Ecommerce Email Marketing: Strategy, Campaign Types, and Best Practices

What is Ecommerce Email Marketing?

Ecommerce email marketing is the process of sending targeted emails to potential and existing customers. These messages include personalized product recommendations, exclusive discounts, and new product launches. You encourage customers to take action, with conversion as the ultimate goal.

Successful email campaigns lead to the following benefits:

• Improved lead generation in digital marketing
• Increase in sales due to targeted product recommendations
• More loyal customers, leading to higher retention rates
• Enhanced brand awareness and reliability

Moreover, these campaigns provide feedback on your customers’ preferences. You can optimize your marketing strategy, especially your promotional messages.

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The importance of email marketing in eCommerce

Return on Investment (ROI) in email marketing continues to improve today. More than 52% of marketers agree with this claim.

This is also true for eCommerce businesses. The open rates for eCommerce email campaigns are still increasing. Promotional emails are effective in converting potential customers, especially if you push the right buttons.

How does email marketing drive success to an eCommerce business? Here’s the process behind it:

• Nurture relationships: Increase customer loyalty through email marketing. Audience segmentation allows you to nurture customers in each stage of the buyer’s journey. You can send a personalized welcome email to new subscribers. Or you can also send post-purchase emails to repeat customers.
• Leverage data: Use email marketing tools to analyze customer data and patterns. The email marketing software market is projected to increase in size. It brings powerful value to streamline the marketing efforts of an online store.
• Reduce costs: Make the most out of your marketing budget. Studies say that you earn $36 for every $1 spent on an email campaign.

Email marketing is a cost-effective strategy for eCommerce stores. Plus, you can utilize email automation tools to make the process more efficient.

Types of Ecommerce Email Marketing Campaigns

Choose the right type of eCommerce email marketing campaign for each stage of the buyer’s journey.

Welcome emails

A welcome email sets the stage for successful eCommerce email campaigns. It’s your 15-second audition into the interests of future customers.

Welcome emails play these roles in email marketing:

• Brand expectation: Make a good first impression on your audience. What can they expect from your products and services? Focus your messaging on their interests and pain points.
• First-time purchases: Provide exclusive discounts or recommendations to new subscribers. This could motivate them to purchase or at least check your online store.
• Customer base: Take your first step to establishing a loyal customer base. A personalized welcome email reflects the brand’s willingness to help new customers.

Typically, a welcome email is triggered when you acquire new email subscribers. You can use a digital tool like Mailchimp to automate this process.

Abandoned cart emails

You shouldn’t be discouraged when shoppers don’t buy products in their cart. It means that they liked your products. However, there might be circumstances — like budget constraints — that are preventing customer purchases.

This is when you can leverage shopping cart abandonment emails. You remind a customer of products they left in their online shopping cart. Here’s how you should send follow-up emails on abandoned carts:

• Timely reminders: The common practice is to send abandoned cart emails within 24 hours. Sometimes, customers just encounter technical problems before checking out their cart. Remind them of your product before they totally move forward to another brand.
• Urgency or incentives: Offer exclusive discounts or coupons to encourage order completion. You can also use the urgency strategy. Let them know that the product is running out of stock. Or you can remind them of your limited-time promos.

Most eCommerce platforms have built-in tracking tools for abandoned carts. Alternatively, you can use third-party platforms like Hotjar or Kissmetrics.

Product recommendation emails

In the United States, 49% of shoppers want personalized product recommendations. Targeted recommendations are very different from cold emails or calls. You show products or services that align with your customers’ interests.

Data plays a huge role in this process. You can get data-driven insights to recommend the right products to existing or new customers.

Here’s why data becomes valuable for an eCommerce brand:

• Personalized suggestions: Recommend products based on browsing and purchase history. You can also analyze a customer’s wishlist on your platform.
• Cross-selling: Cross-sell emails involve suggesting related products. If you’re lucky, you can hit another customer’s pain point.
• Upselling: Try to recommend higher-end products to a customer. Focus on the product’s valuable features. Also, you can offer discounts to attract the attention of a potential customer.

Don’t think that people are annoyed by your product recommendations. Just make sure that you’re customizing the content, including the messaging and subject line.

Seasonal and promotional emails

Relevance is key in any marketing campaign. That’s true when you’re running an eCommerce SEO campaign or an email strategy.

This is why seasonal or holiday emails are game-changers in the industry. You leverage sudden spikes in customer demands and needs. Then, your online store can benefit from these benefits:

• Increased sales thanks to exclusive deals and bundles
• Bring in more repeat customers
• Free word-of-mouth marketing
• Build customer loyalty through regular sales events

Timeliness and relevance aren’t the only characteristics of a seasonal email campaign. Consistency is another aspect of this process. You want your most loyal customers to always look forward to your sales events.

Re-engagement emails

Ideally, you always want to retain customers. After all, it’s more expensive to go through the process of acquiring new customers.

However, there are instances when customers don’t engage with your brand for a long time. Do you just give up and write them off as lost customers? No, you shouldn’t.

There’s still a way to win back those customers. Re-engagement emails are a staple for a successful online store. Follow these steps when running a re-engagement email strategy:

• First, identify customers who haven’t interacted with your store. You can also determine inactive subscribers.
• Then, segment the inactive customers into groups. You can use an email marketing platform like Constant Contact for audience segmentation.
• Send out highly personalized messages. Provide limited-time discounts and specific incentives.
• Run A/B testing for re-engagement emails. Test out various wordings and timings.

Moreover, don’t give up just after the first re-engagement email. Be consistent in providing personalized and timely recommendations. Leveraging seasonal sales also opens up re-engagement opportunities.

Order confirmation and shipping emails

Order confirmation emails have an average 65% open rate, the highest among eCommerce emails. Transactional emails contain important shipping details, encouraging customers to open the message.

Since it has a high open rate, transactional emails cover valuable marketing aspects. Take a look:

• Sales opportunities: You can upsell or cross-sell related products on a transactional email. But ensure that the order confirmation details are prioritized. Place promotional content towards the end of the shipping confirmation email.
• Clear communication: Provide accurate details about the customer’s order or purchase. This reduces inquiries and establishes a means of communication.
• Customer satisfaction: Transactional emails are not just about confirming orders. You’re also giving assurance to the customers, especially with the shipping date. This could help forge customer relationships, particularly in trusting your brand.

Most importantly, ensure that all transactional details are accurate. If not, information discrepancies could lead to lost sales.

10 Essential Ecommerce Email Marketing Strategies

Maximize your eCommerce email marketing campaigns with these proven strategies in 2024.

Segmentation and personalization

All email marketing campaigns require a level of personalization. That rings true for every industry — whether you’re running an eCommerce or enterprise-level email marketing.

Otherwise, you’re just going in blindly and wasting your investment. It takes more work, but personalized email campaigns can increase your Return on Investment (ROI).

Here are steps on how eCommerce stores can personalize their email rollouts:

• Develop buyer personas for your eCommerce brand. Consider factors like age, gender, location, needs, and preferences. You can even get more specific with their hobbies and professions.
• Gather customer data from different marketing channels. Look into their browsing behavior, purchase frequency, and demographics.
• Use the data to segment your audience into groups. Personalize the email content for each group, especially the product recommendations.

Using segmentation criteria can also streamline this process. It provides a more straightforward way of grouping your audience. You can create segmentation groups like these:

• Demographic: Age, gender, location, profession, income level
• Behavioral: Frequent website visitors, inactive customers, abandoned carts
• Lifecycle: High-value customers, first-time subscribers or buyers, frequent buyers

The key is to find a common denominator, no matter which segmentation criteria you take. This drastically increases the probability of customer engagement and conversion.

Automation and drip campaigns

You can’t do every email marketing task in one sitting. After all, emails are not the only focus of your marketing playbook. For instance, you have an eCommerce SEO campaign to manage in increasing visibility on search engines.

That’s why more businesses are tapping into email marketing automation. You can send automated emails without having to type the content in real-time. This saves time and allows you to promptly respond to your customers.

What are the eCommerce email marketing aspects that automation can cover? We listed several key points below:

• Lead nurturing: Set up drip campaigns to nurture leads over time. This allows you to quickly leverage people’s interest in your eCommerce store.
• Onboarding: Guide customers through the onboarding process with drip campaigns. Send a series of emails, including product features, support resources, and related products.
• Timely responses: Don’t miss out on potential engagements or re-engagements. Send triggered emails based on customer interaction.

There are different email marketing software that could help automate workflows. You can create campaigns using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools like Salesforce. A more niche tool like GetResponse is also a powerful automation platform.

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A/B testing

Fine-tuning your email campaign requires an experimentation process called A/B testing. This is a tactic used by 59% of email marketing strategies.

A/B testing involves varying certain elements of your email marketing playbook. You experiment with different versions of email subject lines, CTAs, and wording. It’s a great technique to see which aspects work and don’t work.

This way, you get data-driven insights on the things that your customers want to see. We recommend these A/B testing techniques in email marketing:

• Relevant metrics: Choose key metrics that align with your business goals. These metrics could include open rates, click-through rates, and sign-up rates.
• Gradual progression: Start small at the beginning. Try to test one variable one at a time. Then, progress to multi-variant testing. Learn which combinations bring in the most engagements.
• Sample and duration: Don’t rush into results analysis. Make sure that you have a significant sample size to look at.

Analyze the results and adapt as you go. Continue experimenting with A/B testing, especially during holidays and seasonal sales events.

Interactive emails

Every eCommerce store should get into the interactive email trend. Among marketers worldwide, 52% view interactive emails as the most effective marketing content tool.

The goal of interactive emails is to encourage subscribers to click and engage. Here are interactive elements that you can incorporate into your email marketing strategy:

• Quizzes and polls: Personality quizzes, new product surveys, polls for customer feedback
• Games: Scratch cards, spin-the-wheel discounts, leaderboard challenges, progress bars
• Carousels: Product recommendations, before-and-after images, zoomed-in and out views
• Embedded videos: Product tutorials, facility tours, client testimonials

Most email marketing platforms offer the ability to integrate interactive elements. You can also opt for interactive email builders like EmailOctopus and Beefree. These tools provide drag-and-drop features for easier email customization.

Dynamic content blocks

Do you want to create branded emails for your audience? You can start with dynamic content blocks.

Dynamic content is an innovative technique that customizes emails for each customer. It increases engagement and conversion rates, especially if you hit the right targets. Moreover, you can better understand your customers’ preferences.

Here are the common types of email dynamic content for online stores:

• Personalized offers: Create dynamic content for product recommendations and location-based offers. Use essential information like demographics, browsing behavior, and previous purchases.
• Personalized messaging: Don’t focus too much on product suggestions. Customize your emails with birthday greetings or loyalty program milestones. Let your subscribers feel that the email is uniquely written for them.
• Dynamic pricing: Incorporate pricing updates or inventory restocks into your email push. This creates urgency, especially when customers browse abandonment email sections.

You can set dynamic content preferences on email platforms like Mailchimp and Salesforce. There are email templates you can use to quickly create dynamic content blocks.

Loyalty program integration

Add more value to the customer lifecycle with a well-managed loyalty program. You can integrate loyalty or membership programs with your email campaign. Your subscribers would love to receive email notifications about their loyalty program perks and progress.

Offering membership tiers encourages repeat purchases and more sales. Customers are motivated by exclusive discount codes and early access to new products.

Integrating loyalty programs with email workflows produces these customer-oriented benefits:

• Improves customer retention
• Motivates customers to purchase again
• Builds a sense of exclusivity through member-only discounts and perks
• Increases customer lifetime value (CLV) for more cost-efficient customer acquisition

In the US, 70% of customers look at loyalty programs as a leading purchase factor. If you’re looking to reduce churn rate, your eCommerce brand should have a loyalty program.

User-generated content (UGC)

Online reputation is key in penetrating your market. People are more likely to engage with online stores with excellent reputations. In fact, 99% of customers read reviews before they make a purchase.

There’s no better way to increase reputation than customer reviews and testimonials.

It’s time to incorporate these reviews into your email strategy. User-generated content (UGC) includes genuine messaging from previous customers. Essentially, you’re providing proof that your product or service works.

Here’s how you could integrate UGC into your eCommerce emails:

• Encourage submissions: Motivate customers to submit UGC through contests and giveaways. Require selfies with your product or reviews on your social media channels.
• UGC in product emails: Curate the best UGC and feature them in your emails. Highlight UGC that directly relates to the products you’re promoting.
• Influencer marketing: Leverage the marketing power of influencers and vloggers. Have them review or take a picture with your product. This increases the credibility of your emails. If done right, influencer marketing can drastically boost your email marketing performance.

Of course, the prerequisite for UGC is to have excellent products and customer service. It becomes easier to request reviews when people genuinely like your brand.

Behavioral triggers

In email marketing, automated workflows depend on behavioral triggers. These are automated messages triggered by different types of customer interaction.

How effective are these behavioral triggers in email marketing? A Blueshift Report says that trigger-based emails perform better than blast emails by 497%. That’s the effectiveness of personalized, trigger-based marketing emails.

Take a look at the types of emails that you can automate through behavioral triggers:

• Emails for new subscribers or first-time buyers
• Reminders for abandoned carts or abandoned browsing session
• Product recommendations
• Post-purchase follow-up
• Re-engagement emails
• Birthday and anniversary emails
• Customer surveys and polls

Personalize your trigger-based emails as much as possible. Run an audience segmentation process and always gather customer data on different social channels.

Seasonal countdown emails

Seasonal sales events are always a part of the eCommerce industry. Now, combine that with countdown emails and you effectively build anticipation for special events.

Here’s how you can leverage seasonal countdown emails for your eCommerce company:

• Identify the target audience of your countdown emails. Look into your audience segments to see if you have a limited-time promo to offer.
• Start with an urgent subject line. Remind your subscribers of an upcoming or ongoing sales event.
• Integrate a countdown timer or progress bar to visualize the countdown period. Align the visuals with your company branding.
• Include a strong CTA. Use a persuasive tone to incite a Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) experience.

There are tools you can use to create countdown timers in your emails. Email builders like AWeber and Brevo offer countdown timer blocks.

Storytelling emails

There’s nothing more effective than using emotions to connect with an audience. That’s also true when you integrate storytelling into your email content. You make your products and your entire brand more relatable.

Storytelling emails are important for your content marketing strategy. Here are the types of storytelling content you can include in your emails:

• Brand origin: Share stories of your company’s origins. How did you grow as a brand? This content could resonate with people who want to follow your progress.
• UGC: User-generated content is the best way to increase brand reliability. Include UGC forms such as customer reviews and case studies.
• Product journey: How do you develop or manufacture a product? Show how you develop a product, right from the concept to its delivery. This might even encourage customers to provide helpful feedback.

Content is a huge element in eCommerce email marketing. By creating value-driven stories, you drive more attention and loyalty to your online brand.

Tools and Resources for Ecommerce Email Marketing

From creating sign-up forms to personalizing messages, email marketing covers lots of ground. Thankfully, there are tons of marketing tools and resources you can use.

For instance, you can use an email service provider to set up trigger-based emails. Take a look at these versatile email marketing tools for eCommerce brands:

• Mailchimp: User-friendly interface for small to medium-sized online stores.
• Klaviyo: Powerful data capabilities and integrations for personalized strategies.
• ActiveCampaign: Easy integration into an online store’s CRM platform.
• Omnisend: Combines marketing automation workflows for SMS and emails.
• Drip: Manage customer relationships and interactions at scale.

Moreover, there are resources you can utilize to gain valuable strategies and market insights. These online channels can help you optimize your eCommerce email marketing operations:

• Blogs: Shopify Blog, Mailchimp Blog, Litmus Blog
• Webinars and conferences: Litmus Live, Klaviyo Live Training
• Courses: Klaviyo Academy, HubSpot Academy, Mailchimp Academy

There’s no best email marketing tool — only the most suitable platforms. Plus, there’s an option to collaborate with an eCommerce email marketing agency. They are experts not just in email marketing, but in the entire marketing process as well.

For example, digital marketing agencies like Fortis Media specialize in the eCommerce niche. We provide full-suite search marketing services, including email marketing, full-scale SEO audits, or paid marketing campaigns. We can help you recover lost revenue and conversion opportunities.

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Key takeaways

For eCommerce businesses, email marketing is an avenue to acquire high-value clients. Email marketing offers the ability to target the right audience and personalize your messaging. Plus, you have digital tools ready to automate workflows and repetitive tasks.

Still, the best strategy is to be timely with your emails. Send product recommendations during holidays and follow up on abandoned carts. Always review request emails and respond to customer inquiries.

Personalization and timing are the foundational elements of excellent eCommerce email marketing. Strike a balance between these two aspects and see your engagement rate increase.