Table of Content
1: Adopt Product-Led Growth (PLG) model
2: Power email campaigns with actionable ecommerce insights
3: Increase email relevancy
4: Maintain cross-channel identity
5: Personalize at every stage of customer lifecycle
6: Present ecommerce experience at all time
7: The more data, the better the results
Even though it is one of the oldest forms of ecommerce marketing, ecommerce email marketing still delivers the highest ROI for online store owners that adopt it correctly:
Above all, email is an owned media marketing channel where you have control over your list and the content you share. You don’t depend on third-party algorithms to reach your audience, as is the case with organic search, social media, or paid ads.
Unlike Google ads that generate $2 for every $1 spent, companies see an average return of $36 for every dollar spent on email marketing, according to Statista.
The entire economy is experiencing a phase shift driven by AI and the widespread availability of data. These rapid changes are reshaping ecommerce email marketing:
These new capabilities are leading to a better customer experience, more engagement, and ultimately, increased sales.
To fully capitalize on these advancements, email marketers must modernize their email marketing setups.
Conventional ecommerce marketing strategies are not aging well forcing email marketers to rapidly retool their setup and skillset.
This blog post introduces a new generation of email marketing strategies, providing a solid foundation for sustainable and profitable revenue growth.
The existing ecommerce email marketing model can be classified as marketing-led, where the focus is on list segmentation and the creation of promotional content.
Marketing-led approach is useful, but it represents only one side of the product-market fit equation.
This is where the Product-Led Growth (PLG) model comes in, where product usage data drives success at every stage of the customer life cycle.
PLG was introduced as a go-to-market strategy that has revolutionized the software industry and is now doing the same for ecommerce businesses.
Implementing a product-led growth (PLG) strategy brings multiple advantages:
Product-led growth allows you to create a flywheel that positively impacts key metrics across all areas of your organization.
While there isn’t a single prescribed path to achieve PLG, we’ve compiled a set of principles to guide online brands in navigating this transformation:
Campaign → Product Performance: When formulating a campaign strategy, the use of open or click rate metrics should be replaced with product performance metrics, like the view-to-revenue rate.
Design → Product Discovery: Ensuring that your emails reflect your brand image is important, but more valuable is highlighting landing pages and products that will reduce the number of clicks shoppers need to discover products of interest.
Conversion → Customer Behavior: Focusing on campaign conversion rates often leads to promoting a limited number of popular and discounted products, which can limit revenue growth. By using live customer behavior metrics, you can start promoting a broader range of products that your customers desire, reducing the need for discounts.
Audience → Product Relevance: List segmentation is useful, but presenting the right product to the right buyer is more effective.
You don’t need to adopt all principles into your PLG strategy. Instead, use as many as are applicable to your brand.
Marketers know that measuring and tracking email campaigns provides insight into their performance and indicates whether they are meeting their email marketing goals.
Moreover, this analysis reveals areas for improvement in their email marketing strategy.
Key metrics typically include:
For instance, many retailers see an average click-through rate of 1.95%, an average open rate of 31.64%, and an average bounce rate of 3.76%.
While email metrics are valuable,they fall short of offering actionable insights into how shoppers interact with promoted products in the email or on the online store.
Unfortunately, the more actionable insights reside on the ecommerce side of the business, deeply hidden in website analytics.
The disconnect in organization and the raw nature of web analytics data pose too big an obstacle for email marketers to overcome on their own.
That’s why a new breed of email analytics tools, like Obviyo’s free Ecommerce Email Score, is so necessary and valuable.
Designed for non-analysts, this app instantly generates a score based on multiple key performance indicators:
The score is bolstered by a more detailed analysis of individual email campaigns, using the same key performance indicators (KPIs).
Get your FREE Ecommerce Email Score!
Unlock the hidden revenue potential of your email marketing:
Request to join the Beta Program.
People don’t know what they want until you show it to them,’ Steve Jobs once said.
Likely he was not referring to the email I recently received announcing a clearance sale on mullet putters. Yet, in an instant, I knew there was nothing I wanted—and, frankly, deserved—as much as a new mullet putter.
This is the magic—or perhaps the audacity—of ecommerce email marketing.
However, this magic only works if the emails highlight products that genuinely appeal to the recipient.
The big challenge is how to tap into what consumers want even before they know they want it.
The time-honored method of better connecting with buyers is through segmentation.
While there are a near-infinite number of segments you can create based on a customer’s existing behavior, Shopify identifies five essential buckets marketers can start with first when outlining the customer lifecycle:
Segment 1: New subscribers: The goal with brand new subscribers is to build trust, introduce products, and get them to make their first purchase.
Segment 2: One-time buyers: Due to high customer acquisition costs, it’s only on repeat purchases that online brands generate profits. Unfortunately, 80% to 90% of a typical brand’s shoppers are single-purchase, marginally profitable customers. One way to make more money is a campaign that delivers an offer on a product related to the product that was just purchased.
Segment 3: VIPs: Your “whales” are those customers who make large or consistent purchases from you. These customers are worth a lot and, better yet, they rarely require discounts to come back. To keep engaging these customers, brands should run targeted email campaigns that court them and keep them buying.
Segment 4: Defecting customers – While these folks might have been enthusiastic customers at one point, for one reason or another, they aren’t now. When a customer is slipping away, to potentially never purchase again, offering discounts to win them back can make financial sense.
Segment 5: Cart abandoners – Once a cart abandonment campaign is in place, test a series of emails that goes out over two weeks. Start with gentle reminders first and, if they don’t work, move on to greater incentives, like discounts. You’ll find that many of your recovered carts return before the discounts are even required.
One of the most challenging aspects of every email campaign is predicting which products or collections will resonate most with the target audience.
Email marketers often play it safe by promoting best-selling or most popular products to minimize risk.
This doesn’t help with brand development nor sustainable revenue growth.
The latest generation of web analytics applications, such as Obviyo’s Ecommerce Pulse, addresses this challenge by leveraging AI and metrics on online store product performance.
It automates the data analysis process, identifying improvement opportunities and recommending actionable steps. Additionally, it provides a list of products generated by AI algorithms that optimize multiple performance metrics.
The modern shopper uses multiple devices and visits various online stores before finalizing a purchase, which fragments the buyer’s journey and results in high abandonment rates at each step.
Ironically, email marketing further fragments an already fragmented buying journey.
Here’s how: After capturing a contact’s email and securing their opt-in, the next step in email marketing is to direct that traffic back to the online store. However, during this process, the user’s identity often gets lost.
As a result, when an email recipient initiates a new online session, they are treated as an unknown visitor and met with a generic store experience. This disconnect can lead to increased store abandonment and, ultimately, higher list churn.
To address this challenge, advanced solutions like Email Genie ensure the user’s identity signal is maintained throughout the entire buyer journey.
It’s human nature: email recipients are more likely to be influenced by messages specifically tailored to them, significantly increasing the likelihood of taking action.
In fact, personalized promotional emails have been shown to boost transaction rates and revenue by up to six times compared to non-personalized emails.
This is an emerging trend, known as personalization marketing, which represents the fastest-growing aspect of email marketing, fueled by the rapid adoption of AI algorithms and the increasing availability of actionable data.
Personalization in marketing typically hinges on three main pillars: context, demographics, and behavior:
NOTE: Amazon, which pioneered personalization in ecommerce, discovered that personalized recommendations derived from live visitor actions and context significantly outperform those based on visitor demographics and past activities. This insight led to the development of Amazon Personalize, a personalized product recommendation solution that powers Amazon’s marketplace. This technology is now accessible to online brands using Shopify through Obviyo’s Personalization app.
Here are the most commonly used types of personalized marketing:
Segmentation
Segmentation is a method used by marketers to divide their audience into smaller, more defined groups or segments.
The rationale is clear: if you present products that are more appealing to a specific segment of customers, their likelihood of making a purchase increases. To transcend the basic segments identified by Shopify, it’s crucial to delve into customer data and behaviors across multiple channels.
Determining the optimal way to segment is complex due to the broad array of data points to consider, such as demographics, past purchases, marketing channels, devices used, geographic location, product types, and pricing.
To address this challenge, email marketing companies like Klaviyo offer AI-powered solutions that help marketers more effectively segment their audience and, in turn, boost sales.
Personalized emails
Email personalization is a marketing strategy that involves customizing email content to the specific preferences, interests, and behaviors of individual recipients.
There is certainly no shortage of things you can personalize in customer emails:
Personalized product recommendations
This represents the pinnacle of one-to-one personalized marketing, offering product recommendations based on behavioral data and context, tailored to the interests of the individual.
Such a solution necessitates the most advanced product recommendation AI, similar to Amazon Personalize, and seamless integration of the online shopping experience across both email and the online store. This capability is enabled by applications like Obviyo’s Personalize and Email Genie.
Marketers learn that there are three types of marketing emails:
The following is a quick compilation of various email marketing strategies for each of the main email types:
Transactional Strategies
Promotional Strategies
Lifecycle Strategies
These strategies are effective for creating email experiences that help with open and click rates but fall short of maximizing brand value and revenue outcomes.
The new approach to email marketing, adopted by leading brands, is to treat email as an extension of the online store. This involves viewing email as a landing page that simultaneously employs a wide range of email marketing strategies.
Email Experience
(single-strategy email marketing)
EXAMPLE: BOGO promotion
EXAMPLE: shop the look
Ecommerce Experience
(multi-strategy email marketing)
EXAMPLE: multi-strategy email campaign
Included strategies:
Staging e-commerce experiences in emails seems like an obvious thing to do. So, why isn’t it being done by all marketers?
The challenge is that existing email solutions require custom coding to build such emails. This is not scalable, and in most cases, the marketing team lacks the necessary skills.
Obviyo’s Email Genie app solves this challenge with a wide range of ready-to-go templates that can be customized via a visual editor and then effortlessly injected into an email with simple copy-paste functionality.
E-commerce email marketing involves numerous components that must be constantly tracked to maximize your return on investment in terms of time, effort, and money.
Remember, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
Email marketers rely on analytics provided by their email automation tools designed to automatically track metrics below:
Open rate measures the percentage of recipients who opened the email. It provides insights into the effectiveness of the subject line and the sender’s reputation.
Click-through rate (CTR) represents the percentage of email recipients who clicked on one or more links. It gauges the email’s effectiveness in directing traffic to your website.
Conversion rate denotes the percentage of recipients who took a desired action, such as making a purchase. A higher conversion rate indicates that the email effectively motivated recipients to act.
Bounce rate is the percentage of sent emails that failed to reach the recipient’s inbox. A high bounce rate can harm the sender’s reputation and may lead to email service providers flagging your emails as spam.
Unsubscribe rate measures the percentage of subscribers who opted out of receiving future emails. A rising unsubscribe rate for eCommerce brands indicates a potential disconnect between email content and subscriber interests.
It is unfortunate, but email marketers are left in the dark regarding how shoppers engage with email content or what actions they take once they reach the e-commerce site.
Email Engagement Metrics: If an email contains more than a few clickable content elements, as in the example above, it is essential to know exactly which element was clicked on. Such tracking is technically possible, but in environments where marketers struggle to properly use basic campaign ‘utm’ tracking parameters, it is rarely implemented, if ever.
Buying Experience Metrics: Once on the e-commerce site, each email shopper follows their own path to discover and purchase a product of interest. Conventional web analytics solutions, like Google Analytics, track such data but fall short in automatically identifying common products of interest. This deficiency prevents email marketers from implementing an e-commerce site-driven improvement loop.
To enable data-driven e-commerce email marketing, Obviyo’s Email Genie enables auto-tagging of email message content components, which generates email engagement metrics. Meanwhile, the Email Pulse analytics application can enrich and process Google Analytics data to automatically generate actionable insights and email-specific product recommendations.
Whether your brand is a small startup or a global ecommerce company, email marketing should have a large part to play in your overall marketing strategy.
To recap, the 7 strategies you should implement in your e-commerce email marketing strategy are:
1: Adopt Product-Led Growth (PLG) model
2: Power email campaigns with actionable ecommerce insights
3: Increase email relevancy
4: Maintain cross-channel identity
5: Personalize at every stage of customer lifecycle
6: Present ecommerce experience at all times
7: The more data, the better the results
With these strategies in place, you’ll know that you’re doing everything you can to boost email engagement and sustainable email revenue growth.
Which of the above strategies are you most excited to implement in your email marketing strategy?
The post 7 Strategies to Supercharge Your Ecommerce Email Marketing appeared first on Obviyo.
