6 Email Strategies For E-commerce Companies
At Rat Race Marketing, we’re huge believers in the power of email marketing. At last count, our clients have earned hundreds of thousands of dollars from email. It doesn’t matter if your business is in B2B or B2C, email can power your revenue growth predictably and cost effectively. After our work with a leading outdoor e-commerce company, we put together a list of strategies that have worked for growing their business through email. Here are a few email strategy ideas for e-commerce companies looking to build up their email marketing capabilities.
Automated Flows
We highly recommend Klaviyo for e-commerce email marketing due its flexibility, integrations with Shopify and other BigCommerce, amazing documentation, and seamless automation. With Flows, you can automate who gets emails based on triggers, when they get them, and how (email, SMS, or both). You can test different aspects of your emails like subject lines, creative, send time, etc., to generate sales on demand. It’s a set it and forget it way to engage users and grow sales. Here are a few Flow ideas we recommend:
Abandoned cart
Browse abandonment
Welcome series
Anniversary of first purchase
Birthday
Time lapsed since last purchase
Cross sell
Discount from trip wire / pop up
List cleaning - unsubscribe or suppress unengaged users
Campaigns
Depending on your customers expectations, we recommend sending a weekly, semi weekly, or monthly campaign to different subsets of your user base. Develop content pillars for email campaigns that overlap with your overall content strategy to drive sales and remain top of mind (blog is great). A few examples:
Blog content: send an email with a blog article or video to educate your customers
Social media roundup: do you post on social?
Influencer / athlete
Industry writeups
PR
Holidays
Discounts / sales
Back in stock
Collect feedback from customers
Always ask your audience what they’re thinking. It could be about a recent purchase they made to solicit a review, or a survey to a subset of your audience who stopped engaging with your emails. Set up a Flow or Campaign, make a Google Form or some other feedback system your CTA destination, and collect feedback on autopilot. We found that a discount doesn’t hurt here to get the feedback but also to get people to re-engage with your product. We recently asked for feedback from engaged email subscribers what they thought about the email program since we took over and got some good tidbits of info to guide the program in the future.
Segmentation
There are endless opportunities to segment your audience and the more you develop your email marketing prowess the more segments and lists you’ll have. People who bought your product more than a year ago but haven’t purchased since? Sure people who are opening emails but not buying anything? Check. You’ll want to see who your most engaged subscribers are, who lapsed from being highly engaged, to those you should suppress from future emails. Klaviyo makes it super simple to build these out.
Wholesale ordering
Okay, this isn’t for DTC brands but is for those who have partner distribution in addition to an online store. Want to focus your sales efforts on the whales, and automate the orders from the minnows? Setup a wholesale store (Shopify, BigCommerce, etc.) and make the key contacts at your accounts aware of it. This will give you and your sales team the time back to prioritize larger opportunities. We saw 50% of monthly wholesale orders come through the portal as a direct result of email. To help drive adoption of the platform, you can provide limited time offers for orders over a certain size, include free product in orders of a certain size, promote products with too much inventory, etc..
Wholesale account prospecting
Ready to get more wholesale accounts into your customer base? I recommend good old cold email automation to do it.
This type of campaign goes against Klaviyo’s recommendations and terms of service since you’ll need to build a list of contacts who have not opted in to your email communication. For this job, you’ll want to use a Sales Automation tool instead of a Marketing Automation tool which will send the emails out through a standard ESP like gmail. There are several options out there, but we recently fell in love with Lemlist. The full scope of cold email automation is outside the scope of this article
What kind of offer resonates? Depending on your product(s), it could be as simple as a free sample. For more complex products it could be an intro call with you or a sales rep.