Email automation does the heavy lifting of email marketing for your ecommerce store. Learn how to do it and discover 8 recommended flows your in-house team will love.
According to Constant Contact, email marketing offers an average ROI of $36 for every $1 spent, making it by far the most cost-effective digital marketing strategy that businesses have at their disposal. If you’re running an ecommerce store, email marketing can be an incredibly effective way to excite potential customers and re-engage current customers.
That said, sending out individual emails to everyone on your subscriber list is simply too time-consuming to be feasible. Instead, you can leverage automated email campaigns to deliver the right messages at the right time without the manual work.
We’ll help you get started creating an effective email marketing strategy driven by the power of marketing automation. Take a look at everything you need to know about email automation for ecommerce stores, including eight examples of email automation series built to attract and retain more new customers.
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Email automation is the process of building emails and setting them to automatically send to your email list based on the criteria you choose. It’s used for both transactional and promotional emails.
Automated emails can be sent at specific times and triggered by specific criteria. Triggers might include a recipient’s newsletter subscription, purchase history, clicks on links, time since their last purchase, and more. For transactional emails, a typical automation example is sending a user a shipping update or password reset email.
While email automation is relatively straightforward to set up for businesses of all sizes — which is a big part of why email marketing can offer such a high ROI — there are a couple of things you’ll need to put in place before you can begin sending automated messages.
First, you’ll need to use an email automation tool that will allow you to deliver one-off messages and multi-message campaigns to your subscribers. We’ll cover some of these below. Second, you’ll need to create email templates for your automated campaigns targeted to specific audience segments.
With the right automation platform and high-quality message content, email automation is something that any ecommerce business can leverage for outstanding results. It can help boost your store’s conversion rate, reduce cart abandonment rate, improve your customer experience, and beyond.
Automation begins with great software. You’ll want to look for options that integrate seamlessly with your other ecommerce automation tools, such as your customer service or inventory management platforms. Today, the top email automation tools include the following:
Automation lets your business enjoy all the unique, worthwhile benefits of email marketing without demanding more human power or a more significant time investment. Here are the specific advantages of automating your email campaigns.
We mentioned earlier that email marketing is unrivaled when it comes to ROI, yielding an average of $36 for every $1 spent. This statistic alone is more than enough to convince most ecommerce businesses to invest their efforts in this channel.
One reason why email marketing offers such a high ROI is that email marketing is an incredibly low-cost marketing avenue. Once you have a list of subscribers, the only real expense associated with email marketing is the cost of paying for a subscription to an email marketing automation platform.
These platforms are available at a variety of price points, including free options with robust feature sets, and let you send to hundreds or thousands of customers every month. When the “I” in “ROI” is this low, there’s potential to achieve a substantial return on your investment.
Automated emails, transactional and promotional, are vital for creating a customer-centric brand.
Fast transactional emails, such as responses to customer service requests, make your subscribers feel heard and valued. Nearly 50% of customers say they expect an email response from businesses in less than four hours. Automated messages speed up your customer service response times.
Email automation is also effective at keeping customers interacting with your brand. For example, 45% of subscribers who receive “win back” (re-engagement emails) will go on to open subsequent emails, according to data from Return Path. By scheduling regular messages, you can retain customers who might have otherwise been lost.
Automated email marketing also allows you to segment your list of subscribers based on factors like web activity, purchase history, and interests in order to create targeted cross-selling and upselling opportunities. Ecommerce platforms and CRMs offer plenty of data to inform triggered campaigns.
Say you have a segment of customers who purchased a winter coat from your store. You can set up an automated, personalized campaign that recommends scarves and mittens to pair with their purchase. This is a great way to raise average order values among your existing customer base.
With the right tools, all of the above benefits of email marketing can be accomplished with minimal manual input from your company’s sales, marketing, or customer service staff.
Once you’ve created the necessary email templates and set up criteria to trigger email sends, automated email campaigns practically run themselves. This frees up your teams to focus on tasks that truly need a human touch while making them faster and more efficient at repetitive but essential tasks.
To help you get up and running, we’ll walk through eight of the most important email automation series for reaching your revenue, customer satisfaction, and retention goals. As you build emails for each of these flows, make sure to read up on email marketing best practices for tips and inspiration.
Given that nearly 7 out of every 10 ecommerce carts are abandoned, salvaging even a small percentage of your store’s abandoned carts can yield substantial returns. Turning those exits into sales could be as easy as setting up automated cart abandonment emails. According to Mailchimp, cart abandonment emails yield 34 times more orders per recipient than through standard marketing emails alone.
Many times, simply reminding customers that they still have products in their shopping cart is all that it takes to convince them to complete their purchase. Many ecommerce stores also choose to offer discounts to encourage conversions.
The main goal of abandoned cart emails is to reduce your cart abandonment rate, a metric that should be easy to track via the analytics features of the ecommerce platform you use. Conversion rate and click-through rate can also be used to gauge whether your abandoned cart emails are as compelling as they should be.
Automated email marketing is a great way to present would-be and current customers with personalized recommendations that pique their interest. It pays off: According to Barilliance, average order value (AOV) increases by 369% when prospects engage with a single product recommendation.
In addition to helping you form more robust customer relationships, product recommendation emails can help you upsell or cross-sell a new product to the customers most likely to buy them.
The goal of product recommendation emails is twofold. One, product recommendation emails encourage repeat purchases from customers who have already given your online store the stamp of approval. Tracking clicks and conversions on each recommendation is an excellent way to evaluate these emails.
Two, product recommendation emails let customers know that you’re paying attention to their interests and value their business. No one likes seeing suggestions for products they’d never consider buying. A customer survey could help you measure whether your customers feel your tips are on target.
Strategically sending discounts is one of the most popular ways to utilize automated email marketing. According to Adoric, 44% of consumers check branded emails for discounts and other valuable offers.
To really capitalize on the benefits of discount emails, though, your offers should be triggered based on customer behavior. If a customer has been browsing a specific product, for example, you could send them a discount code as a welcome.
As we touched on above, you can also send discount codes to customers who have abandoned their cart or on their previous purchases. It’s also common to automate discount emails to send if a certain amount of time has elapsed since a customer’s last purchases, whether it’s two weeks or two months. There are endless possibilities when it comes to tailoring discounts.
The goal of a discount email is simple: to encourage conversions by offering customers savings on the products they’re most interested in. This makes tracking the success of your discount emails as simple as monitoring the conversion rate and click-through rate of the discount emails you send out. You can also look at average order value (AOV) and customer lifetime value (CLV) to see how discounts
Welcome emails that greet your new subscribers have an average open rate of 50%, making their open rate 86% higher than standard newsletters. Wordstream reports that are 320% more revenue is attributed to welcome emails compared to other promotional emails.
Simply saying hello to new subscribers and providing product highlights is an excellent way to get them excited about what your store has to offer and let them know that you’re happy to have them in the fold. It’s also a prime opportunity to offer welcome discounts, planting the seeds for their first or next purchase.
The ultimate goal of a welcome email series is to convert subscribers into loyal, paying customers. This makes conversion rate an important factor to consider when sending out these emails.
Beyond this, welcome emails are also a great way to let your audience know the benefit of engaging with your messages (discounts, exclusive sales, first looks at products, etc.) and make them more likely to open subsequent emails. So, the open rate is an important metric to watch.
One of the most significant benefits of email automation is streamlining and speeding up transactional email sending. Unlike marketing emails, your customers expect to receive lightning-fast order confirmations, receipts, status updates, and more.
For example, email receipts that are sent out when a customer makes a purchase have an average open rate of 70.9%, making these emails more likely to be read than any other type of message. Even small delays may decrease confidence or lead to customer service tickets filling up your queue. Email automation lets you proactively inform customers of changes and get ahead of questions.
The most important objective of update and order confirmation emails is to provide detailed information and answer customers’ questions. You can track email metrics like open rate as well as customer service metrics like the number of tickets related to receipts, shipping status, and so on.
According to data from a Stitch Labs report on customer loyalty, repeat customers make up almost 25% of a store’s revenue despite only making up 11% of a store’s customer base on average.
This makes it especially important to engage your repeat customers and ensure that they continue coming back to your store. For this purpose, automated email campaigns that are targeted based on the behaviors and interests of your repeat customers can be highly beneficial. Your email series could include interesting blog reads, product ideas or inspiration videos, promo codes, featured customers, and more.
The goal of repeat customer emails is to encourage repeat business from your store’s most valuable segment of customers. Open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate are the most important metrics to track when sending out these emails.
Few things are more valuable or actionable for an online retailer than in-depth customer feedback. With automation, you can schedule email surveys that collect this all-important data on a regular basis, whether monthly, quarterly, or yearly. You can also schedule them to send after key interactions like purchases, returns, or customer service conversations.
Customer feedback emails are also a good opportunity to request that customers leave a review on the products that they’ve purchased. Small discounts, gift cards, or prize drawings can be valuable incentives for customers to share their thoughts.
While the goal of most ecommerce email marketing campaigns is to encourage conversions, this isn’t the goal of customer feedback emails. Instead, the goal of these emails is to gather feedback from your customers in the form of either survey responses or online reviews. This makes open rate and click-through rate the most important metrics to track for these email campaigns.
Eventually, some subscribers may start to ignore the emails you send if they don’t find them valuable. Often, segments of subscribers aren’t even receiving your emails because their contact information is outdated.
If you notice that your open rate is starting to suffer, re-engagement or “win back” email series can help. These emails are all about understanding what drives customers to engage with your emails, confirming contact details, and reigniting the interest of your subscribers. There are many different approaches. You can offer product recommendations and discounts, ask readers to verify their email addresses if they like your content, and more.
The goal of re-engagement emails is to motivate inactive subscribers to take action, whether buying, browsing, or unsubscribing. Monitoring the open rate, click rate, and the number of unsubscribes for these series is crucial. You can also gauge the success of these campaigns by tracking conversions.
At Gorgias, we’re committed to helping businesses make the most of ecommerce automation and hands-free email marketing through our convenient central hub. Our helpdesk platform integrates with popular marketing automation platforms. It makes it easy to manage email communication, SMS communication, and social media messaging, allowing you to provide the kind of customer service that turns visitors and newcomers into loyal shoppers.
Want to learn more about how Gorgias empowers your online store? Book a free demo today.
