Email marketing strategies for effective e-commerce

Although email marketing is one of the oldest marketing strategies today, it's not dead!

Here, we will provide you with some essential elements for designing an effective e-commerce strategy.

Today, if you have an email account, it’s almost impossible not to be influenced by the email marketing practices of some business websites. Offers, promotions and business information... the content of these emails can be of any kind. Email marketing is one of the best tools used in the world of online marketing and remains one of the most effective channels when it comes to generating conversions in any type of online business.

According to marketing studies, 98% of respondents said they would be willing to increase their email marketing investments in e-commerce sites in the future. ADigital conducted another very interesting study on email marketing for e-commerce, entitled ‘Study on the use and perception of email marketing in Italy’. A quarter of respondents said that 15-25% of online sales came from using email marketing as part of their own research.

In short, email marketing is more active than ever in e-commerce and, as mentioned, it remains an essential channel in any online e-commerce marketing strategy. To make our strategy effective, there are some guidelines we need to follow to help us attract the attention of users and prevent our emails from ending up in the dreaded spam folder.

In this article, we will provide you with a set of guidelines to follow when starting an email marketing campaign. are you ready? Then keep reading...

Animated Newsletter: In 2015 the first batch of newsletters with GIF animations came out, which had a great impact and achieved excellent results in terms of interaction. Due to overall progress on all email platforms, in 2017 more and more business emails contain animated/on-the-go items, GIFs, slideshows, or videos. However, not all e-mail readers can read them and sometimes appear only as still images. Keep that in mind so that the email doesn't lose its meaning when that happens.

Simple and responsive design: As we all know, more and more users are using their mobile phones to check their emails. Modeling these newsletters first on mobile devices, then on PC and vice versa will be the key to success in 2022.

Adapting to new trends

Online marketing is an ever-changing topic. This should encourage us to keep up with all the latest industry news and trends and continually adjust our strategies and actions. When it comes to email marketing, we can highlight three key trends for next year:

Animated Newsletters: In 2014 the first newsletters with animated GIFs appeared, which had a great impact and produced excellent results in terms of interaction. Due to overall progress on all email platforms, in 2017 more and more business emails contain animated/on-the-go items, GIFs, slideshows, or videos. However, they have not been read by all e-mail readers and are sometimes only displayed as still images. Keep that in mind so that the email doesn't lose its meaning when that happens.

Simple and responsive design: As we all know, more and more users are using their mobile phones to check their emails. Modeling these newsletters with mobile phones first and then with the PC, and not vice versa, will be the key to success in 2017.

Tailor-made: More and more email marketing tools allow you to customize emails so that users only get the relevant content they need.

Split the database

As mentioned earlier, in e-commerce personalization, not only message personalization, but also the type of content, is one of the key factors for the success of an email marketing strategy. In this regard, it makes sense to provide each group of users with relevant content based on their needs and ‘likes’.

Let's take a look at a simple example of an online dropshipping pet store. One way to segment our database is to do it by type of animal (e.g. cat owner). The weekly newsletter in this section contains the latest updates on Cats products and is more effective than a generic newsletter for the entire database.

Design campaigns that add value and capture customer attention

Did you know that 65% of internet users have used a coupon or discount received via email at least once? ‘Double-purpose’ promotions or discount coupons often have a high customer success rate, although it’s not the only way to generate good conversion levels.

Newsletters or ads are another of the most common email marketing campaigns used in e-commerce. This is an email that is usually generated on a regular basis (weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly) and often combines different types of content, such as products, articles, or news from a store.

There are countless email marketing campaigns that can lead to great results.

Here are some examples:

Welcome event for new members.

Events on special dates: Christmas, Mother's Day, Black Friday

New: products, collections, services, etc.

Tips for recently purchased products.

Birthday parties, communions, baptisms, marriages, etc.

Customer Testimonials

How to analyze the success of email marketing campaigns?

After you’ve created your database’s segmented list, defined your email campaign, designed some creative elements, and optimized your message, it’s time to launch them ... and of course keep track of the results.

After all, if you don’t analyze the results of the actions you take, you’ll get little or no benefit from your email marketing strategy. There are several KPIs or key metrics to measure the success or failure of your e-commerce store’s email marketing strategy, although the best ones can define your business well.

Let's describe in detail the most important:

Open Rate: The percentage of users who open your email.

Unsubscribe Rate: The percentage of users who unsubscribe from notifications.

Bounce rate: The percentage of emails that failed or did not reach your inbox.

Click-through rate: The click-through rate of the email (as a percentage of total emails and total open emails).

Conversion rate: Conversion rate (such as sales) as a percentage of total shipments.