Email Marketing for e-commerce: Top things you may be missing out

Email marketing is one of the most sure-fire ways to boost your conversions and increase customer engagement. In fact, 81% of small and medium-sized businesses consider email its primary channel for customer acquisition and an average open rate for a welcome email is at a whopping 82%.

Though seemingly simple, this form of marketing is quite complex and comprises many aspects. There are certain techniques in email marketing that work magic but are often overlooked by marketers, leading to lost sales and customers. Make sure you are using them and bring your email marketing game to a high level.

Use transactional emails

Transactional emails are triggered by the user’s action on the site: a sign-up, product order, request for a password reset, etc. Because a user always expects these emails, it comes as no surprise that they get an 8X higher open rate than marketing emails.

While any online store sends out thousands of transactional emails on a daily basis, not all stores use them for marketing purposes. And this is a big mistake.

Transactional emails can help you greatly boost your sales if you do it right. One of the best things that you can do is include an incentive in the welcome email or any other email on a special occasion (Birthday or anniversary on the site). That will help you immediately win the customers and promote further interaction with your store. As well, you can do upselling or cross-selling in transactional emails that confirm your order payment or send shipping information.

Do upselling and cross-selling

Cross-selling is offering the customer a product that would complement the initial purchase and add additional value. Upselling is offering a product that is better than the initial purchase, has more features, and can bring more value to the customer.

You can greatly increase your sales with these techniques. One of the most popular ways to upsell/cross-sell is to add a product recommendation section to the product pages with “Special pick just for you” messages or similar.

However, emails are also a great place to upsell or cross-sell. Here are some of the cases when it will be relevant:

  • Order confirmation (transactional email): offering customers to purchase relevant products that would complement the order;
  • Promotional emails: offering product recommendations based on previous purchases;
  • Cart abandonment emails: offering products that are similar to the one left in the cart.

When cross-selling, remember an important rule: do not offer products that are much more expensive than the initial purchase. In the case of upselling, always justify why the customer should opt for a more expensive option and outline the product’s benefits and value.

Send abandoned cart emails

Abandoned cart emails can recover approximately 15% of your revenue. Considering the average abandonment cart rate in e-commerce is 70%, this email strategy is obligatory to use.

Abandoned cart emails are automatically sent to the customers after they add a product to the cart and then leave without buying. While you can completely configure the look and content of such an email and choose when exactly it will be sent to the customer, there are some essentials to follow:

  • Include a strong CTA to encourage the customer to come back and complete the purchase,
  • Be creative and add emotions to the copy,
  • Always include the image of the product that is left in the cart,
  • Add a button that would allow to immediately proceed to the cart from the email body,
  • Create a sense of urgency (“Hurry: the product is selling fast”).

Reward loyalty and milestones

Every customer loves to feel special. Reward your loyal customers with discounts or incentives and mark important milestones, like one year spent on your website.

By loyal customers, we mean the ones that engaged with your emails before. And because the probability of selling to an existing customer is up to 70% (compare to 20% probability for the new ones!), it’s crucial that you put the effort in retaining the existing and loyal shoppers.

As for the milestones, you can easily track how long the customer has been the user of your site and thank them with a special offer.

Re-engage the customers

One more trick to win back the existing customers is to send them a re-engaging email. Such emails are sent to the customers that previously engaged with your emails and site but then disappeared for some reason.

When sending a win-back email, two things work perfectly: personalization and incentive.

By personalization we mean the general tone of voice and use of phrases like “We miss you” or “Are you doing OK?”. This sounds as if you are addressing a friend and proves to work great by showing the customers that you genuinely care about them.

As for the incentive, you can offer a discount or a coupon for the next purchase to encourage the user to visit your site.

A quick guide to a stellar email marketing strategy

To sum it up, we provide you with a quick guide to an e-commerce email marketing strategy. By going through it, you can check how you are doing and if there is anything your campaign might be missing. As well, check out the lifecycle email marketing strategy to achieve better results.

Collect emails properly

Nobody likes aggressive marketingю Thus, make the process of emails collection relevant and comfortable for the users.

One of the greatest ways to do so is to incorporate a pop-up on the page. While many websites do it right after the user lands on the page, others take some time and set the pop-up to appear after the user spends some time on the site.

Test which option works better for your customers and make sure to add it to your store.

Another option to collect emails is adding a bar either on top or bottom of the page with a message that offers value for signing up.

Never do default sign-up for emails

Last year the European Union introduced the GDPR regulation and one of its main points of focus is the user’s consent for data collection and control over private data management.

The biggest mistake that stores do is have the option of signing up for emails as the default. To be more GDPR-compliant and give users more control, leave the checkboxes blank and let the user choose whether to sign up for your emails or not.

Though you may have fewer sign-ups, in the end, all of them will be those users who are genuinely interested in your news and promotions.

Automate your emails

Automation saves time and frees you from hours of mundane work. As well, by automating your emails you can be sure they are always sent at a perfect time.

The emails that you can automate include:

  • Welcome emails
  • Abandoned cart emails
  • Follow-up emails
  • Newsletters
  • Promotional emails

Segment your shoppers for better reach

How many times you’ve hit the “delete” button without even opening an email?

The reason for that is that you are not the right audience for these emails. By sending irrelevant emails to the wrong audience, companies are drastically decreasing their conversions and dropping down the audience loyalty.

Before sending out any emails, segment your audience first. Do this in accordance with your set goals and craft different emails for different customers. One of the most popular and efficient segmentation methods is by behavior: existing and active users vs newcomers or those who are “just looking”.

Final word

Email marketing is an amazing method of reaching your users in an appealing manner and encourage them to buy from you without pushing. Keep an eye on the email content, insert a powerful CTA and see an inflow of traffic to your store with conversions following along.