Want A Thriving eCommerce Business? Automate Your Emails

📖 6 Minute Read

———

When done right, email can achieve an ROI as high as $36 for every dollar spent - higher than any other marketing channel. 

But the competition is fierce. More than 64% of small businesses use email to reach their customers, a rate that’s set to increase like crazy over the next five years. It’s common for the average person to have about 20 to 30 email subscriptions going at a time, and today’s eCommerce customers want their email subscriptions to deliver real value - not just random promotions or updates. 

So how do you make sure your emails are actually engaging your customers and contributing to your bottom line? By embracing automation. An automated email strategy gives you the power to target your customers with thoughtful, personalized messaging across their buying journey. It will net you higher sales, achieve better customer retention, and save you time in the long run. 

Here are five essential steps to get you started with email marketing automation.

Step 1: Grow your list

The only way you’re going to truly benefit from email marketing is if you have an audience to talk to, and the only way you’re going to grow this audience is if you make it extremely easy for people to join it.

Here’s how: 

1. Put an email capture field in your website’s footer, making it visible at the end of every page.

2. Greet all new visitors to your website with an automatic pop-up window that asks for their email address.

3. Incentivize your website visitors to sign up by offering a small purchase discount in exchange for their email. This will vastly improve your email capture rate.

4. Once they sign up, send them a discount code via an automated welcome email.

Pro tip: You can enable pop-up windows in most eCommerce website builders, either natively (for Squarespace) or with third-party apps (for Shopify). I love OptinMonster as a pop-up solution because it offers robust audience targeting and reporting features on affordable pricing plans.  

Canadian apparel brand Alder (alderapparel.com) has an email capture field embedded in its website footer, greeting site visitors at the bottom of every page scroll. 

Toronto-based outdoor living brand Moss (mossgardenhome.com) welcomes each new website visitor with a bright pop-up window that promises a code for 10% off in exchange for an email address.

Step 2: Make a great first impression

Your welcome email is the first email a new subscriber gets after signing up on your website. It’s your first opportunity to welcome them to your community, and should have everything they need to redeem the discount you promised them.

A strong welcome email can generate an open rate as high as 90.09%, and can greatly increase the chances of your email subscribers converting to customers. This, in turn, gives you more data for your email segments (but more on that in Step 3).

For now, here’s how to build a welcome email that converts:

1. Set up an auto-response in your email management software that immediately sends a welcome message to all new subscribers in your mailing list. Set it as a standalone email - don’t include it in a longer drip campaign.

2. Create a discount code in your website’s backend that never expires, and include the code directly in the body of your welcome message.

3. Make the discount code the main focal point of the message, but don’t forget to include branded elements (like your brand’s name and logo) to make the email easily recognizable.

4. Make sure your double opt-in setting is switched off. Double opt-in (or DOI) subscriptions require additional confirmation from subscribers before they can receive marketing emails, which can significantly reduce your conversion.

When a subscriber receives your welcome email and applies your discount code at checkout, they’ll literally see the value of engaging with your emails (and be more incentivized to engage with them in the future).

Luxury fashion label Totême (toteme-studio.com) sends a simple and effective welcome email to all new subscribers immediately upon sign-up.

Step 3: Segment, segment, segment

So now you’ve automated the process of gathering emails, welcoming your subscribers, and delivering value. The next step is to start treating your subscribers like real people, by using email segmentation to deliver personalized messaging to specific subgroups in your mailing list. 

Here’s how to get started with email segmentation:

1. First, segment your mailing list into two large groups: Customers and Non-customers.

2. For the ‘Non-customers’ segment, focus on guiding them toward conversion with drip campaigns that a) educate them about your brand, your story, and your products, and b) experiment with different types of promotions like flash sales, freebie items, and shipping perks.

3. Next, filter your ‘Customers’ segment into subcategories. This will entirely depend on what you sell, but here are some suggestions:

   • If you sell apparel, segment by size.

   • If you sell interior decor, segment by style.

   • If you sell cosmetics, segment by skin tone.

   Then, focus on delivering quality email content that caters to the interests and needs of each subcategory. This can include specific product suggestions, imagery, language usage, etc. Lots of room for testing and creativity here!

4. Create additional filters for the ‘Customers’ segment based on demographics (like gender and geographic location) and average order value (or AOV, i.e. a customer’s budget when shopping your brand). Use these filters to further personalize your messaging to different customer segments.

Step 4: Know that more is not always better

Set up a rule in your email software that limits the number of emails your subscribers receive to max 2 or 3 per week, and then test which cadence gets you the best engagement and conversion rates. This is especially important when you consider that many of your subscribers will be part of multiple segments at once, and you want to avoid inundating them with too many messages.

You should also consider your subscribers’ past engagement levels, and filter your email cadences accordingly:

• High engagers (those who open more than half of your emails and have high click-through rates) will be more responsive to upsells and personalized product alerts.

• Low engagers (those who haven’t opened any emails in the past few months) will likely only be interested in the largest sales events, like Labour Day of Black Friday.

• Non-engagers (those who haven’t opened a single email from you in over a year) should be automatically archived from your mailing list. This will keep your list healthy, and will ensure you’re getting an accurate read on your audience’s activity.

Pro tip: As your mailing list grows, you’ll start to notice that emails about sales and discounts perform best. It will be tempting to send every single promotion you run to every single subscriber on your mailing list to net the highest returns from email - but this will also train your audience to never pay full price again. Instead, focus on sharing promotions only with the subscribers who need them to convert, like low engagers or customers with low AOV. 

Step 5: Follow up post-purchase 

Catering to your subscribers’ unique needs will increase your conversion, but it’s important to continue the conversation with them after you make a sale, too. This fosters better engagement, improves brand trust, and helps retain more customers.

Here are some post-purchase campaigns to consider implementing:

• Offer creative ways that a customer can use/wear the item(s) they purchased

• Notify them when additional items in their size/style/shade get added to your catalog

• Answer common post-purchase FAQs (i.e. deliver customer service proactively)

• Share reviews of the purchased item(s) from other customers, and ask for their feedback (in exchange for a discount on their next purchase)

Bottom line: Focus on the value

Email marketing, when done right, achieves two things: 

1. It converts more customers

2. It increases customer loyalty (i.e. gets more customers to purchase again)

Customers are extremely aware of when they are being sold to, and if your email marketing is overly sales-y, your subscribers are going to disengage (or unsubscribe altogether). The more personalized attention you give them, the more value they’ll get out of your messaging - and the more ROI you’ll see in the long term.

———

Subscribe here to get eCommerce insights delivered right to your inbox each week.