10 email marketing tips to boost your e-commerce business

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email-marketing tips

The biggest challenge about running an online store is that you cannot interact with your customers in-person. Email marketing tips for e-commerce is not just about selling but building strong relations with your customers.

If you are not using e-commerce email marketing in your marketing strategy, you are missing out the tremendous potential for your sales funnel.

You are an entrepreneur recently launched an online store, there are chances you do not have much time to invest in marketing research.

However, it is advisable to make an effort to invest your time in email marketing to make the most of it.

If used successfully, email campaigns are highly influential sales tool.

However, it is spam and a waste of time when used poorly.

I am listing a few must-have email marketing tips for e-commerce for you to reaching out to your customers.

  • The welcome email
  • The referral email
  • The discount email
  • The abandoned cart email
  • Order confirmation mail
  • Survey Emails
  • Promotional Emails
  • Thank you email

Read the full list here with the example for each type of emails.

Here is a list of best practices for e-commerce email marketing.

1. Don’t fluke it. You must have a plan

Staring email marketing without a plan is a bad idea. You need to prepare a strategy to reach your customer through email marketing. Write down your email marketing plan and the steps you need to take to achieve the goal.

email marketing plan

First of all, you need to have an email list.

Optimize your e-commerce website to grab the opportunity to add visitors to your email list. Collect emails whenever possible. Request your customers to subscribe to your newsletter.

Another brilliant option to collect emails without letting your customers think much to enter their email id is, by providing a choice of “notify me when in stock”.

I personally feel that this is one of the excellent opportunity to keep your customers coming back and you are not even directly asking to subscribe to your email campaigns.

Another good way is a blog. It’s a great way to build a relationship with your prospects. Consistent blogs with great insights and knowledge encourage readers to sign up for your email, and this can eventually make them regular readers.

Here is the list of 29 simple ways to grow your email list

2. Keeping it original & to the point is a vital email marketing tips for e-commerce

Unique and engaging content can work really well for you to build relations with your customers. Avoid sending repetitive stuff as it may lead to getting a poor opening rate and your target audience may end up unsubscribing your emails.

Here originality and relevance work hand in hand. Create content in a right format with appropriate media which is consistent throughout the email.

Try including humor in your email content as it helps to keep your email marketing campaign light and also keep your audience engaged.

3.Write fantastic subject lines

A study says that almost 85% of the email opening rate highly depends on the subject line. Optimize your subject line and preview text to create a positive impression on your customers even before opening it. Not paying attention to subject lines may cost you a poor opening rate.

Fantastic email subject line

You can create a catchy attractive subject line with these two major components.

  1. Include humour or suspense to grab the attention of your audience.
  2. Write a subject line that delivers the purpose of the email.

Grab the reader’s attention with an enticing subject line which will tell them what the email is all about.

4. Call to action is very important

CTAs are essential to the success of your email marketing campaigns as they provide clear and straightforward direction to your readers.

A strong CTA let you come one step closer to your potential customers.

Create CTAs that is easy to spot and clickable.

Call to action

You can use tools like Canva to create a button without many dependencies on graphic designers.

Also, research suggests that try to keep only one call to action, as keeping multiple call to actions in an email campaign may confuse your audience and cause them to take no action at all.

5. Segment your email list

Keep your emails relevant to the recipient whenever possible. Sending the same email to every person in your email list might not work well every time.

If your e-commerce website is selling items to different categories, you need to segment your email list based on their interest, gender, location, the engagement rate and so on.

Your potential customers are only going to take action on your email if it is relevant to them.

Again, you can segment your email list on the type of customer. By this, I mean segregate your customers on the basis of their interaction with your online store.

email segmentation

You can have email lists like this,

  • New customers
  • Returning customers
  • Potential customers
  • Loyal customers
  • Dormant customers

By segmenting your email list, you can target your emails to the right audience and chances becomes high for converting your potential customers into regular and loyal customers.

6. Send regular emails

Be organized with the frequency of your emails. Here what I mean is do not annoy your subscribers by sending too many emails at a point of time. Plan a calendar which includes your special offers, Blogs articles, festivals and so on.

Keep your posting frequency consistent. Say thrice a week or on a daily basis if you have some exciting and fresh content to share with your audience.

email marketing tips

To discover the ideal number, you need to try and test with your subscribers.

One more thing, while asking your audience to subscribe to your newsletter, if you promise them to deliver a weekly digest, please send them as your audience are expecting.

7. Keep your eye on unsubscribe rate

Your email subscriber rate is a crucial factor to measure your marketing success rate. For this, you need to take steps to improve your subscriber rate and reduce the unsubscribe rate.

email marketing tips

Your email unsubscribe list is never going to be zero. The people who unsubscribe from your email list, are probably not your target audience. So you need not take every unsubscribe personally; instead, you can try finding out the reasons why people are unsubscribing from your email list and work on the improvement areas. Focus on providing more value to the subscribers. Increase frequency of personalized emails which your target audience seek.

Another important thing is to keep your unsubscribe page interactive, by interactive I mean when a person is unsubscribing ask them for a reason and make sure you make their exit memorable.

8.Keep it mobile friendly

Google predicts that in the near future, billions of users are going to connect to the internet through mobile devices.

Optimize your email campaigns for mobile. If you are not, you are losing great potential traffic to your webpage. A recent study shows that more than 70% of emails are opened on mobile. While your email is not mobile friendly, it eventually loses the game.

9. Keep this email marketing tips for e-commerce in mind and Automate your emails

You can’t spend your time writing emails. You have more important things to do. A number of tools exist to automate your email campaigns where you can send thousands of emails with a single click at a time.

email marketing

Automation allows you to reach thousands with no pain.

Keep a regular track on opening rate, click through rate and the actual conversion for each email campaign. This gives you insights about what your customers are liking and what kind of content or promotional offer attracts your customers more.

10. Being aware of anti-spam laws is an important email marketing tips for e-commerce

There are specific regulations which user have to abide by.  You must follow anti-spam requirements that may apply to your business.

Some of the common anti-spam requirements are,

  1. The mail message’s “from” label needs to be the sender’s email.
  2. The subject line has to reflect the purpose of the email.
  3. There has to be a link to unsubscribe to the email.

Make sure you follow anti-spam requirements and your emails are not ending up in a spam folder.

email marketing tips

Wrapping up

Deliver regular content to build a long-term relationship with your customers. You can keep them engaged by passing on special offers, birthday or festival discounts recently published articles and what not!

Whatever you send to your customers, just make sure these are not ONLY sales intended. You can inform them about exclusive offers and promotional campaigns but not in every email.

You make a lot of efforts and time to stand out as an e-commerce brand, what you need to focus on is how it reaches to your audience and touch their feelings.

Keep your newsletter as a medium to reach and remind your customers that you exist with some beautiful products and the stories which make them fall in love with you.

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