4 Ecommerce Email Marketing Tips To Save You Time And Increase Effectiveness

Optimizing your email marketing can be especially tricky for ecommerce businesses. Here are 4 tips you can use to start improving your email results right away.

You know email marketing is powerful. But are you maximizing its potential to convert more customers, sell more products, and create repeat business?

In my experience, there’s always room for improvement. But it can be tough to figure it all out when you’re whizzing down the road at 100mph running and growing your ecommerce business! So buckle up and allow me to share with you some of the best growth-oriented email marketing tips you can start implementing right away.

1. Merge your lists

Most ecommerce companies have too many email lists. Just because you have multiple contacts from one trade show, and a bunch from another, doesn’t mean they can’t all go on the same list, saving you the time and hassle of needlessly managing multiple lists.

Merging lists also eliminates the problem of having duplicate subscribers across different lists. And you can still distinguish subscribers whenever helpful, by taking advantage of user properties or attributes, or tracking their origin in your CRM.

2. Chose the right email platform

There are many excellent email marketing providers, but the key is to choose the one that makes the most sense for your individual business needs.

For example, Klaviyo is an email marketing platform that’s specifically designed for the ecommerce industry, and is perfect for most retailers in the startup phase. I recommend Klaviyo as the ideal email platform for any ecommerce business with a list of up to 100,000 subscribers.

Klaviyo lets you easily create different types of emails that target customers at various stages of the marketing funnel; you can set up first time purchase emails, cart abandonment emails, and winback emails that specifically address each customer’s unique situation, increasing your sales and customer retention.

Once you’ve pushed past the 100k-subscriber stage, and you’re ready to dive into more advanced segmentation tactics, then you might consider upgrading to a behemoth-sized ecommerce marketing tool like Bronto or Sailthru.

3. Integrate Segment.io

Segment.io is an awesome tool that makes it easy to share customer data across your various analytics and tracking plugins.

You can use Segment.io to pass customer purchase data to Klaviyo, so you can create dynamic lists (within Klaviyo) based on what each customer has purchased from you in the past, how many items they’ve purchased, or the total amount they’ve spent with your ecommerce store. This allows you to build more sophisticated email campaigns that are not limited to being targeted only by user-type (e.g. retail user, wholesale user).

To see how powerful this capability is, imagine sending out a cart abandonment email to a customer, in order to try and nudge them toward completing an unfinished purchase. A typical cart abandonment email says little more than, “You left something in your cart.” But using the power of Segment.io, you can auto populate additional information, like pictures of the abandoned items, prices, and even the number of units left in stock to create scarcity and raise the product’s perceived value from the customer’s perspective.

4. Scrub your lists

Having a huge email list might seem like a good thing, but list size is only as good as the quality of the average subscriber. What’s the point in continuously emailing someone who doesn’t even open your messages anymore?

It can be tempting to think that it’s worth it to keep inactive subscribers because they may buy something in the future. But the truth is that having these people on your list increases your risk of spam complaints, which you need to avoid like the plague if you don’t want your emails landing in your customers’ junk folders.

It can also skew your data, since these aren’t your real target customers–yet you’re still measuring their activity along with actively engaged subscribers. All in all, it’s just not worth it to keep these people on your list.

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