Email marketing is a must as it drives maximum ROI for the businesses. Why? 59% of the customers have said that emails influence their purchase decisions. For ecommerce businesses, nurturing this chunk can impact their business and influence their returns heavily.
However, the entire success of your email depends on how well it is crafted and designed. Here we will take you through the types of ecommerce emails that you should be aware of, as well as the best practices involved in designing an ecommerce email.
Before that, we would like to touch upon the other benefits associated with ecommerce email marketing.
- Personalization is possible with email marketing that helps gain the customer’s interest. In a cluttered market space with a lot of noise, email comes across as a tool that offers well-defined, customized experiences for the customers
- It proves to be an easier way to identify, segment, and even understand your customer’s preferences. You can ask them their preferences at the opt-in stage and keep updating their information as and when needed. You can also collect data from other channels such as Google searches, Facebook and social channels to know what kind of customer preferences you are dealing with.
- The conversions are greater with the ecommerce industry. Emails tend to increase your sales, as the content is more contextual, and helps build relations with your end customer.
Let’s get a look at the types of ecommerce emails that you can opt for, and how to use them to build your customer base and conversions.
Types of Ecommerce Emails
The Welcome Emails
This has become mandatory for every new customer subscribing to your emails. It sets the expectations in terms of content, context and the frequency of the emails the subscriber will receive from you.
The welcome email also provides some value which will help build the initial relationship with your subscriber. The welcome email is basically a way to understand whether the opt-in was intentional or accidental, and also to reach out to the subscribers and make them feel comfortable.
Birchbox here talks about all the subscription types and sets the tone for the next email in the series. The message is clean, and the action cleaner in this case.
This email by Michaels is a transactional kind of welcome email, with the single goal of gaining conversions from their first ever email.
It is recommended that you send a series of welcome emails like Asana does. They send across a 3-email series to the first-time subscribers and informs them about their services.
The first email welcomes the subscriber and takes through the basic tasks that you can perform with the application, and then has an impressive CTA at the end of it.
The second email talks about how you can track your tasks with Asana and measure your goals too. It gives you a quick overview on using the tool for measuring your success metrics.
The third email takes you through a particular element of the application that stands out. It helps user understand how to create tasks, which is an important part of the app, and ends with another CTA.
Cart Abandonment Emails
These emails urge the cart abandoners to complete their purchase. It could be a payment issue or, a change of mind. The abandoners need to be nurtured, which is why these emails are very important.
60% of the shoppers are back to complete their shopping within 24 hours of receiving the cart abandonment email within 24 hours of receiving a cart abandonment email. The reason being, the cart abandoners are waiting to come back, only if they receive some kind of motivation to do so.
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Here are some brands that have effectively adopted the cart abandonment email strategy to win back their audiences.
Follow-up Emails
Amazon does a great job of sending these emails. After every completed purchase, you will receive an email from the ecommerce giant asking you for a feedback on the product. They will not only ask you to rate the seller, but also the product, so that other people can know whether it is worth investing in the product or not. The post sales follow-up email will help you as an ecommerce site or marketplace to improve your products and offering.
The idea should be clear, and the message should be concise so that the recipient of the email understands it completely.
Re-engagement Emails
There are email subscribers who have not opened or clicked through your emails in the recent past. Some of them are your customers who don’t shop at your site anymore. You need to re-engage them, as it is not just easier, but also cost-effective to get an old customer on-board as against acquiring a new one.
The offer that you are mailing with the re-engagement email should be attractive, and people should not say no to them. if you don’t want to send them deals, you can focus on rebuilding a relationship, which will eventually become transactional in your case.
Transactional Emails
When a particular action is triggered, the transactional emails are automatically sent to the subscriber. For instance, when the order has been placed with your site, an email will be sent containing the order details and everything the user needs to know about the order. Similar email is sent once the order is shipped to the customer. These emails are very important to build an engagement with the customer, and ensure they come back to your site to make purchases.
Ecommerce Email Best Practices
When drafting your ecommerce email, there are a few things that you cannot compromise upon.
- Before you build your email campaign, and start designing the emails, you ought to have a defined set of goals that will help you increase your returns. What do you aim to achieve from your email marketing strategy and who is your target audience? Get the answers to these two questions right, and you will be able to plan your campaign better. Finally, when setting the goals, you should also define how you aim to measure the goals.
- Automation is an important aspect of ecommerce email strategy. For every behaviour trigger and buying stage, there is an email that will help convert effectively. You will need to make sure the email reaches the buyer in time to help them make an informed decision. When you are using email marketing for your online store, make sure you have effectively added automation.
- The list should be validated and squeaky clean if you aim to convert with your email marketing practices. Remove duplication, and people who are not interested in your brand. Always have an opt-out strategy made available to the subscribers so that they need not be a part of the email list. Segment your list according to the user’s preferences, their buying stage, and other factors so that you can send personalized emails to the list.
- Always design for the user. If the user prefers deals to be highlighted and is most likely to open on a mobile device, make sure your design is for the mobile. You should have a thumb friendly design with bigger fonts and fewer words.
- The send frequency needs to be determined right at the start. If the audience is getting emails that they had not opted for, then your unsubscribe might increase. Allow users to set preferences in terms of email types as well as the frequency before you take the journey ahead.
Wrapping up
An effective email strategy for the eCommerce businesses is likely to improve their setting and win them more conversions. There are different types of email automation that they should sign-up for, so that they can convince their users, and improve their returns.
The emails that you send should depend on the user type, their preferences, what they are looking for in your site, and their buying stage. Demographics as well as certain external factors such as competition can also impact the type of emails you ought to send your users.
Clean designs and squeaky-clean lists should help win the customers, increase engagement and boost conversions for your business.
