The dynamics of e-commerce marketing have changed on a considerable level in recent years. The majority of online retailers and ecommerce businesses keep finding ways to skyrocket their revenue, customer retention, ecommerce sales, and even market share. One of the most prominent ways to achieve the same was email strategy.

Now, this is not about the generic promotional emails that you get to see every now and then in your account. Moreover, it is about personalization of the mail for all the customers so that the organization can get higher engagement. Moving forward in this article, we will talk about the basic definition of e-commerce email marketing, followed by the best e-commerce email marketing strategies.

What is Ecommerce Email Marketing?

E-commerce marketing is nothing but a marketing medium that allows you to send marketing-based messages to potential and current customers. Multiple organizations use e-commerce email marketing for the purpose of building loyalty, educating, and selling products to their target audience. Companies follow a plethora of strategies to get the best out of this practice.

The best part about email marketing is that it will let you own everything about the process, unlike social media and SEO. Out of which, you also have an email subscribers list available for yourself. Not only this, but top-notch ecommerce email marketing strategy, thus increasing the Return on Investment (ROI).

Why Email Marketing is Important to Any Ecommerce Business

Here are a few statistics which show why email marketing is such a critical component of a successful e-commerce store:

• 33% of consumers get highly engaged with a brand when they have a customized welcome email from the company.
• 99% of consumers keep a tab on their email on a regular basis (and this includes checking the marketing emails as well).
• 80% of retailers consider ecommerce email marketing strategy an effective one in customer engagement and retention.

9 Killer Strategies for Ecommerce Email Marketing

With the above in mind, let’s take a deeper look at some strategies for success.

1. Integration of AI and Machine Learning

No doubt this could be dubbed one of the most prominent ecommerce email marketing strategy. Now, this sounds like something straight out of a sci-fi movie, but trust us, it is not. AI can help you in getting to understand your customers better as it can analyze their purchasing behavior, see what they like the most, and then help you create personalized email plans for them consisting of special offers and drive sales as well.

For example, using AI to understand how the customer reacts to different kinds of mail is going to give you an idea about future retention strategies. Furthermore, the timing of the email plays a major role in deciding whether the customer will interact with the same or not. With AI, you can use predictive analytics that works on user data, statistical algorithms, and machine learning to recognize the outcome of an email at the time of sending it to the consumers.

You can also automate the ecommerce email marketing campaign (for a particular email list) with the help of machine learning without any manual effort. The email automation can be based on a customer buying something or submitting a form. Here is an example of email automation, it can help in sending customers confirmation emails for their orders. Not only this, but AI can also help increase the email’s deliverability so that it reaches the inbox of a user instead of lying in the spam section.

Further Reading: 13 Ways to Use AI in Ecommerce in 2024 (with Tools Recommendations)

2. Advanced Segmentation Techniques

Segmentation plays a major role in any ecommerce email marketing campaign. Previously, the segmentation was not that common apart from the demographic segmentation. Currently, the audience segment is spread over multiple categories like demography, psychography, and geography. Further, these categories are divided into subcategories that make it easier to target audience.

Under demographic segmentation, we get to see age, birthday, business industry, occupation, gender, income stature, marital status, number of children of an individual, race, education level, skill level, etc. As per the geographic segmentation, we get to see subcategories like state, weather, town, neighborhood, country, etc. Similarly, psychographic segmentation includes webinar attendance of a consumer, purchase history, abandoned cart status, purchase frequency, website behavior, purchase type, most reviewed products, etc.

Further Reading: How to Use Email Segmentation to Boost Marketing Conversions

3. Lifecycle Email Marketing

Lifecycle email marketing consists of promotional emails that the companies shoot to the potential customers in different stages, from subscription to purchase. These email messages are based on user behavior and the way they interact with your brand (as they could be transactional emails if the customer is more into purchasing). The mails can straightaway help you in retaining customers, increasing revenue, and even improve the engagement for your business. Moreover they can also help in regaining the attention of inactive subscribers who have substantial previous purchases.

There are different lifecycle email customer segments, including new customers, existing or active customers, lapsed customers, and VIP customers. To convert each of the segments, you are supposed to send emails that are particularly prepared for the same. These types of emails include welcome emails, shipping confirmation emails, browse abandonment emails, cart abandonment emails, referral email, product recommendation emails, transactional emails, customer feedback emails, cart email, and re-engagement emails, anniversary emails, post purchase emails, upsell email, and birthday emails.

4. Incorporating Case Studies and Real-World Examples

This is one of the factors that is overlooked by most of the budding brands. However, it could play a major role in uplifting your brand. You can take inspiration from the recent strategies adopted by popular brands all over the world and the way they infiltrated the market so that you can get a better idea of what you are supposed to do to make the most out of your email marketing efforts.

5. Using Interactive Email Content

In simple terms, interactive mail is a mail that offers basic functionality to the users in order to take action (inclusion of dynamic content). For example, it can let subscribers add their favorite items to their shopping cart, watch a video in the inbox, or even take a quiz. Undoubtedly, interactive emails boost the chances of user engagement. You can also get the help of responsive email templates for the same.

Whether it is about personalization, improved sharing, customer feedback, enhanced conversion rates, or better lead generation, interactive email content (like a cart email) contributes to all of that. The dynamic content that you can use to make an email interactive are shopping carts, customer reviews, educational content, image carousels, discount code (or a special discount), gamification, product pages, polls, referral program, quizzes, videos, animation, etc.

6. Personalized Product Recommendations

This one tactic, when clubbed with email marketing, can work wonders for your company in terms of captivating and engaging the clients. Personalized messages have a proven record of skyrocketing customer engagement, creating more revenue for a brand, and boosting click-through rates as well. And that’s not it; you can also use AI-backed product recommendations to harness the power of artificial intelligence and make emails that result in customer acquisition as well as retention.

As for AI, it works on the data collected by various resources to analyze and create personalized product recommendations for loyal customers, thus resulting in better customer experience along with maintaining their loyalty towards the brands. A lot of brands right now use the product recommendations feature to make their business more successful.

Not only this, but AI also takes into consideration the purchase behavior of all the customers who have similar preferences. This aids the system in recognizing the trends and patterns that would have been missed out by any other radar. There are multiple types of personalized product recommendations – top seller recommendations, cross-sell recommendations, frequently bought together product recommendations, check out recommendations, and rating-based recommendations.

Further Reading: 8 Personalized Email Marketing Strategies You Don’t Want to Miss (with Examples)

7. Effective Use of Calls to Action (CTAs)

Calls to action (CTA) in an email makes the user take a specific action like making a purchase for a product. It could be displayed in a mail as a link or a button, and when the readers click on it, they are redirected to a page where they can get done with the desired action. But you have to look out for the body of the mail as well, as it should be persuasive enough to make the customer indulge with CTA.

For example, if you are sending a mail regarding the sale of a particular product, then the mail copy should include the benefits of the same as well (an email marketing tool could help you in the same). And on top of that, you can also add a CTA button like ‘Place Order’ or ‘Buy at 18% off’. However, you should not indulge in using too many CTAs in the mail. Research suggests that emails sent with 2 to 3 CTAs performed better than 3 CTAs in terms of click rate.

8. Mobile-Optimized Email Design

It is estimated that around 46% of emails are read on smartphones. This clearly means that you need to have a mobile-optimized email design so that the user doesn’t get uninterested in the mail with the unresponsiveness. In simple terms, you need to adjust the text and other content of the mail according to a smartphone screen. For the same, you can also send the email with a special coding that lets the images and texts in a mail show differently on all devices, resulting in an easily accessible interface on all of them. In the case of unoptimized emails, the user can delete or even unsubscribe from your email newsletter, which is going to be a setback for the brand in every way (and it will also increase the unsubscribe rate). Some of the best practices to follow are:

• Keeping the content of the mail short and simple (while sending it to any email address) so that the user is not supposed to go through a lot of text to figure out what they are supposed to do.
• You should optimize the preheader text of a mail perfectly because it gets more space than the subject lines on smartphones, and it loads before the email subject.
• In addition, you should also write short sentences so that the user will be able to read them without any issues.

Further Reading: Email Marketing Design: 13 Best Practices to Follow

9. Utilizing User-Generated Content

User-generated content means any type of content that a customer creates for a brand on social networking websites. This content can be in any form – testimonials, videos, reviews, images, and posts. For example, let’s say you have an earphone brand, someone brought it from your website and posted a picture with it on social media; this is the form of user-generated relevant content. The easiest way to include UGC via mail is by using hashtags. These hashtags give the opportunity to show off the products on social media with the same hashtags. This kind of social proof can be a part of building a community and creating customer loyalty programs.

So there are three significant ways via which you can gather all the user generated content:

• Convince people to share posts related to your brand, as it will give an organic push on social media platforms.
• Kick-start user generated content campaigns as they will help in attracting more users without a doubt.
• Take advantage of the social media influencers by connecting with them.

The best practices that you can follow to get the most out of user generated content for your e-commerce business are:

• Use the user generated content on different social commerce platforms.
• Adding testimonials and user generated content into ecommerce email campaigns is also going to help on a noteworthy scale.
• In addition, you can also showcase the user generated content and testimonials in your physical trust so that they work as a trust-winning factor for the customers who are visiting your store.
• Showcasing a shoppable user generated content gallery on your website is also going to help in the long run.
• Moreover, you can also integrate a user generated content feed on your ecommerce website.

Further Reading: 17 UGC Marketing Strategies to Generate More Sales in 2024

Wrapping up

So, these are the best email marketing strategies that you can opt for to make your business boom in every sense. The best part about the strategies mentioned above is that you can edit and customize them according to the requirements of your business. Suppose you are looking for the best email marketing implementation in e-commerce. In that case, you can simply go through our list of email e-commerce marketing strategies to maximize your return on investment (ROI).

Author Bio

Chandan Kumar is a seasoned technology enthusiast and entrepreneur passionate about empowering businesses and individuals globally. As the founder of Geekflare, a leading technology publication, Chandan has spearheaded the development of valuable content and resources that cater to a global audience of businesses and individuals.

Hero photo by S O C I A L . C U T on Unsplash

Ecommerce Email Marketing FAQs

What is e-commerce email marketing?

E-commerce email marketing is the process of using email to promote and sell products or services online. This type of marketing can be used to increase sales, promote new products or services, or build customer loyalty. E-commerce email marketing can be an effective way to reach a target audience and can be customized to fit the needs of any business.

Does email marketing work for ecommerce?

Yes. When done correctly, email campaigns have the potential to drive tremendous returns on a business’s investment. Emails have the unique ability to reach customers in their inboxes, allowing businesses to engage with them directly while they are already thinking about the products or services they need. Email marketing makes it easy to tailor campaigns to specific target audiences, efficiently delivering tailored content that drives consumer interaction.

How to use email marketing for ecommerce business?

For ecommerce businesses, email marketing is an invaluable tool for building a loyal customer base and generating revenue. To make the most of this powerful marketing strategy, it’s important to set up automated emails that target customers with relevant content. Additionally, using segmentation techniques to better reach specific audiences can help generate higher open and click-through rates. Lastly, by testing different subject lines and using A/B testing to compare their results.

What are the 4 types of email marketing?

The 4 types of email marketing are:

1. Welcome emails – used to introduce potential customers to your business and brand.
2. Subscription emails – keep customers informed of new developments in the company such as sales or new products.
3. Promotional emails – provide clients with coupons, discounts, and incentives that encourage them to continue shopping with you.
4. Transactional emails – provide necessary information about communication between the customer and company.

What are the 3 types of e-commerce?

Here are the 3 types of e-commerce:

1. Business-to-Consumer (B2C) – where businesses use their websites to promote and sell products directly to consumers.
2. Business-to-Business (B2B) – where businesses use e-commerce sites to offer goods and services to other companies.
3. Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) – where give individuals the ability to buy and sell goods through online marketplaces.