Email marketing is a powerful tool that some eCommerce store owners may overlook because they think it isn’t necessary for success. But email marketing is essential for any online business to have a good marketing and sales plan. Email marketing can be one of the best ways to get in touch with customers, increase sales, and make customers more loyal.
If you already know how important email marketing is in ecommerce, you’re ahead of most store owners. But how do you get started with ecommerce email marketing? In this article, we’ll show you how to use email marketing in ecommerce to grow your business and recommend the best email marketing software for ecommerce.
What Is Ecommerce Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a powerful tool for ecommerce businesses and is essential for staying in touch with customers. With email marketing, you can reach your customers and potential customers even when they’re not on your website. You can send them a message in their inbox to remind them about your brand and encourage them to buy something from your store.
Email marketing is one of the best ways to increase sales and keep customers coming back. By building an email list and using an email marketing strategy for your ecommerce business, you can send targeted emails to customers with special offers, news about new products, and other important information to get them to come back to your store and buy your products.
You can even set up “abandoned cart” emails as part of your email marketing strategy to remind customers who left without checking out that they left something in their cart. If you do these emails right, they can dramatically increase your sales and are easy to set up.
A strategy for ecommerce email marketing can be used by online stores to:
- Increase sales
- Tell people about new products or services
- Encourage customer loyalty and repeat business
- Give your customers useful content, like educational articles, how-to guides, etc.
- Reconnect with customers who haven’t talked to you in a while.
- Bring people to your online store or blog.
- Sending out regular newsletters will help your customers remember your business.
- Email marketing is a great way to do all of these things, and every business that sells online should be using it.
How to set up your email marketing plan for e-commerce
Now that we’ve talked about what email marketing is and why it’s important for ecommerce businesses, let’s look at how to start email marketing for ecommerce. Even though it may seem hard, the hardest part is making the decision to start and then doing it. Once you know the basics, you can start your own ecommerce email marketing strategy and see what works best for your business.
Pick an email service provider.
First, you’ll need to choose an email service provider. There are likely a lot of choices, but not all of them are good. Don’t let this part hold you back too much, though. Do some research, figure out which ones meet your real needs, and sign up to get started with your email marketing.
You should think about the following things when choosing an email service provider:
- Pricing (how much do you want to spend? can you get a better deal if you pay yearly?)
- How many emails must you send every month?
- How big your email list is
- What do you need in terms of features?
- Do you need templates that are well made, or will you keep things simple?
- If you need a little help deciding, we’ve reviewed some of our favorite email marketing service providers at the end of this article.
Start collecting email addresses.
It’s important to get started right away so that you can start building your email list right away. Don’t put it off for six months, or you’ll miss out on all the email subscribers you could have gotten in that time and wish you had started sooner. Even if you don’t know what to send or what your email marketing strategy will be yet, start collecting emails so you can start to grow your email list and have customers and potential customers to email when the time comes.
Don’t forget that people have to choose to join your email list. You can’t just start adding your current customers to the list without their permission. In a few steps, we’ll talk more about opt-ins.
Set up a pre-launch page
Setting up a pre-launch page is one of the best things you can do to start growing your email list right away. A pre-launch page is a simple page on your ecommerce website that has one goal: to get people to sign up for your email list before your launch. That means you don’t even need to be open for business yet!
Your pre-launch page should include:
- Copy that is interesting and will make people want to sign up for your emails
- A short description of what people will get if they sign up for your emails (exclusive coupons, early access to new products, etc.).
- A sign-up form for email
- (optional) An incentive to sign up, like a discount on the day the service starts.
- Don’t worry too much about how the pre-launch page looks. Keep it simple and on brand so that the opt-in form stands out and there isn’t too much information to dig through. If you put too much on it, people might get overwhelmed and leave. You want people who land on that page to do one main thing: sign up for your emails.
A pre-launch page is a great way to start building your email list early on so that you have a group of people to email when you’re ready to open your ecommerce store.
Accounts for sales and customers should send you their emails.
If your e-commerce store is already up and running and making sales, you can also collect emails from customers who make purchases or sign up for an account in your store. These are the best emails to add to your email list because these are people who are already buying from you. If they like your products and continue to hear from your business, they are likely to come back and spend more money with you.
Because ecommerce businesses are all done online and customers usually have to give their email addresses when placing orders, you have many chances to get customer emails so you can keep in touch with them and build a relationship. You can get emails from customers when they check out or when they use a contact form to ask a question.
Place opt-in forms in a smart way
It’s not enough to ask current customers for their emails when they check out. You also want to get email addresses from people who visit your online store but haven’t bought anything yet. Making sure that your email sign-up forms are in more than one place on your website will help you get more email subscribers.
Some of the best places to put opt-in forms for email:
In a prominent place on your homepage. The header, the navigation, or the footer are all good choices because they are on every page of your website. Some people may not go all the way to the bottom of your site, so putting important information above the fold (like in the header or top navigation) is a good idea. However, you should always keep your site’s design in mind. In some cases, you may be able to put your opt-in form both above the fold and in the footer to get the most attention.
As a pop-up window. One of the best opt-in pop-ups for ecommerce is one that appears right before someone leaves your site. This is called a “exit-intent pop-up,” and it can catch people before they leave to try to get their email addresses or offer a deal in exchange for their email address. So, you can use email marketing to get them to come back to your store and buy something.
The page about us. The best way to make a good impression is to have an interesting “About Us” page that tells potential customers everything they need to know about your brand. But while they’re on your site reading about your brand, make sure to include an email opt-in form to encourage customers to let you tell them about sales and new products.
Pages and blog posts. If your ecommerce site has a blog, adding an opt-in on the main blog page and in blog posts is a great way to reach people who came to your site looking for information.
You can use email templates for your online store.
Once you have strategically placed opt-ins and are collecting email addresses for your ecommerce email marketing, it’s time to set up those emails. If you don’t know what kind of emails to send for your ecommerce store, you can get some ideas from the list below.
Greeting emails
Your welcome email is one of the most important emails you will send. This is one of the first things your ecommerce customers will see when they go to your inbox, so it’s important to get it right so you can make a good first impression. If all you do is confirm their subscription, you’re missing out on a chance to get to know your subscribers.
In your welcome email, you should explain what your business is about, get people excited about your brand, and encourage them to take action. In this email, you can also give customers an exclusive coupon code for your store as a reward for signing up.
Emails of thanks
Getting customers to stay loyal takes time and a plan. With loyalty emails, you can make targeted campaigns to build relationships with email subscribers and make them more loyal to your business.
This type of email has two goals: to keep your customers interested and coming back for more, and to increase customer lifetime value. Email marketing for ecommerce is going in the right direction if you can do these two things with your loyalty emails.
Your emails to loyal customers should make them feel like they are on a special list or are VIPs. You can make your email subscribers feel special by giving them early access to sales, special deals, sneak peeks at new products, and invitations to special events. This will make them more loyal to your brand in the long run.
Re-engagement emails
A healthy email list is made up of people who actually open and interact with your emails and are on a clean list. After you’ve been doing email marketing for ecommerce for a while, you’ll notice that a lot of your subscribers are no longer interested in your emails. Maybe they haven’t visited your store or opened an email from you in months, and they haven’t bought anything in a long time. Even though it can be hard to get these “cold subscribers” back, it’s important to remember that they did sign up and were interested in your brand at one point, so sending them re-engagement emails before giving up on them is always a good idea.
For re-engagement emails, you’ll need to do some work to get them to open your email. It starts with a good subject line that makes them want to open the email. Once they do, you can offer a coupon or discount code to get them to come back to your ecommerce store and shop. A stale subscriber on your list can often be brought back to life by making sure this email makes your customer feel special and giving them some kind of benefit.
Emails on anniversaries
Want your customers to feel like they’re important? You can do just that with emails for anniversaries or birthdays. Customers can get anniversary emails on the anniversary of when they made their first purchase from your store or when they signed up for your email list. You can give them a special discount, reward, or offer through these emails to build trust and loyalty and get them to buy from your store.
For this kind of email, you’ll need to use your ecommerce email marketing provider to keep track of when they signed up or made a purchase. Or, if you want to send a special coupon code to people on their birthdays, you will need to set up your opt-in form to ask for their birthday when they sign up. Adding a funny message like “Enter your email so we can send you a gift on your birthday!” will tell them why you want that information and encourage them to fill out the form to find out what “gift” they get.
When you give your customers these kinds of rewards based on how they interact with your business, it makes them more likely to do business with you and improves their experience with your brand.
Emails for advertising
Promotional emails are one of the most common types of emails used in email marketing for ecommerce. Most of the emails in your inbox are probably ads from businesses trying to get your business, so these are easier to understand.
Because ecommerce stores depend on sales to stay in business, promotional emails are important for getting people to your store and making money. These promotional emails can be a great way to remind your customers about your store, boost your average order value, bring in more money when sales are slow, or get rid of old products to make room for new ones.
But because people get so many of these emails every day, it’s important to have a plan for each one. Think about the marketing emails you get every day and which ones you remember. With attention-grabbing subject lines and promotions that get people excited, you’ll have a better chance of turning an email that gets opened into a sale.
Post-purchase emails
Don’t forget about your customer after they’ve bought something from your website. Sending emails after a purchase is a great way to check in with your customers and make sure they were happy with your ecommerce store. Remember that it costs more money and time to get a new customer than to keep an old one. So, make sure that your ecommerce email marketing plan includes emails after a sale.
Post-purchase emails keep in touch with your new customer, make them more loyal, and make them more likely to buy from you again in the future. In these emails, you can thank them for their purchase, find out how they liked working with your company, and even promote other products or give them a discount code for their next purchase to get them to buy from you again soon.
Review request emails
Reading reviews from other customers definitely builds more trust and credibility than even the best sales copy. Think about this before you buy something. Do you read the reviews before you buy something if they are available?
A good review can make you decide to buy something you were on the fence about. Having reviews on your store’s products can be a great way to turn people who are just looking into paying customers. About 95% of customers read reviews before making a purchase, so if you make sure reviews are available, your chances of making a sale are likely to go up.
When you send emails asking for reviews, you encourage customers to tell you what they think about your product or their experience with it. Also, you show those customers that your brand cares about what they have to say, which can go a long way toward building a relationship with them.
Cart abandonment emails
Did you know that just under 70% of carts are left empty? That means that almost 70% of the people who come to your store and put things in their carts but don’t buy anything. With cart abandonment emails, you can get back some of those lost sales and grow your ecommerce business.
Emails about cart abandonment are sent to customers who put items in their shopping cart but didn’t finish the purchase. Most of the time, these emails show the customer what they left in their shopping cart along with a discount or other incentive to get them to come back and finish their order.
Price drop emails
It’s not surprising that most shoppers decide whether or not to buy something based on how much it costs. Emails about price drops can be a great way to get customers to come back to your store and buy something they were interested in.
When the price of an item your subscribers are interested in goes down, you can let them know through price drop emails. This kind of email is usually sent to people who have looked around your store or put items in their shopping cart but haven’t bought anything. These emails are easy because all you have to do is tell interested customers that the price of an item they were looking at has gone down. Most ecommerce email marketing services can connect to your ecommerce software so that emails like these are sent automatically.
Back in stock emails
If you sell items that sometimes sell out, make sure you have a way for customers to sign up for a “back in stock” notice. This lets interested customers know that they will be notified when the item is back in stock. This keeps them from going to a competitor to buy the same thing.
When an item is out of stock, it can be frustrating for customers, but it can also show them that the products in your store are in high demand. Once the product is back in stock, your ecommerce email marketing software will automatically send an email to any interested customers to let them know so they can finish their purchase.
The best email marketing software for online stores
It can be hard to choose the best ecommerce email marketing software because there are so many options, and each one has different features, prices, and reputations. As promised, we’ve given you a short list of the best ecommerce email marketing software so you don’t have to spend too much time researching and can instead get started with your own email marketing strategy.
Klaviyo
Klaviyo is an email marketing platform for ecommerce businesses that was made just for them. They are already connected to the most popular ecommerce platforms, so you can start sending targeted emails right away. You can sync your data with Klaviyo, look at reports, and use their segmentation to send emails to customers based on how they shop.
With the email and SMS templates that are provided, you can set up automated personalized messages like price drop alerts, reminders about your shopping cart, and recommendations. You can also use the information Klaviyo pulls from your store to run targeted marketing campaigns on Facebook and Instagram.
Klaviyo has a free plan that lets you have up to 250 contacts and 500 sends. Their paid plans start at $20 per month for up to 500 contacts and up to 10,000 emails sent per month.
Mailchimp
MailChimp is one of the best-known email marketing services out there. Not only have they been around for a long time, but they are also one of the easiest platforms to use, which makes them great for people who are just starting out in email marketing. MailChimp is great for ecommerce businesses because it has a wide range of integrations and some of the best automation features in the business.
Their ecommerce automations make it easy to send customers targeted emails based on what they buy. Some of the best features for email marketing for ecommerce are segmentation, behavioral targeting, CRM, customer journey, marketing automation, transactional and trigger-based emails, robust reports, split A/B testing, customer surveys, and recommendations.
As an added bonus, they have a lot of email templates you can use so you don’t have to start from scratch every time you want to send an email.
Mailchimp has a free plan that lets you send up to 10,000 emails per month. Paid plans start at $11 per month and go up from there depending on what you need.
Sendinblue
Sendinblue is proud to help small businesses grow by giving them an all-in-one marketing platform. Sendinblue wants to make sure you have all the tools you need to succeed. It has features like email and SMS marketing, CRM, automation, segmentation, and retargeting for Facebook ads.
Sendinblue is different from other ecommerce email marketing software because it doesn’t charge you based on how many contacts you have in your list. Instead, they base their prices on how many emails you send each month. This makes them a great choice for businesses that are just starting out with ecommerce email marketing and don’t have a big list of contacts.
Sendinblue has a free plan that lets you send up to 300 emails per day to an unlimited number of contacts. Paid plans start at $25/month and go up based on how many emails you send each month and how many extra features you want.
