Email marketing provides eCommerce companies with an effective way to boost engagement, sales, and revenue, so no wonder 38% of brands plan to increase their email marketing budgets this year.
“Welcome” and “order confirmed” emails are a great way to kickstart a relationship with new subscribers or purchasers. However to really maximise engagement, and get the most from your email campaigns, it’s recommended to move beyond these types of “transactional” emails, and consider implementing other strategies.
In this post we’ll introduce you to some of the best eCommerce email campaigns to drive engagement and lift revenues.
We’ll also examine how a powerful promotions experience platform can help you implement the best eCommerce email campaigns cost-effectively, at scale.
Suggested reading: Download our free eBook The Ultimate Guide to Using Promo Codes in eCommerce Strategy for hints and tips to make your email campaigns smarter.
Beyond the welcome: Unleashing the full potential of email marketing
Welcome emails offer you the potential to start a relationship with customers, however there are many other types of emails you can use to keep that relationship alive. From abandoned cart emails, and win-back emails, to seasonal email campaigns, we’ll show you that it’s possible to get more creative with your email marketing campaigns.
Here are a few examples of best eCommerce email campaigns to consider:
1. The cart abandonment challenge: Turning missed opportunities into sales
69.82% of online carts are abandoned, with eCommerce businesses losing billions per year in sales revenue - a figure that’s even higher for mobile users.
People leave their carts for any number of reasons, from perceived hidden costs to lengthy checkout procedures. Luckily, whatever the reason for their decision, you can win some of those customers back. An abandoned cart strategy is one of the best eCommerce email campaigns to help you do this.
An abandoned cart email is a follow-up email sent to customers who’ve added products to their baskets, but left the website without completing their purchase. It’s an incredibly effective sales recovery strategy that could see you recovering around 5-11% of potentially lost revenue.
2. Win-back email campaign
A win-back email campaign aims to re-engage inactive customers or contacts who’ve purchased from you previously, or signed up to your email list, but stopped opening their emails. The goal is to get them to interact with you again, and take positive action.
In your win-back emails, you could offer an incentive to nudge people who are sitting on the fence to buy from you again. Consider offering a bonus gift, free shipping, free upgrades, or reward points. Other options are sweepstakes, and prizes, or you could use gamification to reinvigorate peoples’ interests.
Tip: Emails that contain special discounts show customers they’re a valued part of your business. Customers will start to anticipate that when they open your future emails, they can expect to see further exciting purchasing opportunities.
3. Seasonal email campaigns
Ecommerce sales tend to rise and dip throughout the year. From Valentine’s Day to Christmas and Easter, email campaigns can help you capitalise on peak seasons throughout the year, by generating a buzz around your products and services.
Use product recommendations, launch competitions, or run time-based promotions to make your emails stand out. Make sure you’re delivering the right offers to the right groups of people, by segmenting your audience, in terms of their behaviours, and past purchases.
Tips for improving welcome emails
It’s worth remembering that transactional emails, for example “order confirmed'' or “welcome” messages should still play an important role in your strategy.
Since they offer customers peace of mind that a payment has been processed, or contain important information about subscriptions, customers are generally eager to open them. In fact, the open rate for these types of messages is about 63%, far higher than that of average marketing emails.
This is a golden opportunity to collect feedback about your brand, add in product suggestions, or include unique discount codes.
Welcome emails with offers can boost revenue by 30% per mail, compared to welcome emails without offers.
Tip: By using unique, single use, promotional codes in your welcome emails, you can ensure only the intended customer will receive the discount.
Case study: Avis - Driving engagement in loyalty from the get go
Problem: Avis struggled with engagement with their loyalty program, and wanted to make sure new customers were engaged right from the start (and entice new members to make their first purchase).
Solution: They created a welcome message to drive engagement for their new preferred customers. This was sent via email and contained unique discount promo codes.
Result: 12.6% lift in conversion rates.
Key email strategies to try in 2024
- Make use of email marketing automation: Use marketing automation that integrates with a promotions engine, to enable efficient distribution of unique coupon codes.
- Get to know your audience: With third party cookies fading away, your own data will become super important. Use surveys, and track the email content your audience engages with. Build a segmentation strategy around that information and apply it throughout your multi-channel marketing campaigns.
- Make A/B testing routine to remove the guesswork — create 2 versions of emails and run split tests to find out, for example, which subject lines work best for you in terms of open rates, and which content gets you the highest conversion rates.
Unlocking scalability with a promotional experience engine
Uniqodo helps companies unlock the potential of their email marketing strategies at scale. Our powerful promotions platform allows you to send the right campaigns to the right people at the right time, depending on how customers have previously interacted with your brand.
Our single-use coupon codes can be used in your email campaigns, as well as on key landing pages. These could include emails to welcome new customers, win-back programs, event announcements, or abandoned cart emails.
You can import coupon codes from your eCommerce platform, or use Uniqodo’s promotion engine to generate secure, single-use codes. Unlike bulk codes these promotional codes are unique, and cannot be re-used online, thereby protecting your ROI from the risk of code leakage, and over-discounting.
To understand more about Uniqodo’s capabilities, and how we could help you create the best eCommerce email campaigns, get in touch for a demo today.
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