Online shopping is one of the most prevalent forms of purchasing in the world. And, with the growth of worldwide shopping, it’s only going to increase.
This means that getting people to your ecommerce site can be a challenge. With millions of online stores—and likely hundreds to thousands of them in your market alone—it’s becoming more important to stand out and differentiate your business.
One effective way to get in front of people and get them to your online store is through email marketing. With an email, your business can send notifications about sales, holiday deadlines, and the newest products in your store.
An email is a lucrative piece of information to have, and it provides the perfect platform from which your business can continually “touch” potential or returning customers.
Read on to discover a step-by-step approach to using ecommerce emails, as well as some examples of online shopping emails that can potentially boost your revenue.
How emails can increase online shopping
Email marketing is one of the most resourceful types of marketing a business can undertake. With ROIs of up to 4400%, it’s no wonder businesses spend an enormous amount of time crafting the perfect email campaigns.
Here are some email statistics that show just how important email can be to an online shopping platform:
- Conversion rates of up to 50% can be achieved by B2C marketers using email automation.
- When it comes to email revenue, over 75% comes from triggered email campaigns, and 21% comes from automated campaigns.
- Transactional emails may generate up to six times more revenue than other types of emails.
These statistics highlight the importance of putting together an efficient email marketing strategy, as opposed to sending one-size-fits-all emails to your entire list. Combined with tools like list segmentation and personalization, email marketing has the potential to increase your business’ revenue significantly.
How do you put together an efficient email marketing strategy? Keep reading for our step-by-step guide to using ecommerce emails to boost your company’s revenue.
Step-by-step guide to using ecommerce emails
There’s more to email marketing than just throwing together a nice-looking email and sending it to your whole list—email marketing strategy drills down into your list, segmenting it, so you send the right emails at the right time to the right people.
1. Clean up and segment your list.
While there may be certain instances in which sending the same email to all customers is a good idea—think holiday e-cards and letters from the CEO—it’s an email best practice to segment your list. There are dozens of ways to segment a list, so do a little research on what’ll work best for your organization and email campaign.
Takeaway: use email list segmentation to send targeted emails based on aspects like geographic location, age, gender, or even activity on your website.
2. Analyze your ecommerce workflow.
Part of setting up your ecommerce email strategy is knowing what steps people take in their path to purchasing in your store. Key points to send emails are when someone creates an account, adds something to their cart but doesn’t check out, or spends a specific amount of time on your site.
Takeaway: knowing what steps people take in your online store will make your email plan more targeted and productive.
3. Check out email marketing companies.
Before you get ready to spend time on your email design, and before you’re ready to start crafting your content, it may be worth your time to look into email marketing companies. Many of them offer things like drag-and-drop editors, tools for segmenting lists, and shopping cart connectivity.
Takeaway: an email marketing company may be able to take your ecommerce platform and integrate it with a fully functional email marketing platform.
4. Put together email design templates.
Once you’ve spent some time nailing down where you’ll send emails in your ecommerce workflow, it’s a good idea to put together email design templates to help automate your email marketing plan. Design templates don’t have to be out of this world—simple is often effective.
Takeaway: email design templates are timesavers. You can always make changes to them as you A/B test your email campaigns.
5. Craft engaging content to drive clicks.
More than just email design, a quality marketing email will have engaging content, including copy and calls to action. Consider including videos in some of your email campaigns—if your company offers video reviews, include those in your abandoned cart emails.
Takeaway: content is everything in your email, from your subject line to the images and videos to the copy to your CTAs. Don’t skimp on this step.
6. Research the best time to send your emails.
We don’t have any shortcuts for you on this one—the best time and day to send emails varies based on a number of factors. It’s important to gauge your audience and track how they interact with your email campaigns. A/B testing is your friend during this step.
Takeaway: different segments in your list might respond to different days and times positively, so create a strategy for testing during this step.
7. Create a comprehensive email marketing plan.
Now that you’ve figured out what emails you want to send, when you want to send them, and how they’re going to look and feel, it’s time to put it all together. If you’re using an email marketing company, this will be a breeze—you can set up your segmented lists and create away.
Takeaway: if this feels overwhelming at first, or you feel like you’d get better results going slow, start small and create a few campaigns based around the following email types.
Online shopping emails that boost revenue
Unless you have an exhaustive team of marketing professionals, you likely can’t do it all yet. So how do you narrow down which emails are best for your company? And what emails will pack the most punch?
Read through these examples of common online shopping emails that can help your ecommerce business boost its revenue.
Abandoned cart emails
One of the most practical emails your company can send as part of your email marketing strategy is an abandoned cart email. Your potential customer has already been on the site, seen and partially-accepted the price, and just needs a little nudge forward to make the purchase.
Source: Really Good Emails
This example from Rudy’s highlights two products that were in the shopping cart, and it calls out an expiring free shipping offer—using a sense of urgency can help close the deal.
New product alerts
Another great way to guide potential or returning customers back to your store is with a new product alert. New customers may be motivated to be the first to own something, and returning customers already know they love your products.
Source: Really Good Emails
An example from The North Face calls out the company’s new product line, and the full email highlights some of the new products—notice the red-linked “new arrivals” as well.
Back-in-stock notifications
Offering out-of-stock notifications is an excellent way to reserve a spot in someone’s inbox. A potential buyer has already expressed their interest in your product, so why not capitalize on letting them know the moment you have it back in stock?
Source: Really Good Emails
UNIQLO capitalizes on its out-of-stock items by offering customers the option to receive product alerts—letting customers know something is back in stock is a great way to drive revenue.
Similar items on sale memos
Everyone loves a good sale and, for some people, it takes a sale to get them to purchase. If someone shopped on your site, whether they bought anything on not, send a follow-up email highlighting sale or discount items that are similar to those they shopped for.
Source: Really Good Emails
Framebridge takes website activity and turns it into an email marketing opportunity with their similar items on sale email—people tend to buy more when things are on sale.
Wrap up
A comprehensive email marketing strategy is worth its (virtual) weight in gold—done properly, it’s a strategy that drives traffic and increases revenue.
Some key takeaways about using emails to drive traffic in your ecommerce store are:
- A solid email marketing plan is well thought out and incorporates copy, design, and compelling subject lines.
- Thinking through all of the potential situations in which a customer can interact with your ecommerce store will guide your email marketing decisions.
- Use an email marketing company to segment your lists further, create exciting email design, and integrate with your ecommerce platform.
Be sure to spend a sufficient amount of time on each step in our step-by-step guide to incorporating email in your ecommerce store. The more time spent on it now, the better the results in the future.
Looking for an email marketing solution that’ll propel your ecommerce store? Campaign Monitor offers an exciting solution for online shopping platforms.