We recently posted about social media optimization and some best practices to utilize. Social media is a wonderful platform to grow your brand reach and educate your audience about who you are. But what do you do with them once your new customers are in the door? Here’s where email marketing steps in. Emails are one of the best channels to sell and smart ecommerce brands are always looking for new ways to grow revenue.
We’re giving you seven email ideas your ecommerce business should be sending today.
While social media may not need third party platforms to successfully launch and maintain, email is a slightly different story. We recommend investing in an email platform to get the most out of your email channel.
For some email platform inspiration, check out our post on Shopify apps we recommend for your store.
How Often Should You Send Emails?
While there’s not a one-size-fits all answer, there are some best practices we can tap into.
Let’s dive into the five emails you can start sending today!
Welcome Emails
A welcome email is just what it sounds like. Create an automatic email to send when a customer or potential customer signs up to receive emails from you. This welcome email doesn't have to be long and it doesn’t have to be an email series.
Use this as a way to welcome your new audience members and reinforce your brand! Include a few key points about your business, like your value prop. You can also include information about what customers can expect from you now that they’ve given you their email address.
Here’s an example of a welcome email we like from Food 52.
Food 52 reinforces what their brand is about and lets the audience know what to expect from them when it comes to emails.
Abandoned Cart Emails
Abandoned cart emails are one of the best ways to use your email list. On average, more than 70% of shoppers will abandon their shopping carts on your ecommerce site. Don’t take this statistic too personally for your store. The majority of these abandoned carts are due to ecommerce shopping behavior where the customer is just not ready to purchase.
Utilize abandoned cart emails as a way to remind your customers what they left in their shopping carts.
This example from ThredUp shows a simple abandoned cart email you can set up for your store.
Up-Sell and Cross-Sell Emails
This is a great informational shopping email to send to your existing customers. Let your customers know about the other products you offer by highlighting them in an email. Based on your customers’ previous purchases, send them an email featuring items that are frequently bought together or that would complement the item they have already purchased.
This is a great way to increase sales and increase your average order value down the road.
Newsletters
Newsletters are slightly different from the automatic emails we’ve covered above. Your email newsletter can be a mix of informational blog posts or content to promotions and sales emails.
If you have great content to highlight, such as an informational blog post, videos, photos, or curated industry-specific resources, consider creating a weekly newsletter featuring this content.
Promotional Emails
Launching a new product? Looking to boost sales for a specific product in your store? Have a flash sale going on? That’s where promotional emails come into play.
Promotional emails can be part of your overall email newsletter strategy, especially if you break up your content newsletter with occasional sales and product-specific emails.
Re-Engagement Emails
The goal of a re-engagement email is to get your audience to interact with your emails after a long period of inactivity. Why focus on re-engaging an inactive customer instead of acquiring more? Turning an inactive user into a customer is 5 times cheaper than acquiring a new customer.
Instead of an individual email, try a series of emails for your re-engagement campaign. Your inactive users will want an incentive to stick around or to finally become a customer. Offer discounts and special sales to sweeten the deal. If this fails, keep it simple and remind your users of your value as a brand. Reinforce your value props and your product -- you’ll be winning over these customers in no time.
List-Cleaning Emails
If the re-engagement emails don’t work, it may be time to let go of a few customers who haven’t opened an email from you in a few months. List cleaning emails are a great way to improve your email deliverability, open and click rates, and keep your lists targeted.
If you have a group of customers who haven’t engaged with your emails in months, give them a way to unsubscribe to your emails after trying the re-engagement process.
How to Get Started
We recommend choosing the lowest hanging fruit to start. Many of these automatic emails depend on your email marketing platform. If you’re on Shopify or a similar ecommerce platform, starting your abandoned cart email may be faster and easier than starting a welcome email.
Regardless of which email you’re able to start implementing this week, we recommend making sure your email has a clear call to action button that will draw your customers and audience to take action through your emails.