eCommerce Email Marketing Mistakes Brands Make

Want to know the biggest mistakes we’ve observed from working with over 100 eCommerce brands ranging from 6-figures in annual revenue up to $250million? Read on to find out the thoughts of our email marketing squad at Magnet Monster.

This week, I decided to quiz our staff in Slack on the number 1 mistake they’ve observed over the last 3 years.

Their responses were fascinating and eye-opening. Read them below and see if you can pick up the key thoughts.

What is the #1 mistake you’ve observed with Email Marketing for eCommerce brands in your time at Magnet Monster?

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Cristina Solis Costa - Director of CRM Strategy

This is a huge one I find on pretty much every client account: not having a clear focus on what are their primary goals and overloading the post-purchase customer journey after the first purchase.

Lots of brands adopt a very business-first approach where they think of what they want and need from the customer as opposed to what the customer needs at this point.

They know this is a time when the customer is very engaged and as a result, they try to get everything from them at once (repeat sales, subscription to loyalty program, migrated to social media, etc). They lack a strategic long-term view of how this will affect customer engagement moving forward and expedite churn.

This is a challenge to measure the priorities between brand and consumer here as yes, you can get additional sales from adding in discounts and strong sales incentives after the first sale. However, the only way to find incremental success is by conducting a holdout test of two different lifecycle journeys and measuring the impact on CLV and retention rate over time, which many struggle to balance.

‍Adam’s note: For more information on creating an epic post-purchase experience in Klaviyo, read this article

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Sidhartha Sekhar Sahoo - Email Engineer & Klaviyo Expert

“The biggest mistake I have recently observed is missing out on setting up a dedicated sending domain.

Previously, using a shared Klaviyo domain was fine. However, with the recent algorithm updates to inbox providers such as Gmail & Outlook, a lot of eCommerce brands have suffered which is why the move to a dedicated domain has become so important.

Since implementing this for all our clients, we’ve seen a marked improvement in inbox placement across the board. And if your emails aren’t opened, then improving all other metrics is a poisoned chalice.”

DON'T MISS: 3 Email Marketing Mistakes & Red Flags When Working with Email Marketers

Andrew Langhorn - Co-founder & Chief Technical Officer

“Lack of holistic integration across the business as a whole and approaching email in isolation, siloed from other marketing activities can often be an approach taken by many brands. Even down to the brand identity across email compared to other channels (unless it's on purpose), it can be haphazard.”

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Paul Labuschagne - Email & SMS Marketing Strategist

“How disconnected other marketing is from email marketing, and the lack of using insights from organic social media reach to improve email strategy. Social channels provide invaluable data that can be used to drive the content (and strategy) of brands' email marketing success but are often left fragmented and not integrated into their CRM strategy.”

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Rina Isanan - Head of Q/A & Best Practices

“Excessive use of discounts on emails can damage the credibility and profitability of many D2C brands. Emails are more than just sales and promotions. High-quality content should be a priority of every brand.”

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Wiehan Britz - Chief Operating Officer

“Expecting email and SMS to scale their revenue/profit while acquisition volumes are low and unchanged month over month.

The magical "increased email revenue share by 35%" is a mythical achievement. If you cut your ad spend by 50%, you'll instantly drive up your revenue share from email without lifting a finger.

In summary, no email metric or KPI runs in isolation. It's not a silver bullet channel to growth.”

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Abubakar Waheed - Head of Technical

“Not going through the whole customer journey yourself. This is crucially overlooked. Go through the whole journey once yourself and see the mistakes in your email marketing setup. It's the cheat code to growth.

We also see issues with brands not implementing global campaign suppression. When a customer is going through flows then we need them to go through the whole experience and then get the campaigns. Imagine you buy from a store for full price and the next day you get campaigns stating everything is on SALE; it's not an ideal experience and the customers is likely to be left with a bitter taste in their mouth.

I also see problems with companies blindly following best practices. What works for one store won’t necessarily work for yours. Get creative and experiment with your email marketing setup.”

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Hagai Bass - Email Strategist

“Many brands are not seeing the importance of building a sense of community around the brand. Happy customers are your best advocates of the brand. Be active on social media, and open a Facebook group where customers can share tips and help each other.

Maintain an updated high-quality blog section, and create content that matters to your audience.

You can leverage email and SMS as your best distribution channels to add value to subscribers on this channel and drive more traffic back to your website.”

DON'T MISS: 7 Worst email marketing habits that need to die

Concluding thoughts - Email is so much more than sales

Create a holistic customer journey that prioritises the customer getting a great experience, while looking beyond the channel solely through the context for driving repeat sales.

Yes, this is a critical part of email marketing and a powerful tool at your disposal, but don’t underestimate all the other objectives and focus areas you can leverage with a 360^o approach.

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