At Shopify Reunite, new features and tools were announced to help business owners succeed in today’s changing world.
This includes Shopify’s strategic partnerships with Facebook to launch Branded Facebook Shops and Pinterest to launch a new integration. Shopify also introduced more local food delivery options to help meet online consumer demands.
By introducing new ways of communicating with customers online, Shopify is helping businesses grow during this digital transformation. In addition to these announcements, Shopify reminded merchants of updates to their existing channels. This included using Shopify Email.
Shopify Email was introduced in November 2019. It offers a direct line of communication to your customers, which is critical during this time of getting online quickly.
With Shopify Email, anyone can send and track beautifully branded emails. It’s simple to use, requires no marketing experience, and it’s entirely free to use until October 1, 2020. After that, you can still send 2,500 emails per month for free. If you send more than 2,500 emails in a month, you will be charged USD 1 for every 1,000 emails sent.
Shopify Email lets merchants create, run, and track great email marketing campaigns natively inside Shopify marketing. It enables store owners to use highly customizable email templates. Merchants can easily create marketing campaigns using their stores’ brand assets and product content.
Customizing templates is fast and easy, with pre-built sections and settings. Smart templates automatically use your store’s logos, colors, and products to save you time from updating your branding. With virtually no setup required, sending emails also includes your domain name.
Shopify Email’s analytic features help companies measure their successes. This includes email open and click-through rates and the number of add-to-carts and purchases. From templates to tracking, Shopify Email offers tools that help build strong customer relationships.
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach customers through a controllable channel. It increases business accessibility by making marketing more approachable and helps store owners expand their digital reach. Doing so can help you build long-term relationships with customers and potential buyers.
You can contact customers about timely messages such as store updates, new delivery or pickup options, and promotions. You can also maintain relationships by sharing shipping updates and reassuring customers their shipments are coming.
Tracking campaigns and analytic trends can lead to critical insights. You can learn how your emails perform and how to improve your communications over time. Email marketing can help nurture relationships that drive new sales and repeat purchases on your online store.
Here are a few more benefits of email marketing:
These studies demonstrate that email marketing is a highly effective channel for engaging customers online. You can use Shopify Email to reach your target audience on desktop and mobile devices. This can expand your digital reach to boost conversions. As shoppers rely on emails for informative content, you can fill the gap by providing updates that build brand trust.
You can collect email addresses anytime, even before launching your online store! To start accruing the benefits of email marketing, you’ll first need a list of subscribers. To ensure your list is of good quality from real people, avoid buying email lists at all costs—target shoppers who are genuinely interested in your products and focus regularly on ways to grow your list.
You can test a newsletter sign-up form by placing it on your site where people seek additional information. Try adding a CTA to your main navigation menu or in your footer.
The conversion rate for these signup forms may need to be higher overall. However, signups will add up over time to grow your list volume. As shoppers go to your footer to learn more about your brand, they may see your CTA, for example. This will encourage them to sign up for your email newsletter.
Once deemed annoying, popups are more common and can be quite effective when done correctly. Instead of hindering the user experience, you can properly time and target popups to win with this strategy. Experiment with time- or behavior-based targeting to determine what’s most effective for your online store.
For example, an exit intent form captures users’ contact information before they bounce from your website. An exit intent popup shows up when someone moves their mouse toward the corner of the screen, signaling they are about to exit a window. A scroll-triggered popup appears when someone scrolls past a certain point in the article.
Presenting a call to action (CTA) can encourage a time-invested reader to sign up for your email list. The right offer to the right audience can dramatically increase your email sign-ups. Of course, running tests will help you determine what offers work for your brand while minimizing ineffective pop-ups.
Share links to your content on social media to start conversations. This can help you engage with people who want to join your brand community. It will also bring shoppers to your online store who want to participate in conversations. With an invested interest in your company, these visitors will be more likely to sign up for your newsletter form.
You can also drive traffic from social ads to a landing page. A landing page is a standalone web page built with a single goal—to drive conversions. This page can funnel leads without distractions, and measuring results from one page will also be accessible.
For example, you could set up a Facebook ad to drive users to sign up for a downloadable guide. If your brand sells formal wear, this guide can connect leads with your products, such as a wedding lookbook. Targeting ads means you can create your offer with your audience in mind. Target attributes can include people’s age, gender, location, job role, and purchase history.
When email marketing, you’ll need permission to follow up with prospects and customers over time. Subscribers must “opt-in” to hear from you.
There are different ways you can enable them to do so. You can set up a pre-launch page, ask customers to join from sales calls, or place opt-in forms across your site. You can also accelerate deals with discounts or ask for emails in person or at events.
Without explicit permission to send email marketing, you can face steep fines. Here are a few examples of standards for email marketing you should be aware of:
Diff Agency cannot provide legal advice, so the above explanations are for informational purposes. Consult a lawyer if you have further questions about email laws and regulations.
Sending emails to the correct audience at the right time will increase the value of your marketing campaign. Here are a few ecommerce marketing campaign types you can use:
Ensuring your emails arrive to people who want them is the first step to getting email marketing right. As a second step, you’ll want your audience to open your email and engage with what your email says. Here are a few tips to create copy that gets read:
Your email marketing campaigns can pay off with the right amount of work and effort. Here are a few tips that can help drive your email marketing success:
The growth of your list indicates that people are interested in your business, product, or service offerings. The more interest you build, the higher your chance of conversions. Focus on expanding your list with people who genuinely care about your offerings.
If your subscribers lose interest and stop engaging with your content, you can consider running a re-engagement email campaign. This is a special type of campaign targeted directly at inactive subscribers. It can reduce your list churn rates and increase incremental engagement.
An open rate measures how many users look at your email. If your number appears on the low end, that’s quite normal. According to HubSpot, most email marketing campaigns average slightly over 30%.
Click-through rates refer to the number of people who click on the links you provide in your email campaign. This is the percentage of visitors who opened your email and viewed another page after clicking.
A bounce rate represents the number of visitors visiting your site and leaving without continuing to other pages. An opt-out rate means how many people unsubscribed from your email list after receiving your latest email campaign. This percentage is calculated by dividing the number of unsubscribed people by the number of emails delivered times a hundred.
Both of these indicators may show a loss of interest in your content. It also indicates room to improve your website content or navigation to make it more engaging.
Conversions and revenue indicate how many of your readers took action to contribute to your business’s success. Revenue relates to the percentage of money earned from your email marketing.
An Ecommerce report by Klaviyo found that companies attributed over a quarter of their store revenue (27%) to email marketing. Over one thousand stores attributed $230 million from purchases attributed to email in a single business quarter.
A/B testing, or “split testing,” is a strategy for optimizing emails. You can create alternate versions of an email and test the effectiveness of different elements to see which perform best. Variables include images, fonts, CTA text or visuals, and layouts.
For Shopify business owners, building an email strategy is a low-risk marketing tool for communicating directly with potential customers online. Apply the tips to any email campaign you send out to boost your email marketing performance. This will help you create more effective email marketing campaigns to increase engagement, conversions, and returns on investment.
More from Diff Agency:
Why You Shouldn’t Set and Forget Your Marketing Automation Efforts
The Communicator Awards Honors Diff’s Work in Cannabis Ecommerce
Shorten the Path to Purchase with Shopify and Branded Facebook Shops
Written by Debra Weinryb, Content Strategist at Diff Agency
This article originally appeared in the Diff Agency blog and has been published here with permission.
