
Ecommerce email marketing is an incredible way for marketers to reach customers with relevant, personalized messages at the right time. Research has shown that it delivers a solid ROI of about 3900%.
But even after crafting email campaigns, results often fall short of expectations. Conversion rates remain low and cart abandonment looms. This scenario is a nightmare for many e-commerce marketers.
If you're wondering how to transform abandoned carts into thriving sales and boost elusive conversion rates, you're in the right place. This comprehensive guide will help turn those challenging pain points into opportunities.
We'll explore strategies, tactics, and tools to breathe new life into your email campaigns and drive sales skyward.
Let’s dive in.
Before we get right into it, here’s a short selection of 8 easy-to-edit email form templates you can easily customize and publish with Visme. View more templates below:
*Disclaimer: The comparisons and competitor ratings presented in this article are based on features available as of October 16, 2023. We conduct thorough research and draw on both first-hand experience and reputable sources to provide reliable insights. However, as tools and technologies evolve, we recommend readers verify details and consider additional research to ensure the information meets their specific needs.
Ecommerce email marketing is a digital marketing strategy used by online retailers and businesses to promote or sell products and services online. It involves sending targeted emails to potential and existing customers to drive sales, build customer relationships and increase brand loyalty. These emails include newsletters, welcome, abandoned cart, promotional, transactional, retention emails and more.
There are many different ways you can communicate with ecommerce customers in several ways. But email enables you to communicate in a personalized way that builds trust.
These are other key reasons why email marketing is a staple for ecommerce marketing:
Sending emails with product recommendations, special offers and reminders to existing customers nudges recipients to make purchases more often. According to Statista, email marketing revenue is estimated to reach 11 billion by the end of 2023.
Email marketing is a cost-effective digital marketing strategy. In ecommerce marketing, automated emails are triggered by customer behavior. You don't need to pay for printing, postage, ad space and other associated costs.
According to Hubspot research, segmentation and message personalization are two of the most effective strategies in email marketing. Personalizing emails is an ideal way to grab customers’ attention with what matters most to them.
By segmenting subscribers and delivering personalized messages, you can get to know your customers better. This creates a bond between you and your customers and drives repeat purchases and brand loyalty.
As long as your emails are branded and follow a tone and voice brand guideline, they will do a great job building brand awareness for your company. Be consistent with your emails and people will start to notice and recognize you every time.
Email marketing in ecommerce requires sending out many types of emails and communications to your customers.
The two main categories of emails in ecommerce are transactional emails and marketing emails.
Here are some of the types of emails, along with a real-life example for each.
Transactional emails are personal and sent to individual users with information or data that pertains to their activity on your platform. This example is a password reset email. Other examples include identity validations and account alerts.
These are emails that are sent to new subscribers as a warm welcome and introduction to the brand.
An order confirmation email is a transactional email sent automatically when a customer orders a product or service on your site.
These types of emails aren’t typically very creative, but you have the opportunity to inject your brand essence into the content as a way to let new customers get to know you.
This example is from Untamed Street, an online shoe store. They use an attractive font as the greeting with a center-aligned text to welcome you.
A shipping email is another transactional email sent out when an order has been shipped and is on its way to the customer.
This example email is simple and concise, with just enough information to make the customer feel secure that they will receive their shipment as promised.
A promotional email isn’t a transactional email because it’s sent out to segments of your email list or, occasionally, your entire list. Promotional emails are the perfect opportunity to get creative and use high-quality images of your products, plus any other photos that make your brand stand out.
This example is from an adventure apparel brand that’s promoting its latest collection available on its website.
In a retention email, the purpose is to keep customers interested in your brand by sharing news, information and any other content they might be interested in. These emails remind customers that they’ve bought from you before and might need your product or service again.
Retention emails can be newsletters, news update emails, blog posts, stories or testimonials from loyal customers. The idea is to keep your brand top of mind when customers are checking their regular email inboxes.
A customer loyalty email revolves around a customer loyalty program, like a points collection system or tiered programs with goals and achievements.
In the customer loyalty emails, you can send notifications about points status, unlocked achievements and opportunities to use collected points to donate to charities. Use these types of emails to engage with your customers on a deeper level, making them feel special and like they’re playing a part in something worthwhile.
Share achievements and progress towards goals with data visualizations and widgets, all available inside the Visme editor. Use percentage gauges, charts and pie graphs to represent a customer’s tiered program performance visually.
On average, the ecommerce email open rate is around 15%, but abandoned cart emails average 40% open rates with a clickthrough of 28%.
Interestingly, the best-performing sector for this practice is the fashion industry.
The example below is from a store that sells clothing for women. I looked at some products, added some to the cart and left. I promptly got this message with a cross-selling section at the bottom.
Finally, we have the newsletter email. Ecommerce businesses like yours can take advantage of newsletters to share information about the brand or inspirational content that relates to your products.
Newsletters can take many forms: articles from your blog, related articles from other sources, news updates, or simply a greeting from the founder. Try different styles until you find the one that works best.
This newsletter example template is an excellent example of how you can use storytelling to share information about the products you sell.
Incorporating email marketing into your ecommerce business is already a significant step forward. Now, it’s time to take it further, improving ROI and generating more sales.
Here are six ecommerce email marketing tips to improve your efforts.
There’s no doubt that automation is a successful email marketing strategy for your ecommerce business. Not only does it save you time, but it’s also highly cost-effective.
According to Hubspot research, 87% of B2C marketers use automation in their strategies.
Automation is your best ally when it comes to ecommerce email marketing. They save time because you don’t have to send emails manually. They go out based on the triggers you set for them.
Automated emails include transactional emails and behavior-based communication. For example, if a customer clicks on a particular link in a transactional email, they receive a special offer or a discount coupon when they log into the store and have been looking around for a while. With behavior-based automation, you can send personalized emails more easily and connect with your customers at a deeper level.
All transactional emails should be automated from the start. Each transactional email contains information that only pertains to one customer. It’s not efficient to send these types of emails manually.
Here’s a list of the most common types of transactional emails you should be automating:
To make your transactional emails engaging and more efficient, use the Visme AI writer to craft copy that’s engaging and effective for every single email.
There are a couple of reasons why your emails need to be mobile-friendly or responsive.
Design your emails to look good and be legible on both desktop and mobile. Test it on different devices to ensure they’re showing up well.
Use high-quality images in your responsive email designs. If you sell physical products, invest in professional photography so your products look appealing. For services, use branded photography or stock photography that matches your brand.
Visme has over a million stock photos and videos available for you to use freely. They’re all high-quality and royalty-free with your subscription. Search by scene, by color, or by mood. If you don’t find what you’re looking for, create unique visuals with the AI Image generator by simply inputting a prompt that describes what you’re looking for.
Personalization is critical in email marketing.
Effective personalization can significantly boost engagement and conversion rates. To truly connect with your customers, tailor your email content and messaging to their preferences, behavior and demographics.
Address your recipients by name and offer recommendations based on their past interactions with your brand.
A/B testing is a fundamental practice in email marketing when you want to be effective in your messaging and communication.
Experiment with different elements in your emails, such as subject lines, copy, images and calls to action. By analyzing the results, you can determine what resonates most with your audience and continually optimize your campaigns for better performance.
Understanding your audience is critical to creating relevant and engaging email campaigns. Conduct thorough market research to identify your ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer persona.
Analyzing your customer's demographics, interests, pain points and preferences. This knowledge enables you to craft messages that resonate with your customers, build trust, and drive revenue for your ecommerce business.
Brainstorm, create and document your ICP with Visme. Use the whiteboard’s infinite canvas to collaborate with your team and start putting together an ICP or two. Then use one of the available templates to put it all together and finally turn it into a reusable slide to include in other projects like plans and proposals.
Here's a buyer persona template to get you started.
Your subject line is the first thing recipients see, determining whether they open your email. Focus on crafting compelling and concise subject lines that pique curiosity, address a pain point, or offer a personalized benefit.
A well-crafted subject line can significantly impact your email open rates.
Read this article to discover best practices for creating high-converting email subject lines.
Understanding your customer’s journey and sending relevant emails at various stages can improve engagement and retention. Create tailored content for onboarding, nurturing, and re-engaging customers to ensure a seamless and enjoyable experience with your brand
Collaborate with your team to create the perfect emails for every stage. Use a dedicated Visme workspace to design all the emails for a single journey and invite team members to help review and proof the finished designs. You can also collaborate with your team to create detailed customer journey maps to help guide your lifecycle journeys.
Map out the different ways a customer can cycle through the customer journey and define what emails are sent when and with what information. Visme has plenty of templates to help but you can also build journeys from scratch using the diagramming tool.
While email campaigns are crucial for engaging your audience, you must first capture them in your email list. That’s where lead magnets come into the picture. In ecommerce, a lead magnet can be a coupon, a special offer or even a gift with the first purchase.
Lead magnets are an irresistible incentive offered to your audience in exchange for their email. You need those emails to run your ecommerce email marketing strategies.
Creating quality lead magnets with Visme is a piece of cake. There are many lead magnet templates to choose from, like ebooks, whitepapers, checklists, guides, courses, coupons, gift cards and many more.
A sign up form is a critical part of the puzzle in email marketing. It’s where all email strategies start. Create eye-catching and easy-to-use forms on your landing pages and website pages to capture interested prospects.
The more attractive and engaging your email sign up form, the better your chances of getting signups. Utilize Visme forms to create engaging and interactive email sign up forms in less time and with more engagement power.
Visme Forms is an intuitive online form builder that enables anyone to build high-converting online forms in minutes. We tested these forms on more than 700k users and found that interactive and engaging Visme Forms outperform on mobile and desktop.
Visme Forms generates 3x more engagement and signups and a 50% reduction in cost per acquisition. Read the full case study here.
The use of illustrative 3D characters and graphics makes Visme forms unique and eye-catching. They’ll have your prospects signing up much faster than with any other regular form.
Crafting good ecommerce email copywriting is an art that combines storytelling with persuasive messaging.
Whether it’s a product description, an enticing offer or a call to action, your copy should speak to the customer’s desires and needs.
Invest in your copy and make it compelling. If you need help creating copy that catches attention and incites action, use Visme’s AI Writer to craft copy that’s on brand and drives sales.
Use prompt engineering techniques like sharing your brand’s tone of voice and company values or already-written content and asking the AI to stick to that style but make it persuasive.
There are few things worse in email marketing than a terrible-looking email. If your email isn’t optimized for dark mode, then your email will look weird and wrong in many of your customers’ inboxes (the ones using dark mode).
To ensure your emails always look their best, test and optimize them for dark mode to provide a consistent and visually appealing experience for all recipients, regardless of their inbox preferences.
The best way to achieve dark mode readiness is to give your email a background color. In light mode, the default color is white, but in dark mode, it’s dark gray or black. If your email has a transparent background or no background at all, it won’t read well.
Optimize your email graphics with Visme’s ready-to-use icons, photos and videos. Search for exactly what you need using the / keyboard shortcut. Click on the forward slash to open the search dialog and input a keyword.
When working with email marketing, you need to maintain compliance and transparency. Regulations like GDPR and the CAN-SPAM Act require businesses to respect users’ privacy and provide clear information in their communications.
Ensure your email campaigns adhere to regulations by:
Being compliant builds trust with your audience and helps avoid legal issues. Stay informed about evolving regulations and make necessary updates to your email marketing practices. Compliance not only protects your customers but also your brand’s reputation.
We've already discussed the importance of automation. Let's dive into 6 key email marketing campaigns you should automate.
A welcome series is an ecommerce email marketing strategy that consists of a set of emails that a customer receives after they’ve given you their email. In a welcome series, you can introduce your brand, set expectations and nurture the relationship.
A typical welcome series includes the following emails:
Here's an automated email series you can adapt for your ecommerce business
Made with Visme Infographic Maker
An upselling campaign is an effective technique for increasing your average order value. Create personalized recommendations based on the customer’s past purchases and highlight the benefits of the higher-priced product.
Offer exclusive deals or bundles to make the up-sell even more enticing.
This example from LinkedIn is an upsell email that invites the customer to check out all the features available in LinkedIn Premium.
Once your customer has bought something on your site, it’s an excellent opportunity to share other related products they might like. Send a cross-sell email that focuses on products that complement the customer’s recent purchase.
Suggest product pairings or accessory suggestions by showcasing how the additional item enhances the original purchase. Use the customer’s behavior data to create tailored cross-sell recommendations.
The email example below is sent soon after an order is made but not yet shipped. Consumers have the opportunity to add something else to their box before it's shipped.
Automated birthday email campaigns are a fantastic opportunity to celebrate your customers and make them feel special.
Send personalized birthday greetings with exclusive discounts or freebies. Encourage customers to treat themselves to something they’ve had their eye on, turning their special day into a shopping occasion.
This example birthday email is from an online eyewear store. They offer special birthday discounts with a coupon code.
Automate back in stock notifications with data you gather from your customers. When a previously out-of-stock product becomes available again, notify the customers that were interested in it.
Create a sense of urgency by mentioning limited quantities and using compelling language to entice them to act quickly. Include a direct call to action to the product and remind them that they were interested in the product in the first place.
With replenishment reminders, you can help customers reorder products they regularly use. Send reminders based on their purchase frequency. Offer incentives like subscription options with discounts for automated orders of the same product. Keep these emails easy and engaging, making it easy for customers to reorder with a single click.
In this replenishment email, the message goes straight to the point without cutting any corners. The shop button is front and center, removing any guesswork.
Tracking the performance of your ecommerce email marketing campaigns is essential to understanding what’s working and where you can improve. With the right email provider (we’ll discuss some of the best options in the next section), tracking becomes more straightforward.
However, before you dive into tracking, you must decide on the overall metrics you’ll monitor. Here are some key considerations:
Once you’ve determined your overarching metrics, you can start measuring the following rates to assess your ecommerce email marketing performance.
This metric tells you how many recipients took the desired action after receiving your email. It could be purchasing, signing up for a webinar, or any other activity that aligns with your campaign goals.
The open rate reveals the percentage of recipients who opened your email. It’s a crucial metric as it indicates how engaging your subject lines and sender names are.
The click-through rate (CTR) measures the percentage of recipients who click on a link within your email. It’s a strong indicator of how effective your email content and calls to action are.
ROI helps you determine the financial success of your email campaigns. It considers both the revenue generated and the cost of your email marketing efforts.
Bounces occur when emails can’t be delivered to the recipient’s inbox. A high bounce rate can negatively impact your sender's reputation and deliverability.
This metric shows the percentage of recipients opting out of your email list. A rising unsubscribe rate might signal that your content or email frequency needs adjustment.
To track these rates effectively, use analytics tools provided by your email marketing platform. Regularly review your performance data, identify trends and use these insights to refine your ecommerce email marketing strategy. Continual monitoring and optimization are vital to achieving long-term success.
Aside from measuring the performance of your emails, you must also analyze the performance of your sign-up forms.
Analyze how many people sign up on your form and where they’re doing it from.
When you use Visme forms, you can track their performance with the advanced analytics feature integrated with the service. With the analytics dashboard, you can collect emails and download them as a CSV file to upload into your email marketing software.
There are numerous email marketing software options to choose from.
These are 5 of the best options available for ecommerce businesses of all sizes.
Now called Intuit Mailchimp, this email marketing platform has pre-built templates for all types of emails. You can easily create segments, recommend products and generate content.
Build automated email campaigns with behavior-based triggers and send personalized up-selling and cross-selling emails. Plus Mailchimp has an integration with Visme with which you can easily transfer assets and designs from one to the other.
This is the pricing for Mailchimp based on 500 contacts on the email marketing platform. As you have more contacts on your list, the monthly price goes up.
Aside from this pricing, there is also pricing for websites & commerce and for a transactional email service.
Mailerlite has advanced email marketing features to gather subscribers, strengthen customer relationships, automate workflows and monetize an audience. Create campaigns using specialized editors like drag and drop, rich text, custom HTML, an AI email generator and plenty of templates.
This tool also has several segmentation tools to send content based on interests, geography, behavior and timezone.
Pricing is separated into marketing and transactional.
Marketing pricing is calculated by subscribers and transactional pricing is by emails sent. This is the marketing pricing with 500 subscribers:
Constant Contact is a full scale email marketing platform and CRM where you can connect with audiences through email, SMS, and social. The email and ecommerce features help you capture leads, share updates and drive traffic while building a deep relationship with your audience via email marketing.
Solutions for business owners just starting, ones that are up and running and for the advanced marketer.
Constant Contact has a tiered pricing plan that combines contacts and emails sent.
Litmus is a comprehensive email marketing platform that helps you send optimized and personalized emails to maximize ROI through unique email brand experiences. This tool offers a testing and previewing feature where you can analyze performance before hitting send to the entire list.
Use the Litmus Email Guardian to scan your emails for errors and alert you when action is necessary.
Pricing plans at Litmus are on the higher end of the scale and scale as follows. To get more information, you need to sign up with them.
Do you still have questions about email marketing for ecommerce? These FAQs will help.
The best email marketing tool is the one that meets your company’s needs. When looking for an email marketing tool, have a list of the qualities you need it to have. Choose the one that checks off the most items on the list.
If you’re mainly looking for a tool to help you create content for your email strategy for ecommerce, then look no further than Visme. With Visme, you can create and design all the content to include in your emails, from visual graphics to videos and infographics. Download the design as an image file and upload to your email marketing software
The Rule of 7, or the marketing rule of seven, is a marketing tool professionals use to convince prospects to purchase something. The idea is that after seeing the product seven times, they’re primed to buy it.
Email marketing can be an integral part of a Rule of Seven strategy. Out of the seven times a product is placed in front of the consumer, an email is one of them. The other platforms are organic social media posts, targeted social media ads, TV and video advertisements, billboards and more.
Lifecycle automation is an email marketing strategy for ecommerce that involves crafting targeted email campaigns that align with the customer’s journey. Each stage of the journey needs a unique messaging style, from first purchase all the way to loyal, regular purchases.
The idea is that automation sends the right message and optimal time rather than sending emails at any moment. This technique is personalized to each customer and can significantly benefit sales and return on investment.
The best email marketing strategy for small businesses is the one that has the most return on investment (ROI). The most ROI-friendly email marketing strategy is the one that involves strong lead generation and automated email campaigns.
Here’s a simple rundown of an email marketing strategy for a small ecommerce business:
Email marketing is the gateway to potential customers’ hearts and wallets. Take advantage of the positive impact email marketing and automation can have on your business; reduce the manual work, send more personalized emails and convert more customers.
Embrace the strategies you’ve uncovered in this guide, adapt them to your unique brand voice and continue to build connections that drive sales.
Now, regardless of which strategies in email marketing for ecommerce you use, you’ll always need a signup form to gather emails to add to your list. Look no further than Visme Forms, your friendly no-code builder that’ll get 3 times more conversions than a regular form. Visme’s patent-pending interactive experiences improve conversions by up to 207%.
Sign up for Visme forms today, and you’ll be on your way to even better email marketing results for your ecommerce store.
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