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5 Emails Every Ecommerce Seller Needs
By Rodney Laws | Ecommerce
Email marketing is the most powerful tool in your arsenal to get people back to your ecommerce store. But beyond the typical promotions and order detail emails that you’re used to seeing, here are five key emails that you need to send to improve your shopping experience and increase your ROI (return on investment) and CLV (customer lifetime value).
Your welcome email is the first email a subscriber gets after they’ve confirmed their subscription to your list. It’s an easy one to overlook, especially if you’re sending regular emails to your list.
Your welcome email is the first chance to establish your brand and start building a relationship with your customers. Even in ecommerce, people want to buy from companies that they know, like, and trust.
A welcome email is also a great time to delight your customers. If coupons or discounts are part of your strategy, give them a coupon here to use on their next purchase.
Remember, many subscribers will join your email list when they make their first purchase, so your welcome email will arrive later. To avoid the inevitable “can you apply this coupon to my existing purchase?” customer service inquiries, make it valid on any upcoming purchase in the next 30 days.
As an added bonus, you can send a follow-up reminder for people to use the coupon code before it expires.
Abandoned cart emails are pretty routine in ecommerce marketing. Most ecommerce email marketing systems offer an out of the box abandoned cart email.
Take some time to truly customize these emails to align with your brand. If possible, show the products they have in their cart in the email.
You can also use this opportunity to show related products that other customers have purchased, either with or instead of what they’ve considered.
According to Barillaince, the average conversion rate for shopping cart abandonment emails was 18.64%. Take a quick look at your current abandonment rate — and consider what it would mean to your bottom line to get 15-20% of that revenue back into your bottom line.
Abandoned carts emails are also an opportunity to increase the size of your shopping cart by suggesting related or alternative options to what’s in their cart.
Consumer proof is one of the strongest tools in your toolbox when selling online since customers are often unable to properly engage with your products until after they’ve said yes.
Reviews are powerful tools to increase sales and provide you with virtually unlimited marketing content to take off the site as well. According to Neilsen’s research, 73% of online respondents use reviews to make purchase decisions.
Send a review request email 1-2 weeks after the product was received and ask for the customers to provide you with feedback. Give the option to reply directly to the email if something wasn’t right and a link to write a review for the product they purchased if they loved it.
While they’re there and thinking about how great their last order was, they may just add something new to their cart!
Almost anything you sell online can have another accessory that goes with it. From adding on an AirPod case that matches their new iPhone case to the perfect socks to go with their upgraded running shoes. Finding and recommending the products that your customer needs next is a sure-fire way to convert a one-time customer into a lifetime customer.
Luckily, with today’s sophisticated dynamic email features, you don’t have to build all of these emails manually. With an ecommerce focused email marketing system, you can use all the work you’ve put into cross-merchandising inside your shop, along with the browsing data collected, to dynamically build and send these emails on a regular basis.
Last but not least are re-engagement emails. Also called win-back emails, these emails can get people opening your content and shopping again — or keep your email list clean. As many people as there are out there talking about how to bulk up your list numbers, having a clean email list is even more important. Re-engagement emails should be sent after customers haven’t opened or clicked on emails after three to six months.
The series is simple —- you simply ask them if they want to continue getting the emails. If so, they click through. If not, you will remove them automatically. Have your click-through go to a top-rated or new product category on your shop to encourage them to start browsing as well.
Removing unengaged subscribers from your list means that you’ll spend less each month on your email marketing system plus get better results from every email you send.
While these five types of emails are important to support your ecommerce business, don’t stop there! Continue to send traditional email campaigns with special offers like promotions, new product announcements, and shipping updates.
Also, look at your own experiences to identify new opportunities to encourage engagement with your email list. What opportunities have you missed because you simply didn’t know? What information would have helped you make the most of a previous purchase?
Education is a powerful tool that you can use throughout your email marketing campaigns to increase customer loyalty and engagement.
About Brandi Johnson: Brandi Johnson is a marketing consultant and coach with over 15 years of online marketing experience, including content marketing and email marketing. She helps overwhelmed business owners create and implement marketing strategies that support their business goals with less time. You can find her blogging over at heybrandi.com. Her book, Minimum Viable Marketing: Find the Right Pieces to Build Your Marketing Strategy is available now
