As your business grows, keeping a personal touch with your clients manually becomes a costly and difficult affair. This is especially true for online stores as all their interactions with their customer base are completely virtual, making it challenging to build personal relationships that drive customer loyalty. Emails help maintain a close relationship and run promotional campaigns without costing you an arm and a leg. Automated email marketing is considered the best way to source repeat business, the bread and butter for ecommerce brands. Today, I will share an overview of using email automation in ecommerce in this mini-guide based on my email agency experience. Let’s get started.
Email List And Automation Software: The Prerequisites
For any ecommerce company, their customer base must keep growing consistently, and so should their mailing list. This requires you to encash every opportunity: include your website users, referrals, social media engagement, blogs, promotional offers, and freebies in your list building strategy.
The next part is selecting the right email automation software. You need to make sure that ESP meets all the parameters required, like being capable of handling a growing list, smoothly running promotional emails, managing transactional messages, and supporting third-party integrations. Mailchimp currently has a market share of 62.23%. This can be attributed to the large number of Mailchimp email templates available for running promotional emails, but SendinBlue is considered the best option for sending transactional messages. Weigh the pros and cons and decide which one meets all the criteria for your ecommerce business.
Key To Ecommerce Email Marketing Success: Automation
Emails marketing gives you innumerable opportunities to increase touchpoints with your customers or leads who signed up to your mailing list. This includes order confirmation, shipment tracking, product feedback, upselling, cross-selling, various types of transactional emails, and personal event-based messages. This list also includes festivities and Holidays like Christmas, summer holidays, Father’s Day, and Mother’s Day for getting in touch with your subscribers.
Thus, even if you are a small webstore that they might not frequently be visiting, you can still sneak into their inboxes which are checked 15 times a day. Sending out such a large volume of emails to an entire mailing list isn’t possible without email marketing automation even for an email marketing company like ours. It is the key to orchestrating all of these interactions perfectly at a very nominal cost.
5 Automaton Based Email Campaigns That You Simply Cannot Miss
As we saw above, all these interactions have particular purposes, and users have different expectations for various types of emails. For instance, a transactional email like order confirmation is expected to be received immediately, while users expect to receive promotional emails weekly or fortnightly. Thus, creating the right automation workflow is crucial to your ecommerce email marketing success. Let’s see the top five automation based email marketing campaigns that we run at our email marketing company and they will help your ecommerce brand grow as well:
#1 Welcome/Onboarding
Welcome mail is the first interaction initiated by your side where you introduce yourself and onboard your subscribers. They generate 320% more revenue than promotional emails, thus allowing you to make a sale apart from projecting your brand. Also, your subscribers eagerly wait to receive the welcome email since it contains promised gifts/freebies. Have a look at this welcome mail example:
#2 Upsell/Downsell/Cross-Sell
Your customers’ requirements keep evolving with time, and your email marketing automation workflows need to keep track of the changes and recalibrate for staying relevant and generating optimal revenue. You should use automated Upsell/Downsell/Cross-sell campaigns as per the following conditions:
- Regular, repeated purchases = Upsell
- Paused purchase, Cart abandonment = Downsell
- New products added to portfolio = Cross-Sell
Below is one of the good professional email examples for upselling from Dollar Shave Club:
#3 Event/Sales Season-Based
Indeed it is necessary to send promotional emails, but your customer would appreciate receiving your email on their birthday and anniversary and during the sales seasons. While you will make a sale on this occasion, it is also noteworthy that subscribers will feel valued as you wish them on personal occasions and festivities. Based on the experiences at our email marketing agency, I recommend fetching data on personal events well in advance to plan your automated campaigns accordingly. Below is an example from Charles Simon:
#4 Cart Abandonment
Cart abandonment is the biggest challenge faced by the ecommerce industry. According to a study by Forrester research, it causes a loss of around 18 billion every year. Cart abandonment occurs when a visitor goes through products, finds their desired item, adds it to their cart to make a purchase but leaves for some reasons. An automated cart abandonment email reminds them of the product and enables them to complete the purchase. They form a major chunk of the workload at our email marketing agency since cart abandonment emails are the most effective way to make up for these lost leads. One such example is below:
#5 Win Back
No matter how much you invest in the relationship with your customer or how engaged they are, time will come when the spark will die down and finally, they stop buying from you. It becomes necessary for a marketer to reach out to them and convince them to resume buying in such a situation. Automated win-back email series prove to be extremely useful here. Generally, cascading discount offers are sent to make a win-win game. Have a glance at one of my favorite professional email examples below:
Wrap Up
Email marketing generates an ROI of 4400% but how much you can get out of your efforts largely depends on your vision and the strategy you employ. Clear expectations and objectives are necessary to derive maximum benefit from email marketing automation for your organization. I hope this article adds to your understanding of the role of email automation for ecommerce brands.