Ecommerce Email Marketing Best Practices

Ecommerce Email Marketing Best

Practices

Ecommerce email marketing is still the most effective

magic trick up the eCommerce entrepreneur’s sleeve with the highest ROI.

But people are becoming more and more resistant to all the junk cluttering their inboxes!

How to break the clutter then?

The email best practices include:

• Sender reputation• Frequency of emailing• Bulk mails• Open rates• Email conversion

Sender reputation can make it or break it 

• Email providers share the trouble with you• They need to filter out the bad senders.• You are ranked on open rate, click rate, spam complaints, unsubscribe

rate, and output volume.

With bad sender reputation…

• Your email get stuck in a sending queue and can get deleted w/o being sent.

• The worse your reputation is, the fewer emails you can send per hour.• You can get banned and be forced to switch providers.

Bonus: Lower Bounce Rate A total bounce rate higher than 2% gets you in trouble with providers

because they don’t want to facilitate spam.

1. Validate email addresses with a line of code (only one @ symbol, known domains, etc.) or ask for entering the address twice.

2. Clean up the list regularly if you notice the same addresses bouncing over and over.

3. Don’t use click bait to get opens – it annoys people and you’ll get blocked or marked as spam.

How often is best to send emails? Event-triggered emails (transactional) are best.

The recipient remembers you and is more likely to read what you have to say.

Use people’s behavior in your own favor and build on it.

Otherwise, you risk being irrelevant and, therefore, ignored.

Great email trigger events : • signing up

• cart abandonment• wishlist item on sale

• order receipt• order delivery

• new products in, similar to purchased before• content on using your products – especially, something they’ve

already bought • personal benchmarks (if you have permission to use this

information) – birthday, membership anniversary, etc. Also, check out the automated email campaigns every store should use.

Tip: Personalize messages based on what people did

 Look into CRM data and tailor the offers:• Respect their taste and stick to categories they visit often• Don’t overuse discounts and coupons where it’s not needed.• Update frequent shoppers on the new-ins instead of offering outlet

items.

Can I send an email to all people on my list?“Divide and Conquer”

A special email campaign targeting a smaller group of people would give them

more relevant offers and provide additional value is always better.

Examples of customer segments:

 • high LTV customers• customers who haven’t ordered anything in the last 30

days• people who visit your site a lot, but don’t buy anything• customers from a specific city• customers who order a specific product regularly

Tip: No Paid lists 

They’re not qualified leads &will only bump up your unsubscribe rate and even spam complaints because those people never wanted your emails.

Boost Open Rate with irresistible subject lines 

 • Person sender, not company• Not salesy• Avoid “as seen on”, “buy”, “Buy direct”, “Buying

judgments”, “Clearance”, “Order”, “shopper” or “Orders shipped by”

Tip: The perfect subject lines formulas 

 • Questions• Email subscriber exclusive• New product launch• Changes• List

Email conversion: what to write to get those clicks

• A good, branded template and high-quality images• Use  words close to your product like Cook it, Dress for success,

Brew it …• Tie the call-to-action with the whole message, repeating the key

benefit• Use action verbs like try, take, claim, enjoy, create, reserve, get 

For examples of good emails for each trigger event, check out the original article: Ecommerce Email Marketing for More Conversions

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You might find yourself running a few completely different campaigns for different subgroups and that’s great – everybody’s happy!

The beauty of eCommerce email marketing is its power to deliver personalized value while being fully measurable. 

We help online stores understand and use their ecommerce data to sell more.

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