If it’s the right eCommerce email idea, yes.
There are dozens of ways to reach your audience, but few as direct as email marketing. That’s the main reason emails deliver higher ROI than any other marketing channel.
People want to read your content, so long as it’s relevant to them. And that means coming up with the right ideas to engage them. If you can do that, the revenue will follow.
eCommerce Email Ideas That Will Increase Profits
Coming up with great ideas isn’t as easy as it seems. But fortunately, there are some tried and true methods to get you started.
As a leading “Done For You” email marketing company, we’ve tested the following eCommerce email ideas over millions of emails to great effect. If you can pull the concept, adapt the content to your niche, and deliver it at the right time, you’ll see profits increase in no time.
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1. Send Welcome Emails
The perfect welcome email is hard to beat. If done correctly, it gets customers shopping and has a higher chance of building brand loyalty since first impressions mean a lot. In fact, welcome emails have an 86% higher open rate and earn up to 320% more revenue than other promotional messaging.
Welcome emails are an opportunity to make new customers feel like they’re part of your brand. It’s your chance to show them what it means to be a member of your tribe or movement. If you can deliver on this goal, you’ll see tremendous results in your number of dedicated followers.
Showing subscribers that you appreciate them is important throughout their customer lifecycle, but critical in the welcome email. If you can show a contact they’re valuable to you, and that’s why you want to provide value to them, you’ll build a strong relationship from the start.
You can do this by offering special discounts for their first (or second) purchase, throwing in free shipping on their order, or just by writing a heartfelt message that speaks to your audience. However you do it, understand welcome emails are a quick ticket to increased profits.
2. Set Automated Triggers
While welcome emails are technically triggered, there are many more you can send to get your audience shopping.
At SmartMail, we specialize in delivering high-converting trigger-based email campaigns which span the entire customer lifecycle you can see above.
We can establish rules for triggers, so when a customer spends a specified amount of time browsing an item without making a purchase, they’ll receive an email reminding them of that item. This is known as a browse abandonment campaign. A similar approach is made for cart abandonment emails.
3. Personalize Your Segments
Personalization is an eCommerce email idea you can’t afford to miss out on. Many companies treat personalization and segmentation as separate approaches. If you can combine them, however, they become incredibly powerful.
For example, another type of email we use is titled the Win Back campaign. When a user has been inactive for a set amount of time, we’ll have an email prepared to draw them back. With segmentation and personalization strategies, these messages can be honed to perfection, delivering a hyper-relevant email to their inbox and enticing them back.
Every time a customer takes an action, that’s an opportunity for you to refine your segments. The smaller the group you can assign them to, the better. It allows you to provide more relevant content, therefore increasing the chances that they’ll make a purchase.
Personalization goes a long way as well. This goes further than just opening your emails with “Hello $first_name.” Again, it depends on you providing the content they’re more likely to engage with. So if your customer has been looking at dresses, sending an email about shoes will be far less effective.
4. Promote Loyalty
Brand loyalty is a critical asset to any business. If people enjoy your products so much that they’ll come to you when they need something else, you’ve successfully created a customer for life. But it’s not easy. The practice of building loyalty requires knowing your customer wholly and understanding what drives them to make purchases with your brand.
A simple way to increase loyalty is through discounts and other benefits for customers. This is also a dangerous area to work with because if you’re not careful, customers will come to expect discounts and only buy products when available, thereby cutting your margins.
To stay on the right side of offering discounts, don’t set a pattern for when you provide them. Keep them guessing as to when you’ll send discounts and track usage by creating unique coupon codes. This will give you an idea of what works best and will encourage customers to continue opening your emails.
One technique for a customer who opens your emails but hasn’t purchased from your site is to offer special savings. With copy that says, “We see you’ve opened our message but haven’t made a purchase. We want to help you find something you want, so here’s X% off anything in the store.” An email like this shows you care about your customers and want to provide value.
5. Don’t Only Sell
When you start delivering emails to your list, be wary of how much selling you’re doing. While subscribers understand you’re running a business, if they feel like you’re pushing them for a sale rather than trying to offer what’s best for both of you, they’re going to stop engaging with your emails.
Provide value in every email. Offer insights, deliver news, share stories, ask for their experience with previous purchases—do things besides sell.
If customers get used to your emails always having value, they’ll continue to open them. There’s also a chance they’ll browse your site just in case they find something else they’d like to purchase, even if they have no current need.
6. Increase Convenience
In marketing, convenience is key. If you can make your processes easy, customers are more apt to shop with your brand. This includes everything from finding the product they’re looking for to completing the purchase. And with email marketing, it means making it simple for them to join your list.
Many eCommerce marketers make the mistake of adding too many fields to their forms, overwhelming potential subscribers. A better technique is to minimize the fields to the least amount of information you need to engage them. Then, continue to segment and gather additional information as they engage with your site and content.
Another way you can increase convenience is by sending triggered emails. Sometimes people get busy or don’t have a chance to complete a purchase. By sending that cart abandonment email, you provide them with a reminder and way to finish the transaction. If it’s a browse abandonment email, you can also provide recommendations with the option to automatically add it to their cart, streamlining the entire process.
7. Use Graphics
A picture goes a long way in eCommerce emails. If you can deliver eye-catching images of your products, you’ll focus readers’ attention and get them excited to purchase.
GIFs and multimedia are effective ways to hook your audience as they can deliver more than just a shot of your product. Images of people using your product are enticing because viewers will naturally place themselves in that position. It gets them forward-thinking of how the product could improve their life and status, driving a purchase.
Something important to acknowledge is that some users disable images in their email client. Make sure to offer a plain text version of your emails for this small, but sometimes valuable segment of your contacts.
Boosting Revenue With a Team of Professionals
If you truly want to boost revenue, you need to consider the entire customer lifecycle. The easiest way to do it is with a company that’s applied and tested all the eCommerce email ideas you’ve just read.
At SmartMail, we take pride in delivering high-converting trigger-based email campaigns, all done for you. We’ve sent billions of emails, and we’ve boiled our lessons learned into a playbook you can download. But if you want the results that become possible with years of experience in the field, request a consultation to learn how we can help you get them.
