7 Strategies to Supercharge Your Ecommerce Email Marketing

The strong case for Ecommerce Email Marketing

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:

• • • Low customer acquisition cost
    • Ability to drive traffic to the online store
    • Increased brand loyalty and repeat sales
    • Connecting with customers on a deeper level
    • Identifying the prospects most likely to convert
    • Delivering personalized messages
    • Gaining further insights into your audience
    • Re-engaging dormant or inactive customers
    • Tracking the results in real-time

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.

Email marketing and Google ads spend

Ecommerce world is rapidly changing

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:

• • • A new breed of email marketing tools, such as Klaviyo and Braze among many others, is enabling advanced audience segmentation, testing, and ecommerce-specific features.
    • Advanced data analytics are being employed.
    • AI-driven segmentation and personalization algorithms are being developed.
    • Techniques for anonymous visitor identity capture are improving.

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.

7 Ecommerce Email Marketing strategies

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.

#1: Adopt Product-Led Growth (PLG) model

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:

• • • • Reduced email list churn rate: A PLG approach enhances the relevancy of your emails, lowering the frequency at which recipients unsubscribe or ignore them.
      • More profitable revenue growth: By targeting the right products to the right contacts, you increase engagement and revenue performance, leading to more repeat visits, higher click-through rates, and increased conversions, thus minimizing the reliance on constant price discounts.
      • Higher Lifetime Value (LTV): PLG fosters more engaged customers, who tend to have higher Average Order Value (AOV) and Repeat Purchase Rate (RPR), enhancing customer lifetime value.
      • Deeper customer understanding: Adopting a PLG strategy necessitates a deep understanding of your customers, benefiting all business aspects, including fulfillment, customer service, and marketing.
      • Improved team alignment: As PLG integrates the whole organization, teams within a PLG-driven company achieve better alignment and focus compared to those in marketing-led organizations, resulting in increased satisfaction and efficiency.

Product-led growth allows you to create a flywheel that positively impacts key metrics across all areas of your organization.

How can a company transition into a product-led growth (PLG) e-commerce company?

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.

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#2: Power email campaigns with actionable ecommerce insights

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:

• • • • Open rate
      • Click-through rate
      • Bounce rate
      • Unsubscribe rate
      • Conversion rate
      • Spam complaint rate

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.

Bridging the ecommerce data gap

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.

#3: Increase email relevancy

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.

Starting point: Segmentation

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.

Next Level: Product Recommendations

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.

#4: Maintain cross-channel identity

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.

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#5: Personalize customer lifecycle

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:

• • • • Context: Personalization leverages indirect data points related to a customer’s position in their buying journey, such as product collections they’re interested in or their product affinity. For instance, it assesses whether a buyer is at the beginning of product discovery or ready to make a purchase.
      • Demographic: Personalization uses demographic data, including age, gender, location, and household income level, to tailor recommendations.
      • Behavior: Personalization involves analyzing buyer actions, like purchases or website activities, including viewed products or abandoned cart items, to inform future marketing efforts.

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:

• • • • • • Subject lines: Personalize subject lines with the recipient’s name, a reference to their interests, or a recent interaction with your brand.
          • Preview text: This snippet of text appears next to the subject line in your inbox and can be customized to align with the recipient’s preferences or needs.
          • Body content: Include the recipient’s name and tailor the message to their interests, using dynamic content to showcase relevant products based on the customer’s recent shopping history.
          • Images and videos: Tailor the images, videos, and other visual elements in the email to appeal to the recipient’s tastes, preferences, or demographic.
          • Offers: If you are creating personalized emails, include personalized offers with targeted discounts and exclusive deals.
          • Timings: Tailor your sending schedule to personalize delivery times based on each user’s past engagement patterns or time zone.

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.

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#6: Drive ecommerce experiences at all time

Marketers learn that there are three types of marketing emails:

• • • • Transactional: These are sent during checkout and other purchasing actions. They are functional in nature, providing essential information to individual customers.
      • Promotional: These emails are sent when there is something newsworthy to share. It’s crucial to carefully consider the underlying goal, offer, and target subscriber segment.
      • Lifecycle: Also known as “triggered” emails, these are dispatched based on the actions taken by a shopper and where they are in the customer lifecycle.

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.

#7: The more data, the better the results

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.

Conventional email analytics

Email marketers rely on analytics provided by their email automation tools designed to automatically track metrics below:

The Need for E-commerce Email Analytics

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.

Conclusion: Ecommerce Email Marketing is powerful

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?