Connect With Your Customers Through Shopify Email Marketing

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.

What is 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.

Benefits of Shopify Email

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:

Email segmentation increases sales. This is when you divide email subscribers into smaller segments based on criteria. These factors can help you reach your audience, such as geographic location, interests, or purchase history. According to Campaign Monitor, Marketers who use segmented campaigns note as much as a 760% increase in revenue.

Reach more customers on mobile. The number of emails opened on mobile makes up a large percentage of overall engagement. According to Litmus, mobile opens accounted for 46% of all email opens in 2018. Another statistic by Convince & Convert shows that 35% of business professionals check their email on a mobile device.

Expand your demographic reach. In another study, 58% of Gen Z-born respondents were found to check their email multiple times a day. Forbes even labelled Millennials as obsessed with email. Over half of those ages 18 to 24 were found to check their emails while still in bed in the morning, and 43% of those ages 25 to 34 did the same thing.

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.

How to Build Your Email List

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.

Use a newsletter signup form on your website.

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.

Use popups to make your forms stand out.

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.

Drive traffic from social media channels and ads.

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.

Maintain Legal Standards

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:

CAN-SPAM – The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act sets rules for commercial emails in the United States.

CASL – Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation protects consumers and businesses from the misuse of technology, including spam and electronic threats.

GDPR – The General Data Protection Regulation helps protect personal data in the European Union.

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.

Email Campaign Types

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:

Transactional emails confirm a functional agreement between the sender and recipient has been made. Examples are account creation emails, order confirmation or purchase emails, password resets, and shipping notifications.

Promotional emails are messages aimed to complete a purchase or make a conversion. Examples include Black Friday or Cyber Monday deals, a summer sale email, a Valentine’s Day gift guide email, or a time-sensitive discount email.

Lifecycle emails are data-driven and triggered by the customer lifecycle stage. For example, a cart abandonment email is sent after someone adds items to their cart but leaves your site without making a purchase.

Email Marketing Strategies

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:

Ensure it works on mobile. Test your emails using different clients to ensure your message is delivered correctly. This includes opening your campaign on various browsers and checking how emails appear on desktop and mobile apps.

Add alt images to text. Use alt text for any images you include in your email. This will ensure that your recipient always knows what an image is by its description. Users can click an image description to view an image if it gets blocked by an email provider or is turned off by default. Image descriptions also help visually impaired visitors understand the content you present.

Write clearly and concisely. Include your most important information, including the reason for the email, first. Then, follow up with more details. Keep text simple, write short paragraphs, and leverage white space for readability. Use bolded or highlighted text, bullet points, and headings to make your text more scannable.

Use click-worthy CTAs. Choose one central call to action you want each campaign to focus on. Create urgency by emphasizing phrases like “get started today”, “buy now”, or “limited-time offer”. Ensure your CTA button stands out visually with contrasting colors and is placed in an area with white space.

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:

Growth of your email list

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.

Open and click through rates.

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.

Bounce rate and opt-out rate

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.

Company Revenue

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 test subject lines, text, or images

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.

Get Started Today with Email Marketing on Shopify

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.

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