The bulk of stores on Shopify underestimate the power of email marketing, approaching it as just another broadcast tool and sending batch-and-blast emails to everyone. But businesses that manage to obtain ROI from such marketing strategies outperform the rest for a simple reason: they ditched generic broadcasts for smarter, targeted campaigns, with emails and sequences that respond to each user’s behavior.
If you manage a store on Shopify, you don’t want to miss out on such an opportunity to convert and retain customers. Treating it as a potent driver of growth will show you why email marketing tops the list of marketing channels for as many as ~72% entrepreneurs.
First, develop an engaged list
More email contacts don’t mean better. A list of 10K active subscribers is ten times better than a list of 50K who are ghosting you. The biggest email providers (Microsoft, Gmail, and Yahoo) have implemented stricter requirements in this regard and ask senders to include clear, one-click options in their templates for users to unsubscribe from an email or domain whenever they want. If you’re a bulk sender who initiates over 5K emails every day, you have a bit on your plate when it comes to these rules – and one of them is to adjust your approach based on how engaged recipients are. Which takes us to the following important tip.
Do your segmentation right
The advantage of segmenting email campaigns is something that many small businesses miss out on. At the very best, many segment simply by unsubscribed versus subscribed, which doesn’t help when it comes to sending the right content to the right category at the optimal time. Not to mention that this isn’t even a process of segmentation, but a compliance setting.
Embrace the right approach and segment your list by new subscribers, first-time purchasers, recurrent purchasers, highly loyal or VIP buyers, and former buyers who haven’t made any purchase in a while. This will help you with all the important processes, from onboarding newcomers to offering exclusive deals to repeat purchasers to reengaging lapsed ones with offers and other win-back strategies. While here, it’s important that the tool you use allows you to integrate engagement tiers too for a more targeted user experience. For instance, the recipients who engage with your emails more and contribute to higher click-through rates can receive long-format, more frequent sequences, whereas the colder ones should receive the highest-value emails.
Avoid aggressive and pushy campaigns with disinterested contacts because that can hurt your deliverability rates and send your entire domain to the spam folder.
Choose your email marketing software right
Not all email marketing software is the same for e-commerce. Some may focus on making services easy to use but not complex (for those prioritizing rapid setups), whereas others may pack the right features to optimize emails with behavioral tracking, real-time data sync, and all sorts of advantages. Some tools seem cheaper on lower tiers but tend to send bills to the moon when the business scales and the email list grows. Others are intended to serve as all-in-one growth motors and go to the point where they facilitate webinar making and hosting from one single place. Choosing the best email marketing for Shopify is the foundation of a successful marketing campaign, so do it with your current needs in mind, but also with your future goals. You don’t want to choose a platform now only to need to change it later and have to deal with two learning curves.
Key automated sequences for success
So you’ve set up your email software and cleaned your email list, and you’re now wondering what’s left, because that’s clearly not all that you can do to boost your conversions and ROI. Here, launching automated workflows is the step where you’ll switch from sending one-off campaigns manually, and set up a workflow for this tedious task.
Create a welcome series to introduce your brand, create expectations, and even offer an incentive (because what’s better at sparking one’s interest than free credit, highly generous offers, and big discounts?). This way, you catch the reader with their interest at peak levels.
There are also the sequences for abandoned carts, namely automated reminders that notify the subscriber that a product they’re sharing interest in might, say, run out of stock. Post-purchase emails are also important because they give off the feel that the recipient isn’t just another purchase on the brand’s spreadsheet, but a valuable contributor to the business.
Personalize recommendations
It’s been demonstrated time and time again that personalization is key today to drawing and retaining modern internet users’ interest – and if you think for a second, it makes sense why no one would want to waste time on an email that doesn’t understand them. Based on your personalization capabilities, make a point of targeting the right potential buyers, at the right time, with the right proposals. The main categories of recommendations should consist of trending products, products that have just arrived in one’s preferred category, products that are often purchased together, and products from categories scrutinized by the target.
The more information you gather about your audience’s preferences and browsing habits, the more pertinent your emails will feel.
Lastly, keep an eye out for the common deliverability traps that might be silently ruining your campaign.
Not even the best copy or template will get an email that doesn’t meet deliverability standards in the inbox – it will redirect it to the dreaded spam or promotional folders. That’s why you need to keep an eye out for several mishaps.
If you skip SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setups, email providers might think your domain is illicit and lower your sender reputation. Then, sending unsolicited emails can trigger complaints and ruin your brand’s health. Don’t use excessive marketing words, like “FREE”, “one-time offer”, and so on, because that can flag your messages before they even make it to the reader.
It’s about keeping a marketing hygiene that’s demanded from modern email managers.