If email marketing isn’t driving at least a quarter of your ecomm revenue, you’re doing it wrong

Healthy ecommerce brands drive at least 20-40% of their revenue through email marketing.

That’s according to Connie Cen, founder and owner of Rocketeer Media.

And in Klaviyo’s marketing mix report, 76.86% of ecommerce businesses placed email marketing in the top 3 ROI-generating marketing channels.

Clearly, email marketing is powerful. But in order to achieve those kinds of results, you need the right foundations and technology.

It doesn’t have to be hard or expensive, but it’s important. Get it wrong, and you could be stuck diagnosing email issues for years—bringing in agencies and experts to fix what you could have simply set up properly to begin with.

We’ve got you covered, with the scoop on email marketing tips and best practices, the best email marketing services for your brand, the email marketing plug-ins you should use with your ecommerce platform, and how to make sure you’re starting from a place of value and quality—so that you end with conversions and loyal, lifelong customers.

Let’s start with the basics.

What is ecommerce email marketing?

Ecommerce email marketing refers to the practice of using email to promote the products and services of your online store.

Ecommerce stores use email marketing to connect with customers and potential customers through promotions, announcements, and other relevant content in order to:

• Raise brand awareness
• Sell products
• Educate and inform
• Build long-term customer loyalty

“Ecommerce relies heavily on email marketing as a way to connect with both current and prospective customers,” writes New York Times bestselling author Neil Patel, co-founder of NP Digital. “It’s used as a way to promote new products, communicate exclusive offers and deals, and engage with the target audience.”

4 types of ecommerce email marketing strategies

1. Promotional email marketing

A promotional email is an email designed to generate sales. Promotional emails may be campaigns or automations, but their goal is usually the same: to encourage the recipient to make a purchase.

Common types of promotional emails include:

• New product announcements
• Time-sensitive promotions
• Seasonal deals, coupons, and discount codes
• Cross-sell/up-sell emails

2. Transactional email marketing

A transactional email is a trigger-based email that is designed to relay essential information to a customer, rather than generate sales. Common transactional emails include:

• Order confirmation emails
• Shipping confirmation emails
• Delivery updates
• Account-created confirmations

Importantly, a customer doesn’t need to subscribe to your email list in order to receive transactional emails. That means people who unsubscribe from your list, aka suppressed email addresses, will still receive transactional emails, unless:

• The email bounced too many times.
• The email address is invalid.
• The recipient previously marked a message as spam.

3. Ecommerce email marketing campaigns

Email marketing campaigns are one-time sends to a pre-established target group of contacts, such as:

• Regular email newsletters
• Sale announcements
• Promotions

In an email service provider (ESP) like Klaviyo, you can create an individual email campaign immediately, or prepare it in advance and schedule it to send at a later time.

4. Ecommerce email marketing automations

An email marketing automation, also known as a flow, is an automated email message or a sequence of automated email messages triggered when a person performs a specific action, such as:

• Joining your email list
• Exceeding a certain customer lifetime value
• Abandoning their shopping cart

A few examples of commonly triggered email automations include:

• Abandoned cart emails
• Welcome series
• Browse abandonment emails
• Post-purchase and follow-up emails
• Cross-sell and up-sell emails
• Win-back emails
• Back-in-stock emails
• Replenishment emails

4 core pillars of an ecommerce email marketing campaign

1. List growth

Your email list is a collection of people who have signed up to receive emails from your business. Lists are static, meaning they grow as people subscribe or are manually added.

Whether you’re new to email marketing or already have a list of email subscribers, building your list with new subscribers is a critical part of any online marketing strategy. Email marketing can’t be effective if you don’t have an engaged audience to send to.

List growth strategies vary by business, but the most common ones include:

• Sign-up forms: Create and style pop-up, fly-out, full-screen, and embedded opt-in forms for your ecommerce site that ask visitors to input their email address.
• Subscribe pages: Embed a subscribe page on your website to serve as a landing page or link directly to a subscribe page in an email or elsewhere.

2. Segmentation

Unlike traditional subscriber lists, segments are groupings of contacts defined by a set of conditions. Whereas your email list is static, email segments are dynamic—meaning they grow as people meet the segments’ conditions and shrink as people no longer meet them. They also update in real time.

Highly segmented campaigns return more than 3x the revenue per recipient as unsegmented campaigns. Here are a few examples of how you can use segments to identify different audiences:

• First-time purchasers
• Inactive subscribers who have been on your list for at least 6 months but have never opened or clicked an email
• VIP customers who have purchased at least X number of times or spent Y amount of money
• Customers with a high predicted customer lifetime value (CLV)

3. Personalization

For years, marketers have been learning that consumers are more likely to shop with brands that recognize them, remember them, and provide them with relevant offers and product recommendations.

Companies that excel at personalization in marketing generate 40% more revenue from related activities than average players, according to McKinsey & Company—and while 71% of consumers expect personalization from the brands they interact with, even more (76%) get frustrated when they don’t get it.

When you segment your audience based on their preferences and unique characteristics, you can make sure every email appeals to them personally—and relevant, personalized emails are what show your customers you care about their interests.

4. Content

The other 3 pillars of email marketing won’t go very far without this one. You can’t send an email to your subscribers unless you create it first.

Email marketing content varies significantly, not only by retailer but also by individual email. But a typical marketing email includes:

• A subject line
• A professional logo
• A navigation bar
• Images
• The actual message
• A clear call to action (CTA)

4 key benefits of ecommerce email marketing

Compared to paid and performance marketing, which have spent the better part of a decade seducing revenue-hungry businesses with third-party targeting and long marketing attribution windows, email marketing has sometimes been accused of being old-fashioned, tone-deaf—even dead.

With so many flashy marketing channels to choose from, why bother with email marketing? Here are a few email marketing benefits that make it worth your serious investment:

At the end of the day, Cen says, “as a previous ecommerce brand owner myself, I understand that the major thing email marketing really helps with is getting worry off your plate.”