It’s no secret that emails are one of the best ways to stay connected with your audience. For people running an online store, building an email list and nurturing your leads help you stay top of mind.
This article defines ecommerce email marketing and explains why you need it for your business if you want to become successful. We also recommend ecommerce email campaign ideas and strategies, and how you can start getting more leads with the help of UpViral.
The Importance of Email Marketing for Ecommerce
Ecommerce email marketing is simply the use of email as a communication tool to engage your ecommerce store leads and generate sales. When implemented correctly, email marketing can be the key to your growth. Here are reasons to start implementing email:
- Send personalized messages. Emails can be tailored to your shopper’s interests, recently viewed items, and recent purchases. These are just a few ways to optimize your email strategy.
- Unaffected by algorithm changes. If you’ve been doing SEO or social media marketing as part of your efforts, you’re probably aware that Google and social networking sites have algorithms that affect your content visibility.
- Improve your sales. Promoting your product through email increases your chances of getting more conversions. To demonstrate the power of email, here’s an interesting finding: 59% of respondents say that marketing emails have influenced their buying decisions.
- Drive ecommerce store or blog traffic. You don’t need to invest more money in increasing traffic to your store. With email marketing, you can make subscribers aware of your latest case study, blog post, or product offering without running an ad.
Ecommerce Email Marketing Tips and Best Practices
Ready to put email marketing to use? Let’s have a look at a few of the best strategies.
Explore different types of ecommerce email marketing campaigns.
While it’s important for ecommerce brands to tailor their approach accordingly, they should be sending out these types of ecommerce emails:
The welcome email series
You can think of welcome emails as a way to create a good first impression with your prospects. These emails can make or break your relationship, so you need to make sure that they spark excitement and motivate them to take some sort of action.
Tell your new subscribers a bit about yourself. Don’t forget to thank them for making their very first purchase. Surprise them with a discount code that they can use on their next purchase.
Product updates
Avid shoppers like to be kept in the loop regarding the products they’re interested in. Provide them with an option to automatically receive alerts when their favorite item that’s out of stock is available again. This saves them the trouble of having to revisit your website numerous times.
Abandoned cart series
Abandoned cart emails are targeted to people who’ve added items to their shopping cart but left them at checkout. For ecommerce businesses, abandoned carts are one of the factors for lost revenue.
This is where an abandoned cart email comes in. You send a couple of emails to customers to remind them of the items left unpurchased, so they can return to your website and complete the process.
On top of giving a simple reminder, highlight some of the benefits of the product and the positive reviews it received. You may also consider offering a discount; however, you need to be careful to not lose a lot of money because of giving too many discounts to “cart abandoners.”
Anniversary emails
An anniversary email celebrates a special time in their lives, such as their birthday or their first purchase. It’s a great way to strengthen your bond with your ecommerce customers and win back those who’ve lost interest.
Keep a clean email list.
You’ll want to keep communicating with subscribers who actually expect your messages. This is why email list hygiene is so important. By keeping your list clean, you’ll reduce your chances of being flagged as spam and your deliverability rates won’t suffer.
It’s a good idea to do a regular check on who’s no longer opening your emails but hasn’t hit the unsubscribe button yet. Once you identify them, try to re-engage them. Send them a “We Missed You” email with a little incentive. It could be a discount or a chance to enter your giveaway. If your strategy fails, delete them permanently.
Here’s a helpful article on how you can practice email list management. It’ll show you 8 tips to keep your subscriber list healthy after growing it.
Make your emails more mobile-friendly.
Since people often use their smartphones to do anything — shopping, tracking their activity, and connecting with friends — it’s a must to create mobile-friendly emails.
With a mobile-friendly email, your subscribers won’t have to zoom in and out to view your email content. While every ecommerce email marketing platform these days includes responsive templates that display beautifully across devices, you can follow these techniques to ensure mobile-friendliness and maximize your results:
- Use short subject lines. Limit yourself to 30 characters so that your subject line doesn’t get cut off.
- Space out long text by writing shorter paragraphs and using bullet points.
- If you’re including a call-to-action, make it obvious. Use large CTA buttons or mark your CTA text in bold.
- Be mindful of your fonts. Avoid fonts that are difficult to read. If your email has colors, use contrasting fonts — for example, a dark-colored text against a light background.
Encourage customer reviews.
Another way to make the most of ecommerce email marketing is to encourage subscribers to leave a review. Repeat customers on your list are likely to be willing to share their experiences with your product.
Make the process of leaving a review easy for them. For example, adding a link within your email that will take them to a page where they can write an honest product review.
Here’s an UpViral tip: Make this process fun by incentivizing customers! Inside the UpViral platform, you’ll find the campaign template “Online Reputation Engine.” When they leave a review (written or video), they can claim a reward, which could be one of your best products!
How Your Ecommerce Shop Can Grow An Email List
Just because you’re applying these tips and seeing higher levels of engagement and sales, doesn’t mean you should stop your list-building efforts. For ecommerce brands that haven’t started building a list yet, make sure you do.
UpViral can be a valuable tool for growing a sizeable list in a short period of time. Use it to run a contest or giveaway by offering people a prize in exchange for entering their email addresses and referring their friends to the campaign.
Check out these successful ecommerce email marketing examples where business owners did UpViral campaigns:
Sew Much Easier: 2,000-4,000 new leads each month
Terry Mitchell and his wife Shelley are the founders of Sew Much Easier, a business that sells sewing-related products. They do UpViral campaigns each month to get a consistent stream of leads and traffic to their blog. These campaigns resulted in 2,000-4,000 new monthly leads — plus they’ve generated a total of 94,601 leads since they started in 2015.
Exact Clothing: 5,580 leads + $1.2K in sales
Daniela d’Hotman de Villiers, a digital marketer and founder of Savvy Social, helped her ecommerce client Exact Clothing attract 5,580 leads from a 3-week UpViral campaign. The prize consisted of two gift cards that winners could use to avail Exact Clothing’s items. While they weren’t expecting any sales, they still got $1.2K in sales from the ad they used for the campaign.
Massage Chair Store: 10,631 leads + $7,000 in sales
Shawn McCarthy is the lead strategist at Vital Design, a marketing agency. Their ecommerce client, Massage Chair, needed help with building a massive email list. While Massage Chair was already running a paid traffic campaign, Shawn believed that an UpViral giveaway campaign would complement their current strategy. The result? 10,631 leads in 30 days and $7,000 in sales from one person who bought two massage chairs.
Take Your Ecommerce Email Marketing to the Next Level
With email marketing as one of your marketing strategies, an ecommerce business can reap the benefits of increased brand awareness, trust, and and high-intent customers.
If your business hasn’t started email marketing yet, one of your first steps is to set-up an email marketing software and collect leads. Take advantage of UpViral to increase your number of signups by giving away relevant incentives. See the different ways UpViral can grow your ecommerce business!
