthly newsletters, limited-time promotions, seasonal deals, or content updates. You can think of these messages as announcements made when you have something new to share, so consider your core goal, the offer you present, and the segment of subscribers.
3. Lifecycle Emails
Lifecycle emails are powerful because they are personalized and target only a small segment of your subscribers with messages relevant to their behavior. They are also known as “triggered messages,” as they are sent based on the action taken by the shopper and their position in the customer lifecycle. Lifecycle emails also play a significant role in encouraging repeat customer purchases. Getting customers to return is important for many businesses, as it keeps the cost of acquiring the average customer low. Email can be highly effective in driving sales.
Why is Email Marketing Key to eCommerce Success?
The fact about website traffic, even if highly targeted, is that most new visitors to your store will never return. Building an email list and sending engaging messages gives you a way to retain the traffic you’ve worked hard to earn.
If your online store hasn’t taken the time to adopt email marketing, you are likely leaving money on the table. Here are four reasons to consider using email in your eCommerce marketing mix:
1. Email Allows You to Build Sustainable Relationships with Customers
Search engines and social media platforms are great for being discovered by future customers, but email is still the best way to maintain and nurture existing relationships over time.
Data from Constant Contact indicates that the average email open rate is 33.02%, the average email click rate is 1.37%, and the average bounce rate is 10.07%.
It plays
Email also plays a crucial role in encouraging customers to make their second and subsequent purchases. Customer retention is important for many businesses because it keeps the cost of acquiring an average customer low. Email is extremely effective in increasing sales.
2. Email can impact three key growth multipliers
Most entrepreneurs who seek a “magic solution” to get more customers usually end up disappointed and discover that acquiring customers can be very costly.
Marketer Jay Abraham is one of the first to popularize the idea that there are only three ways to increase revenue: increase the total number of customers (C), increase the number of purchases per customer (purchase frequency, or F), or increase the average order value (AOV).
Email marketing for e-commerce provides a viable way out of the customer acquisition race because it can affect all three growth multipliers at the same time: automated welcome messages and abandoned cart emails can increase conversion rates (C), customer re-engagement or recovery campaigns can boost the number of purchases (F), and lifecycle and broadcast campaigns can automatically highlight high-value products to the right customers (AOV).
A systematic focus on all three areas will enhance your results, and this is one of the biggest reasons to direct your e-commerce email marketing strategy as you grow your e-commerce business.
3. Email is not affected by external access barriers
Email is not subject to the fluctuations of centralized platforms, where unforeseen changes in algorithms can completely crush your content distribution strategy.
In contrast, organic reach on Facebook pages has been declining since 2018, as the focus continues on promoting content from friends and family in the feed.
Similarly, it is increasingly difficult to reach the top rank in Google search results, where ads and answer boxes lead to a noticeable increase in searches without clicks, especially on mobile devices. More than ever, if you want to reach your customers on these platforms, you may have to pay, and these costs are rising.
How to create a successful e-commerce email marketing strategy
1. Choose an Email Service Provider (ESP)
There are many powerful and costly email marketing services you can choose from, so don’t get caught up in trying to pick one “perfect” provider. You can always switch providers later.
Instead, choose an ESP with good reviews that fits your needs (such as pricing, drag-and-drop editors, email templates, etc.), and then start sending emails and increasing sales.
For Shopify customers, Shopify Email is integrated with your Shopify store, making it easy and quick to create, send, and engage with your customers.
Email apps like Klaviyo, Privy, and Omnisend are also popular apps that integrate with Shopify and function as customer relationship management (CRM) platforms. Check out our complete list of recommended email apps for the Shopify store.
2. Start building your email list
Ask any online business owner about their biggest marketing regret, and many will tell you that they didn’t start collecting email addresses from day one. Learn from this common mistake and start growing your subscriber list as soon as possible, even before you start launching your business.
One important thing to know before you start building your email list is that you need to get permission to reach out to potential and current customers over time. To do this, subscribers need to “opt-in” to hear from you, and there are many methods you can use to encourage them to do so.
3.
Sending Emails Legally
The relationship you build with your email list must be based on permission; not only from a marketing perspective but also from a legal standpoint.
Promotional email is an example of “permission marketing” – a term coined by Seth Godin, a best-selling marketer and author – which means that people can subscribe to and unsubscribe from their relationship with your brand as they please. Ignoring the law could lead to severe penalties.
4. Tracking E-commerce Email Marketing Performance
There are several metrics to track to measure the performance of your email marketing:
List Size and Growth
The larger your email list, the more potential customers you can reach to increase sales. Track this metric using your email service provider to see how many new subscribers you’ve added on a weekly or monthly basis, or between your recent emails.
Open and Click Rates
The open rate is the percentage that tells you how many emails in a single campaign were successfully delivered and opened by subscribers. A standard open rate ranges from 20% to 33%. You’ll typically notice that your open rate is higher when you start out for the first time.
The click rate is the percentage that tells you how many emails in a single campaign were successfully delivered and received at least one click. The standard click rate is usually two to three times the conversion rate for your online store, slightly less than 3% on average, according to Mailchimp.
Email Deliverability and List Health
A hard bounce is an email that returns to the sender due to an invalid address. A good hard bounce rate is less than 2%.
Spam filters are relatively simple. There is a long list of factors that emails are scored on. If the email scores are too high, they will be marked as spam by the email server.
In general, you should avoid: using capital letters and exclamation marks, using keywords like “free”, using large images with very little text, as many spam filters do not recognize images, and sending emails to old lists that have not been properly maintained over the years.
Human spam filters are more complex. If you are consistently reported as a spam sender, it will affect your deliverability rates for all subscribers.
A/B Testing Results
A/B testing allows you to send high-performing emails confidently by testing messages, designs, and specific calls to action with a smaller segment of subscribers first.
Running an A/B test means dividing recipients into three groups: Group A, Group B, and Group C. After sending two different versions of the email to groups A and B, you will use your analytics to decide which message performed better by generating more engagement or sales. You will then send the winning version, whether it be A or B, to the final group of recipients (C).
Revenue
What percentage of your store’s total revenue can be attributed to email marketing? Drew Sanoki, CEO of AutoAnything, says he has seen many successful stores getting around 20% of their total revenue from the email channel. The value of using green light indicators
Tracking your marketing performance on any channel is essential, but overly focusing on email marketing metrics is an easy way to get distracted.
Instead, consider the goal of “green light indicators,” a concept created by Ramit Sethi. Once you reach a certain threshold (like Sano’s indicators below), give yourself the green light to move on to something else:
- Rate
- 20% open rate, which indicates that you are sending relevant emails to the right people with attractive subject lines.
- 5% click rate, which indicates that the content and offers in your emails are compelling enough to click.
- 20% of total store revenue from email marketing, which indicates that email marketing as a channel converts first-time customers and increases sales from existing customers sufficiently to justify further investment.
Email Marketing for E-commerce in 2024
Exploring email marketing for e-commerce is a smart step when you are at the beginning of your online marketing journey or when you want to improve your current campaign. You can take advantage of different types of emails such as transactional emails, promotional emails, and lifecycle emails to reach customers effectively and increase sales.
By using a solid email marketing strategy for e-commerce, you can build strong relationships with customers, increase sales, and achieve sustainable growth for your business. There’s no better time to start than now.
Leave a Reply