eCommerce Email Marketing Guide

Although saying you have email marketing as a digital marketing channel is all well and good, if you don't regularly partake in trying to attract, engage, and delight more customers each time, you will stay stagnant.

Trying to improve using new tricks of the trade along with some core fundamentals along the way will give you everything you need to streamline your email marketing strategy.

In this guide, we’re going to unravel a complete eCommerce email marketing guide so you’re no longer stuck in the same position and can move forward with your campaigns and flows. Carry on reading to learn the ins and outs!

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Core Concepts For an Effective eCommerce Email Marketing Plan

By failing to prepare, you’re preparing to fail, and this quote couldn’t be any truer in your journey to a successful email marketing strategy. Understanding your target audience and what makes them tick is like leaving money on the table, so obtaining an efficient plan before you blindly send emails out to the right people is critical for your company.

Setting out a plan beforehand, in contrast, will equip you with the knowledge you need to perform your eCommerce email-based strategy in the best way possible. Let’s take a look at some of the core concepts for an effective plan:

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Your Company’s Goals

If you don’t know what you want to achieve along the way, your email marketing becomes an aimless mess of designs and copy. Setting out what you want to achieve from the very beginning will give you clear direction and an achievement to aim for. Some examples of goals that you could set for your email marketing campaigns could be:

Improve email deliverability by X amount to ensure that emails are reaching your email recipients' inboxes within X timeframe
Reduce email unsubscribe rate by X percentage points by improving email content and personalisation in the next X months
Increase email open rates by X percentage points within the next X months
Increase engagement by getting X number of social media shares from a single email campaign within the next X weeks.

These goals should give you an indicator of how you should plan and set out your company goals when looking to enhance email marketing performance. You may have different goals than the ones we have demonstrated, and that is fine, but using this format will be effective.

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Choose a Trusted Email Marketing Software

As you look to send your campaigns out to the masses, if everything looks half-hearted and the software you choose is difficult to use, you’re going to have an extremely challenging time succeeding.

Instead, choosing a highly-rated email marketing app will assist you with automation and other powerful tools that can skyrocket your revenue.

ALSO READ: Klaviyo Email Marketing Course FREE - The Bible for eCommerce Brands

Focus on Growing Your Email List

Of course, within the next section we’ll give you some insightful practices, but as you begin email marketing campaigns and flows, growing your email list should be your main focus. Without people to send your emails to, boosted engagement, raised brand awareness, and increased revenue potential won’t be possible.

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The Best Practices For eCommerce Email Marketing Strategies

Now that you have a clear and defined plan of action, understanding how to attack this plan is key. Without the best practices for eCommerce email marketing strategies, you will be stuck testing pointless strategies, and we don’t want that to happen. Here are some eCommerce email marketing strategies you can use for your company’s backend:

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1: Capturing Emails For Your Business

As we concluded before, capturing email addresses is ultimately the only way you’re going to drive revenue using email marketing, so here are a few of our finest tips to capture your target audience:

Use a Popup: When a visitor clicks on your website or landing page, you can offer them an exclusive discount if they use the popup
Spin-the-wheel prizes: Rather than being professional all the time, customers love games to win free prizes and that is how you can capture their email address using a spin-the-wheel competition
Free value on landing pages: Not all landing pages have to include paid products or services. Instead, offer them free value if they enter their email address

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2: Segment Your Audience

What we mean by this is dividing your customers or potential customers into different lifecycle stages. For example, if they’re interested in your products and keep viewing your website, then this can be a section of customers you can target with personalised emails.

On the other hand, if you don’t segment your list, there could be customers that you can’t lose, and using intrigue to keep them interested in your products or services is paramount for repeat business.

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3: Automation is a Non-Negotiable

Using email triggers for different sections on your website or landing pages is crucial to finishing the sale. Creating an email sequence that is relevant to the stage the customer is in will make them much more likely to purchase.

For example, if they’ve abandoned their cart, you can use a personalised abandoned cart email sequence to remind them about the products they have in their cart. However, the most popular sequence is the welcome series, so ensuring that you personalise the welcome email to each customer is vital to keeping them as long-term customers.

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4: Writing Engaging Subject Lines

The first thing that a potential customer or existing customer sees when you send out your email marketing campaign is the subject line, and if this doesn’t generate genuine interest with an eye-catching phrase, your click-through rate will suffer massively.

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5: Switch up Email Intent

Every time your customer opens an email, they don’t want to see that you’re selling the same product to them all the time. Ensure that you balance informational emails, promotional emails, and transactional emails so your audience doesn’t get bored with your overselling.

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6: Track and Optimise Your Campaigns Using Analytics

Whether you focus on bounce rate, engagement rate, conversion rate, etc., you must stay up-to-date with your performance. With this, you can find that certain sequences are working, and as you dissect why they are working, you could begin to use this successful technique within other emails.

Optimisation and tracking results will not only help you learn about your target market, but you will also learn more about your business intent and what you should do to impress them.

ALSO READ: 3 data plays that will change your email marketing strategy

In Conclusion

Curating the ultimate email marketing strategy will never be a finished article, as times are always changing, but we hope a quick insight into some of the core techniques will help you acquire more email subscribers. There are also tons of other ways to produce great results, and we dive deep into them in other blog posts.

If you want to learn more about email marketing and how you can increase your revenue with all our tried and tested strategies included, we have a limited-time email marketing course open to our readers at the moment, so if you’re interested in just honing your skills or increasing revenue for your business, click here to find out more information!

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