A Complete Guide on E-Commerce Email Marketing to 10x Your Sales

If we were to describe e-commerce email marketing in three words, they would be to connect, inform and promote. As one of the most conversion-rich and cost-effective strategies available today, email marketing is a persuasive way of reaching out to a world of digital users. Let’s find out how you can drive your e-commerce business with email marketing.

Table of contents

• Getting started with email marketing for your e-commerce business
• Types of emails for e-commerce marketing and their applications
• 11 types of e-commerce email marketing campaigns you can’t skip
• E-commerce email marketing: Best practices
• AMP emails for e-commerce email marketing
• Simplify e-commerce email marketing with Mailmodo

Getting started with email marketing for your e-commerce business

With an average ROI of 122%, email marketing has been proven to be 4x more successful than other digital marketing strategies. Sounds too good to be true? That’s because you haven’t tapped into the true potential of email marketing and the influence it can have on your e-commerce business.

With close to 4 billion email users, the opportunity to source prospects and leads, and engage them is unparalleled, making it critical for your e-commerce business to make its presence felt. Email marketing has a direct impact on your revenue generation as it helps in lead generation, nurturing, and ensuring that your leads make their way through the sales funnel.

Why is e-commerce email marketing important?

Can you take a wild guess about the number of emails that were sent out each day in 2019 alone?

According to Statista, it was around 293.6 billion emails per day, a figure that has been projected to increase to 347.3 billion by 2022.

The numbers are jaw-dropping when you think about the expected growth versus the unchartered territories that e-commerce email marketing is yet to explore.

Truth is, good email has great potential - to generate action, develop customer relations, and ensure engagement and retention, the factors that ultimately deliver a high ROI. If you’re not sold on it yet, we’ll walk you through the reasons that make e-commerce email marketing important.

• Create a strong communication channel - Email is one of the most reliable channels for businesses to communicate with their audience. 99% of the people still check their email every day.

• Build your own database - Email marketing allows you to create a strong database over time, and this database remains its own property. The same can’t be said for followers gathered on other social media platforms.

• Get high conversion rates - Emails outperform social media in terms of reach and see 50 to 100 times the click-through rates.

• Get high ROI - Email marketing has been known to have a conversion rate of 4400% - higher than social media, or any other form of marketing.

Related guide: How to Calculate and Improve Your Email Marketing ROI

Types of emails for e-commerce marketing and their applications

E-commerce is a highly dynamic environment. On a daily basis, it undergoes massive changes and updates, and each user’s journey on an e-commerce site is unique, making it essential for the business to take a personalized approach to the user’s needs and requirements. Automation is how you can deliver it.

There are two categories of emails you need to know about and when to leverage which.

Transactional emails: Functional emails shared on a one-on-one basis with users as a response to their interactions, to complete a process they may have started.

Promotional emails: Sent to a database of users that have specifically opted-in to receive promotional content, meaning your email list.

Want to learn more about the two? Here’s a quick guide to get you started on the world of promotional and transactional emails.

11 types of e-commerce email marketing campaigns you can’t skip

Contrary to popular belief, email marketing isn’t just about planning and strategizing correctly - it’s also about right timing and sequencing. It comes down to tracking your user’s journey and sending out the right email campaigns at the right time to keep them engaged.

Incorrectly sequencing emails (or sending irrelevant content) could lead a user to opt-out of your emails or even seek a competitor.

So we have compiled a list of email campaigns your e-commerce can use in chronological order.

1. Welcome emails

Treat a welcome email as your shot to make a lasting impression. A welcome email is your makes or breaks your customer’s experience in setting expectations, and ensuring your subscriber base grows. Welcome emails have unusually high open rates, about 50%, so e-commerce businesses often use welcome emails creatively to attract and wow their users.

2. Engagement email

Grabbing user attention is perhaps one of the toughest things to do today, but with a strong engaging email, you can achieve that. Engagement emails build customer relations with the objective of encouraging them to interact with the business. For example, offering free shipping or free trials to get a user to take action.

3. Referral email

Lead generation is an important aspect of email marketing - and one of the best ways to do that is to incentivize your current customers to hook their friends and family onto your business. Many e-commerce brands have been known to invest in referral programs by offering freebies and discounts to not only their existing customers but also to referred customers.

4. Discount email

Aren’t you more likely to be lured by a discount on a product you’ve had your eyes on? Your users are the same. Many e-commerce businesses use emails to give out discounts as a means to increase purchases on abandoned cart products, or generally across their stores.

5. Flash sale campaign

A flash sale is an announcement that creates a sense of urgency, thus urging customers to act fast. Typically, e-commerce businesses use flash sale emails to announce new arrivals, sales, deals, and exclusive campaigns to make it hard for users to resist.

6. Cart abandonment email

Lack of attention or distraction on the user’s part is one of the biggest fears that most e-commerce businesses have. Users can get disinterested or disengaged extremely quickly and abandon their carts. Other reasons can include high hidden costs at the time of checkout, such as shipping and taxes, complicated checkout processes, slow delivery, and required sign-ups.

But hope isn’t lost, send them a personalized cart abandonment email to nudge them that their potential purchases are waiting. You even send cart abandonment emails with promos or offers to reduce shipping or delivery fees, in an effort to prompt user action.

7. Order confirmation email

In a digital world, it is easy to be duped. Make your users feel reassured and send out order confirmation emails. These emails also help customers track their orders and feel more confident about their purchase and by extension, your brand

8. Upsell email

Ever wondered how to increase your customer’s overall purchase value? There’s a word for it, upselling. A great example of this in action is in the food space. Brands often ask customers whether they’d like to add a side order or a beverage to their final cart. Most e-commerce websites also give customers recommendations a step before checkout by providing ‘frequently bought together’ or ‘you’d also like’ options - to increase the cart value. An email can help you do the same.

9. Win-back email

It’s natural to lose some users on your email list even as it grows. Oftentimes customers opt-out or unsubscribe to emails because they don’t feel engaged, or just don’t open the site or app anymore. A great way to reconnect with them back is to send out win-back emails, in an effort to, you guessed it, win them back. E-commerce businesses do this by sending extra credits, discounts, or promos to get customers restarted.

10. Survey email

An excellent way to gain feedback and gauge where you stand vis-a-vis competitors, survey emails are quick tools to understand consumers. By sending out specific survey emails, you can gain insight that can help you improve your email marketing, products, or understand what your customers need. If you listen to your customers, chances are they’ll feel more wanted and trust you more.

You can take your engagement a step further with AMP survey emails. These help your audience answer the survey right from their inbox without switching to another tab or getting into lengthy sign-ups.

11. Thank you email

Expressing gratitude can be extremely beneficial - especially when it is personalized. Customers are a huge reason why your e-commerce business exists and thrives, and it’s important to thank them and make them feel valued. Express thanks through offers and promos, or just check in to see how your customers are doing. It’ll take you a long way.

E-commerce email marketing: Best practices

E-commerce is one of the fiercest markets out there with a bevy of competitors popping up every other day, it’s important to ensure your business remains afloat, and top of their marketing game. To maximize your visibility and optimize conversions, let’s explore some e-commerce email marketing best practices that can help you grow your email lists, increase your open rates, and boost sales.

• Track unopened emails: Wonder why? To resend them, of course. To increase the chances of higher open rates, track unopened emails, and resend them to the segment that didn’t open them. To get better results the second time around, use effective subject lines using A/B testing and gauge how users respond.

• Ensure personalization and follow-ups: Personalization helps businesses to become more friendly and approachable towards users. Great ways to be personal and follow up are through sending users welcome emails, onboarding emails, and thank you emails.

• Use social media to target email subscribers: Don’t be shy, approach your email subscribers on their social media platforms by integrating the database. This can help you automatically target and engage your proactively built audience. You can uncover more specific information about their behavior and interests which can help you create more specific segments for sending out email campaigns to personalize even further.

Read more about how to segment your audience for optimizing your e-commerce email marketing campiagns

AMP emails for e-commerce email marketing

People crave interaction. It gives them a feeling of belonging and makes them want to participate. In the world of engagement, one of the best forms of personalized interaction without human intervention is through dynamic AMP emails, something the e-commerce industry has increasingly utilized to leverage its market position.

E-commerce email marketing through AMP emails opens the door to various possibilities.

• Provide users with status updates including such as notifications about increase or drop in prices of products in their carts, app-related updates, or information about order changes.

• Browse products within an email, thereby reducing the distraction associated with being diverted to another site or page to browse.

• Channel through the sales funnels by nudging a customer to complete the checkout process within an email for products abandoned in their carts, or by providing recommendations according to their past purchases.

• Running campaigns and gaining customer feedback quickly through emails.

Read more about the power of AMP emails for e-commerce and how it can help your business grow.

Simplify e-commerce email marketing with Mailmodo

Mailmodo provides users with complete email marketing solutions to improve and maximize email conversions and simplifying email marketing for businesses including those in the e-commerce space.

As a one-stop shop for e-commerce businesses, Mailmodo helps in sending out various kinds of email campaigns by enabling email automation, user journey creation, and automatically triggering schedules, as well as integrating API within newsletters and email content.

Users can integrate their Shopify stores with Mailmodo and send out product-specific emails. For example, customizing and sending out email campaigns to enable users to browse products, revert to their abandoned carts, or educate users about certain products. With all of this and more, Mailmodo is a boon for e-commerce businesses looking to boost sales by establishing impactful digital marketing strategies.

What are you waiting for then? Try Mailmodo for your e-commerce business today.