What is ecommerce email marketing?
Ecommerce email marketing is the method of sending emails to generate sales, keep email subscribers engaged, and build customer loyalty for your ecommerce business.
Email marketing is one of the most critical tools for your ecommerce store because it is an "owned" marketing channel. In other words, your business owns the audience (your email list) and controls the content.
Unlike paid marketing channels (ie. Facebook, TikTok, Google) and earned marketing channels (ie. press coverage), email marketing gives you full control over your content, direct access to your audience and you don't have to pay to reach them.
This makes email marketing a powerful marketing strategy to nurture, convert, and retain customers by building long-term relationships.
Why is email marketing important to grow your ecommerce store?
It has one of the highest return on investment (ROI): on average, e-commerce businesses earn $40 for every $1 spent on their email marketing and email marketing generates 20-30% of their business revenue.
This makes email marketing one of the most effective channels to generate revenue & convert customers.
Here are some of the ways email marketing can generate sales for your ecommerce store:
1. Promoting new products and promotions
Announce new product launches and promotions directly to your email list with email campaigns to generate awareness and sales.
2. Convert email subscribers into customers
Send a personalized welcome email to new subscribers to introduce them to your brand and your products with a Welcome Flow.
3. Educate & engage with new customers
Build customer loyalty by thanking customers after they purchase with automated email flows, such as post-purchase emails, that educate them on your brand and how to get the most out of your product.
4. Keep customers updated
Use transactional emails to keep customers notified on their order when it has been fulfilled, shipped, and delivered to improve your customer experience.
5. Get more repeat customers
Get more loyal customers and build long-term customer relationships by sending personalized cross-sell and upsell emails to introduce existing customers to new products or get them to upgrade to a higher tiered product.
6. Win back lost customers
Recapture lost revenue by showing your appreciation for lapsed customers re-rengaging them to return to make another purchase with a winback emails.
Fundamentals of Ecommerce Email Marketing
Types Of Emails
1. Transactional Emails
Transactional emails are a type of automated email that is sent specifically to alert customers or send them key information about their purchase on your online store. Unlike email marketing campaigns and flows, transactional emails are functional and related to their order, such as email receipts, order confirmations, order delivered emails.
SendGrid describes the difference between transactional emails and marketing emails as this: "transactional emails contains information about an action the recipient has already taken, while a marketing email intends to drive the recipient toward an action you want them to take".
2. Promotional Email Marketing Campaigns
Promotional emails are a type of email marketing campaign designed to drive sales for a promotional offer. However, promotional emails can also be used to promote the launch of a new product or a collection.
Examples of promotional emails can include a sitewide 4th of July sale, the launch of new products in your Winter Collection, a free gift during Mother's Day, or a 20% off Spring Sale.
3. General Email Marketing Campaigns
General campaigns are a type of ecommerce email marketing campaign designed to engage customers, drive sales, and/or nurture your audience. Unlike promotional emails, general campaigns typically don't include any promotion or sale. Rather, they focus on sharing relevant content that your audience is interested in and introduce them to different products.
Examples of general campaigns include a weekly newsletter, blog roundup of your top content, listicles featuring tips or a product highlight educating customers on the features and benefits of your product.
4. Email Marketing Flows
Email Flows (also known as drip campaigns, triggered emails, evergreen emails, and lifecycle emails) are a type of automated emails that are sent when someone takes a certain action. This is often one of the biggest areas of opportunity for e-commerce brands to generate revenue. Many e-commerce brands have less than 20% of the built for their business and are leaving $100,000+ on the table.
Check out the most comprehensive full funnel download we created with Fermat & Ecom Experts to build your key email marketing flows.
Examples of email flows include a welcome email for new subscribers, cart abandonment emails to recover abandoned carts, and post-purchase emails to thank customers.
Other Email Marketing Basics
5. List Building
Your email list is one of the most important parts to successful email marketing. After all, you'll need an audience to send emails to! Your email list is the list of people who have subscribed to receive emails from your ecommerce business. Most online stores build their email list through:
- Website Pop-Up: This is a form appearing to website visitors asking them to enter their email address, often to receive a discount code for their first purchase.
• Checkout Sign-Up: This is the form to collect the email address of customers as they're completing checkout, where they're asked to opt-in to receive marketing emails.
Other methods of building your email list include giveaways, quizzes, lead magnets, exit intent pop-ups, and footer email captures.
6. Email Design
Email design refers to the content of your email which includes the email layout (also known as email structure, email wireframe or email template), copywriting, and design. Great email design is an important part of improving your email marketing performance because it determines how well your emails engage and convert your audience.
There are three types of emails: plain-text emails, HTML emails & image-based emails. Most ecommerce email marketing campaigns use image-based emails to convey the brand in a more visually engaging way for audiences. However, plain-text and HTML emails often improve deliverability and can be useful to your email marketing strategy.
Most email marketing services include pre-made templates that you can use to easily create beautiful, optimized email designs. A tool like Backbone can also help you optimize your email design by providing customized email templates that optimize conversion and engagement.
7. A/B Testing
A/B testing (also known as split testing) is the method of systematically improving the performance of your ecommerce email marketing. It does so by sending two different variations of an email (variation A and variation B) to your email list, and seeing which performs better.
An example of A/B testing include sending two different variations of an email subject line, to see which one of the email marketing campaigns gets a higher open rate.
A/B testing is an important email marketing strategy to use to improve your open rates, click rates, and conversion rates. Though A/B tests only test one variable at a time, you can test multiple variables with multi-variate testing.
8. Audience Segmentation
Segmentation is the practice of splitting up your email subscribers into smaller groups based on different criteria. The most common types of customer segmentation are based on behaviors, demographics or characteristics.
A few examples of ways you can segment your audience is based on their location, level of customer engagement, whether they've made a purchase, or even what products they've purchased.
The main purpose of segmentation is to send personalized marketing messages for customers at each stage of their customer lifecycle. After all, repeat customers and loyal customers should receive different emails than new subscribers and potential customers.
Segmentation is an incredibly important part of having a sophisticated, and effective ecommerce email marketing strategy because it helps you deepen customer loyalty and customer relationships.
9. Email Marketing Terminology
When it comes to learning ecommerce email marketing, you're likely going to run across a lot of terminology such as open rates, CTRs, cart abandonment, welcome email, blacklist & more. Being familiar with these terms will be important to be building an effective email marketing strategy.
See our Email Marketing Glossary for a list of all the e-commerce email marketing terms you'll run into, explained.
Tools For Successful ECommerce Email Marketing
1. Email Service Provider (ESP)
To start email marketing, you'll need an ESP (email service provider), which is a type of email marketing software that allows you to send emails to your list of email subscribers.There are a variety of email service providers that work well for ecommerce businesses and it isn't a one-size-fits-all. It can depend on what you want to accomplish, how advanced your email marketing experience is, the size of your business, and which of the ecommerce platforms (ie. Shopify, WooCommerce etc.) that your ecommerce site is hosted on.Klaviyo is one of the few email marketing services that is built specifically for email marketing for ecommerce businesses. It also includes critical features you should look for in any email marketing service such as:
• Customizable, pre-made email templates to simplify the creation & design of emails
• Audience segmentation features to send personalized, targeted emails to different people
• Ability to send automated email campaigns to scale your email marketing
• Email capture opt-in forms to collect email addresses of new subscribers on your website
• Detailed reporting to measure the performance of your email marketing to generate insights on how to improve
• Ability to A/B test email campaigns to optimize your subject lines and content
Other options for great email marketing services include Active Campaign, Drip and more.
2. Project Management Tool
While a project management tool isn't critical, you'll find that once you start sending email campaigns regularly, there are a lot of different parts of the project to manage. You'll need a project management tool that can help with:
• Building your email marketing campaign calendar
• Prioritizing the automated email campaigns you want to build each month
• Tracking the progress of the creation of each email: email brief, copywriting, design, and implementation
At Longplay, we use Asana as our project management tool to plan and track the hundreds of emails we're creating each month.
3. Backbone
An email marketing tool like Backbone can help streamline your e-commerce email marketing efforts by automatically building your customized email marketing calendar & customer AI-generated email templates to create more high-converting emails for everything from a new product launch to an abandoned cart series.
4. Team
At a minimum, the anatomy of a successful e-commerce email marketing team usually consists of the following roles:
• an Email Marketing Manager/Strategist to build the ecommerce email marketing plan, build the email marketing calendar each month, develop new marketing strategies, and plan promotional emails
• an Email Copywriter to write the high-converting copy for each of the emails
• an Email Designer to create high-converting designs for each of the emails
Often, successful e-commerce email marketing teams will also have access to:
• a Technical Email Implementor to create and test the email in your email marketing service
• an Analyst to build reports to evaluate the effectiveness of different email marketing strategies
Best Practices & Common Mistakes For Ecommerce Email Marketing Strategy
1. Send email campaigns regularly
Consistency is key! Stick to a regular schedule when it comes to sending email campaigns.
One of the most common mistakes in ecommerce email marketing that online businesses make going months without sending an email to their email list. Over time, this can led to low engagement from your email list, and high unsubscribe or spam rates.
It's better to send 1-2 emails a month regularly, than to not send any emails to your email subscribers for months, and suddenly hit them with lots of emails.
Your email marketing campaigns are the best way to maintain customer engagement with your brand and encourage customers to make more purchases.
2. Build email flows
Email flows are the highest ROI (return on investment) activity you can do when it comes to e-commerce email marketing.
For example, building one welcome email can have 50x more return in revenue than building one email campaign, because once it's set live, it'll continue generating revenue for you automatically.
Often ecommerce brands focus their email marketing strategy too much on campaigns, especially when teams are short on time or resources, which leads to email flows being neglected.
Set a goal to build or optimize at least 1-2 automated email campaigns each month to make sure you're consistently improving your email flows.
See Part Beginner's Guide To Email Marketing to learn more about building the critical flows to generate automated revenue for your e-commerce business.
3. Collect email addresses
Don't be shy when it comes to collecting email addresses! At a minimum, you should have a welcome pop-up on your online store.
One of the most common mistakes e-commerce businesses make is only collecting email addresses at checkout, when a customer purchases.
Email marketing is one of the most effective channels to convert new subscribers into paying customers, so make sure you A/B test your website pop-up to maximize your opt-in rate.
4. Only sending email campaigns during promotions or product launches
Set a goal to consistently send at least 1-2 general email marketing campaigns each month.
One of the most common mistakes e-commerce businesses make is only emailing their list when they have a promotion offer or a new product launch to announce, which can hurt your customer relationships in the long-term.
Instead, build customer loyalty and nurture your potential customers by providing value through sharing content like educational emails, blog post roundups, or customer stories.
5. Run A/B Tests
A/B testing is one of the cornerstones to an effective email marketing strategy because it allows you to optimize your emails. A/B testing can be used to improve your open rate, click rate, purchase rate and even your average order value.
Most e-commerce brands don't do enough A/B testing. In fact, you should aim to run an A/B test on every single one of your e-commerce email campaigns, even if it's as simple as a subject line test.
6. Not tracking email marketing performance
As Peter Drucker says, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.". In order to improve the performance of your email marketing strategies, you need to be able to measure and track the results.
One of the most common mistakes ecommerce brands make is trying to make their email marketing reporting too complicated in the beginning. It's better to get started with something simple and be able to view your performance consistently.
Most email service providers have built-in reporting dashboards to allow you to see your key metrics. So set a regular time each week or month to review your email performance! We'll dive into the metrics you should be looking at to track your email marketing success.
Tracking Ecommerce Email Marketing Success
When it comes to measuring your email performance, these are the key metrics you should be looking at. You can find this data in most email marketing software, or using analytics tools such as Google Analytics or Triple Whale.
See Part 8: Measuring Email Marketing Success of our Beginner's Guide To Email Marketing to learn more about the basic and advanced metrics you should be tracking, why they're important, and how to use the data to improve your email marketing strategy.
• Total email revenue: the total revenue generated from email marketing
• Email revenue %: the percentage of the total revenue of your online store that is attributed to email marketing
• Open rate: the percentage of people who received an email campaign and opened the email
• Click rate: the percentage of people who received an email campaign and clicked the email
• Conversion rate: the percentage of people who received an email campaign and ended up making a purchase
• Average order value: the average value of the orders placed that are attributed to email marketing
• Bounce rate: the percentage of emails sent that bounced from the recipient's inbox
• Spam rate: the percentage of people who received an email campaign and marked it as spam
• Unsubscribe rate: the percentage of people who received an email campaign and opted-out of receiving more emails
• Email list size: the total number of people on your email list
2. Build email flows
Email flows are the highest ROI (return on investment) activity you can do when it comes to e-commerce email marketing.
For example, building one welcome email can have 50x more return in revenue than building one email campaign, because once it's set live, it'll continue generating revenue for you automatically.
Often ecommerce brands focus their email marketing strategy too much on campaigns, especially when teams are short on time or resources, which leads to email flows being neglected.
Set a goal to build or optimize at least 1-2 automated email campaigns each month to make sure you're consistently improving your email flows.
See Part 3 and Part 4 of our Beginner's Guide To Email Marketing to learn more about building the critical flows to generate automated revenue for your e-commerce business.
3. Collect email addresses
Don't be shy when it comes to collecting email addresses! At a minimum, you should have a welcome pop-up on your online store.
One of the most common mistakes e-commerce businesses make is only collecting email addresses at checkout, when a customer purchases.
Email marketing is one of the most effective channels to convert new subscribers into paying customers, so make sure you A/B test your website pop-up to maximize your opt-in rate.
4. Only sending email campaigns during promotions or product launches
Set a goal to consistently send at least 1-2 general email marketing campaigns each month.
One of the most common mistakes e-commerce businesses make is only emailing their list when they have a promotion offer or a new product launch to announce, which can hurt your customer relationships in the long-term.
Instead, build customer loyalty and nurture your potential customers by providing value through sharing content like educational emails, blog post roundups, or customer stories.
5. Run A/B Tests
A/B testing is one of the cornerstones to an effective email marketing strategy because it allows you to optimize your emails. A/B testing can be used to improve your open rate, click rate, purchase rate and even your average order value.
Most e-commerce brands don't do enough A/B testing. In fact, you should aim to run an A/B test on every single one of your e-commerce email campaigns, even if it's as simple as a subject line test.
6. Not tracking email marketing performance
As Peter Drucker says, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.". In order to improve the performance of your email marketing strategies, you need to be able to measure and track the results.
One of the most common mistakes ecommerce brands make is trying to make their email marketing reporting too complicated in the beginning. It's better to get started with something simple and be able to view your performance consistently.
Most email service providers have built-in reporting dashboards to allow you to see your key metrics. So set a regular time each week or month to review your email performance! We'll dive into the metrics you should be looking at to track your email marketing success.