E-commerce Email Marketing: Best Practices

Email marketing is one of the most senior eCommerce business marketing methods that has been taken up upon by companies since digital marketing first became a potential revenue stream for businesses around the globe.

This is widely regarded as eCommerce email marketing and although it sometimes gains a bad reputation due to spam emails that are often sent out to the masses - if done correctly, this can be one of your biggest cash flow streams.

Building a successful online business nowadays requires that you take email marketing into consideration - as the backend return of retaining customers is second-to-none. Thus, in this blog, we’ll be walking through the best practices for eCommerce email marketing to enhance your backend results even further!

Listing eCommerce Email Marketing Best Practices

Having worked with over 150 DTC brands over the years, we at Magnet Monster, have learned one thing; eCommerce email marketing campaigns aren’t as easy as some people think it is. Creating a flashy design with no thought and planning will damage your open rate, engagement rate and overall conversion rate.

A well-thought-out plan of execution and following the below practices will certainly put you on your way to creating killer campaigns and flows that your potential customers/existing customers simply can’t say no to.

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1 - Plan Your Email Marketing Success

A goal without a plan is just a wish. Jotting down every small goal that you want to achieve with email marketing is similar to anything in your life. If you don’t act on your words, you will not receive what you’re trying to achieve.

eCommerce email marketing is no different and plotting your stages of success will give you purpose and a vision to aim for. Clear, concise and straightforward steps to follow will allow you to act on your email marketing strategy every day - leading to a much higher chance of succeeding.

Being specific with what you want to do, being realistic with the goals so you don’t give up too quickly and setting a deadline for the goal to be achieved will give you the blueprint of finishing your said goals on time - with maximum efficiency, creativity and success rate.

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2 - Finding an Automated Email Marketing Software

Although hard work is required to see success with email marketing… if you can find a great email marketing automation software that can conduct, analyse and optimise your work for the better - why wouldn’t you do it?

Without using automated email marketing tools, you won’t be able to scale your business to the heights you want to reach. Writing and sending emails, creating every email template, etc is not sustainable long-term - thus finding a platform you can trust with your eCommerce email marketing is essential.

We would always recommend you use the Klaviyo email marketing channel for your automated needs!

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3 - Keeping a Clean Email List

Businesses often get impatient with their email lists and begin to purchase fake email lists in order to reap the benefits of a bigger email list. However, if you keep a clean email list filled with organic, loyal customers, you will find that over time that your customers will be much easier to reach.

Whilst Klaviyo will typically cover this basis so you don’t have to worry about the majority of the difficulties - you must ensure that your audience is engaged and creating an organic list with your target audience is the only way to do this.

Image sourced from MagnetMonster, 2023

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4 - Ensuring Your Automation Covers the Customer Journey

If you don’t have every stage of the customer purchase funnel set up with emails ready to send out to your target audience - you will lose a hefty amount of customers at this time. For optimal results, creating an automation strategy that holistically covers the pre-purchase, post-purchase and even during-purchase will retain the most significant array of customers.

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5 - Relevant Email Delivery

This coincides with the previous point slightly but if you’re sending a potential customer who has never bought from you a welcome series email - you will often find yourself in the spam folder. Not only will this damage your brand identity, but poor email deliverability will lower your chances of being seen by your target audience

Keeping to the customer journey and segmenting your email list into different sections will allow you to send the correct email to the right customer… at the right time - only making for a better customer experience and improving your click-through rate sizably. This has become standard practice at Magnet Monster.

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6 - Welcome Series/ Abandoned Cart Sequences

These are two of the most common types of emails that generate heaps of revenue for businesses when they write and design their emails correctly. Giving your customers a nice warm welcome and letting them know about your brand mission allows them to decide their future with you.

As for the abandoned cart email, this is to either remind the customer about the purchase they were going to make… or if the customer was unsure about spending a sum of money. Therefore, if you can either remind or persuade the customer to finish their purchase, this can make a massive difference in your email marketing income.

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7 - Discounts

Don’t hand out discounts all the time, but if it is either a special occasion inside or outside of your business, timing this correctly can reap massive rewards. Discounts with a time limit create urgency and a fear of missing out (FOMO). The boost in sales that you will see is mind-blowing when you get it right.

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8 - Optimising Your Emails

Businesses often believe that the first email that they send out to their audience is going to outperform all of their competitors. This is just not the case. Other businesses tend to have good email marketing strategies, so to compete with that you must analyse where you’re going right and wrong and re-strategise around the strengths and weaknesses you’re seeing.

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9 - Encourage Reviews

You may think one review won’t change the performance of your website but you’re highly mistaken. Customers look for companies they can trust and if they see a company with 5-star reviews across the board, they’re much more likely to purchase with you - rather than another company with a lack of authority and social proof.

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