10 of the Best Email Marketing Strategies for E-Commerce Sites

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If you run an e-commerce site, you don’t really have a chance to interact with your customers in person. Being unable to talk to your customers face-to-face means it can be a challenge to let them know that they are more than just a number and that you appreciate their business. However, that doesn’t have to be the case. By using email marketing, you can communicate with your customers and make them feel like you value them and that you want to nurture your relationships with them.

Simply sending emails left and right isn’t enough, though. Through careful strategizing, you can improve customer engagement, grow your subscriber list, and increase your sales. So, here are ten of the best email marketing strategies for e-commerce sites that you can give it a try.

1. Write subject lines and preheader text that boost open rates

Creating high-converting subject lines and preview texts is the first strategy you should consider because they work across all other email marketing strategies. After all, the subject line and the preview text are found in every email regardless of the contents of the email.

The subject line and the preview text are the first things a subscriber sees before they open your email. They only take a second or two to decide if they’re going to open your email or not, so you have to make a great first impression.

The subject line should contain incentivizing language such as “% off” or “voucher” or increase scarcity, and should only be three to five words and 17 to 24 characters long. The preview text, on the other hand, should be between 40 and 50 characters long to make sure that it is still displayed in full even on mobile devices.

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2. Welcome Your New Subscribers

You are just beginning to develop relationships with your new subscribers. One way to strengthen these relationships is by sending them welcome emails to your new subscribers the moment they subscribe so that they immediately feel valued.

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You can send welcome emails manually, but if you get hundreds or thousands of new subscribers on a regular basis, it would be virtually impossible for you to keep up. This is where e-commerce email marketing automation comes in. Set up a rule on your email marketing platform so that it automatically sends an email to members of your email list.

But if you’re a small e-commerce business & can’t really afford high costs of marketing automation platforms, no worries. You can still set up these welcome emails for your new customers & subscribers by simply integrating your e-commerce platform with Gmail.

Automate.io is a simple tool that lets you connect all your apps & create automated workflows.

3. Email Personalization for E-Commerce Business

Most businesses have some sort of email marketing strategy in place, so customers receive tons of emails from different companies every single day. With everyone doing email marketing, it can be difficult to set your business apart from the rest.

This is why personalization is no longer just an option—it’s a necessity. If you want to stand out from the crowd, you need to add a personal touch to your emails. Even just adding your customers’ names to the email instead of a generic “Dear Customer” will do wonders for your brand.

You should also make it a point to tailor your emails according to details like the customer’s gender preference, location, or past purchases. For example, if your customer identifies as a man and recently bought men’s shoes from your online store, it wouldn’t make sense to send them emails promoting women’s shoes.

Pro Tip – Sync your e-Commerce Store with other Payments, CRM & Email Marketing Apps

Your email can get really powerful & impactful if the customer sees it to be damn relevant to them. For example including recommendations in emails based on order history, order values, interest categories, abandoned carts, etc.

Check out all the integrations provided by Automate.io. Choose the apps of your choice & go ahead creating automated workflows (within no time & without any coding)

4. Reward Your Loyal Customers

Your loyal customers are great drivers of profit. Compared to your other customers, loyal customers have a much higher Lifetime Value (LTV), so it’s important to take care of them, set up a customer loyalty program and reward them for what they do for your business.

What you can do is provide these customers with things like loyalty programs or exclusive discounts. If you’re emailing your subscribers about a storewide sale of 5%, you can send a separate discount offer email to your loyal customers informing them of a bigger discount of 10%.

5. Reward Subscribers Who Refer

Even though today’s marketing landscape is mostly digital, word of mouth is still a highly effective (and free) form of marketing. According to Invespcro, 77% of people are more likely to purchase a product if it was shared by a friend or family member.

Leverage this by incentivizing your subscribers to make referrals. Send them either discounts on their next purchases or vouchers for a certain amount. To increase the likelihood of referrals buying from you, you can also offer them a discount on their next purchase.

Source: Really Good Emails

6. Maximize Your E-Commerce Transactional Emails

Transactional emails are opened eight times more than non-transactional emails because transactional emails are sent to the customer as a result of an action they’ve taken. Customers are much more inclined to open transactional emails because the content is relevant to them.

Source: Really Good Emails

Take advantage of the high level of engagement with your transactional emails by putting more information on them. On purchase confirmation emails, you can include recommendations for similar or complementary products. If the customer purchased running shoes, include recommendations for athletic socks on the email.

Pro Tip: Keep your Store Products in Sync with Email Marketing App

It gets really simple to craft an email with recommendations if your store products are in sync with your email marketing platform. That’ll help you simply drag & drop store products into your email based on customer past purchase history.

7. Email Your Customer When an Item is Back in Stock

Don’t let an item that’s out of stock signal the end of your engagement with a customer. Instead of removing these items from your site, provide customers with an option to be notified by email once the item is back in stock.

Doing this allows you to achieve two things:

1) You have the possibility to make a quick sale once they know that the item is back in stock

2) You can increase traffic to your site by including opt-ins for newsletters and promotions on your notification email.

Source: Really Good Emails

8. Design your emails to be mobile-friendly

Approximately 59% of all email opens occur on a mobile device, so it’s highly likely that your customers read your emails on their mobile devices. Make it easier for them and avoid the possibility of your emails just getting deleted by designing mobile-friendly emails.

The key here is to use a responsive design so that your email displays correctly on a wide variety of mobile devices. If you are not well-versed in web development, you can use mobile-responsive email templates.

9. Take Advantage of Email Marketing Automation

There’s no other way around it. In the last few years, marketing automation trends have shown that businesses automation simplifies the ordeal of this continuously evolving digital world.

So now, you need to automate your email marketing otherwise, you’ll be spending most of your day just sending emails to your subscribers instead of focusing on growing your business.

Email marketing automation enables you to not only send thousands of messages in an instant but also send these messages at the perfect time. As previously mentioned, one aspect of email marketing you can automate is the sending of welcome emails—but that’s not all. E-Commerce Email Automation has more than just emails.

Here are Other Tasks That You can Automate:

1. Sending abandoned cart emails to customers who didn’t complete the checkout process. Note: We’ve also written the best practices to reduce shopping cart abandonment which you can implement to win back these customers.

2. Triggering purchase confirmations with personalized content. Further, you can also generate an invoice automatically via your bookkeeping software, for every new sale. This will be made easy for you if all your payments, eCommerce & marketing apps are in sync with each other. Automate.io makes sure all your apps are in sync. Few examples:

3. Sending confirmations that a customer’s order is already in transit.

4. Reactivation of customers who have not logged on to your website or made a purchase from you for a certain amount of time (three months, 6 months, etc.).

So even before you start this drip of reactivation, you need to make sure your customer data is synced with your email marketing platform. This way, it gets easy for you to identify non-active users and trigger emails only for them. It’s easy with Automate.io to sync your e-commerce platform data with your email marketing app. Below are a few examples:

Sync Shopify & CampaignMonitor from here.

10. Integrate Social Media into Your Email Marketing

Boost engagement with your subscribers and potentially grow your email list at the same time by combining your social media and email marketing strategies.

Encourage your subscribers to share your content by placing social media sharing buttons on your messages such as promotional emails about new products.

The best practice is to put sufficiently sized buttons on either the header or the footer of the email. This way, the buttons are still highly visible but don’t take away from the main message of the email.

Wrap up:

Time has proven again and again how significant the ROI is for email marketing. So, if you want to increase your revenues, explore a few of these e-commerce email marketing best practices and reap their benefits. The great thing about it is these tips are not rules, so you are absolutely free to mix and match to see which ones are right for your business.