Email Marketing Guide For Shopify

There are 4 bilion daily email users and it’s counting each day. This makes email marketing an important part of growth process for Shopify stores. In this post you’ll learn;

• How to approach email marketing
• Three types of email strategies you need to have
• Best practices for higher conversions and revenue from email marketing
• FAQ

How to Approach Email Marketing

Email is one of the oldest “earned” channel for marketing. Essence of email marketing is ability to reach your customers with one-to-one communication.

This is why it’s important to invest enough resources and be careful when working on your email marketing strategy.

If your email become too much or too irrelevant, people starts to ignore your emails and today all inbox solutions works hard to put only emails matter in the inbox.

Best solution for this think of your customers not just email addresses and think them as human. Ask yourself if they were just right here and I start to talk about this topic, will they be interested?

If your answer is yes, then you can send that email. If not, then won’t send that email just hoping a few extra sales because it won’t bring that much result.

Three types of email strategies you need to have

There are lot’s of different email marketing practices and I see that it confuse people easily. So let’s talk about email types and strategies you need have.

1. Transactional Emails

This is the most basic email you need to send. This emails only send when people take an action on your store. “We got your order”, “Your order shipped” are most popular example to transactional emails.

You can design these emails in Shopify panel easily.

Try to be consistent with your branding when designing these emails.

Being transactional emails won’t make these emails useless for the marketing.

You can still make offers, recommend product in these emails. Just don’t forget that it needs to be done carefully.

2. Email Sequences and Automations

Now there are second type of email marketing. Based on your sales funnel, it’s important to use emails to educate and convert your subscribers to customers.

This is where email sequences come to play.

Sequence emails designed based on your lists, value propositions and how do you get subscribers.

First one should be welcome email sequence. This will be triggered when a new subscriber joined the list.

Welcome sequence should focus on your brand story, what makes you different, how do you solve the pain/need of your customers and all reviews, press coverage and other important advantages of your stores.

If you use landing pages and have custom value propositions like webinar, ebook and other kinds, then you need to create different lists for all of these sequences.

Also you can use smart email sequences like after purchase emails for upsell.

3. Campaign Emails

This is the last type of emails. After previous emails you need to send emails time to time about new products, campaigns, new updates from your store…

Most important part of campaign emails is segmentation. You shouldn’t send campaign emails to all of your subscribers. Here are some segment ideas;

• Subscribers didn’t buy anything yet
• Customers with one/two/third or more orders
• Customers who spend less than $100 or more than $100 (amount needs to change based on your average order value)
• Customers who buy products on specific collections or buy products with multiple collections
• Customers location (country wise)
• Customers who complete order in last 3 months or who don’t place any order in last 6 months

You get the idea. Try to segment your email data based on behavioral data.

Subject lines plays a huge role to get people to open your email. Try to personalize your subject lines and email body as much as you can.

One of the most common mistake is sending emails as images only. There should be plain text in your email copy and it helps you to increase your open rates.

Best Practices for Higher Conversions and Revenue from Email Marketing

1. Find Your Best Frequency: Don’t try to copy/paste your competitors or experts advice. Try to find  your best frequency. If you send too much emails, your emails can ends up in spam or loosing subscribers.
2. First Party Data and Personalization: Collect as much as possible data about your subscribers and use them in your emails.
3. Segmentation, Segmentation, Segmentation: Segmentation is starting key for highly successful email marketing. Try to segment your emails as much as you can!
4. Subject Makes Opens: Creative subject lines makes your emails open. Work on interesting, eye catching subject lines.
5. Content Makes Clicks: Let’s say they open the mail. There should be something to make them click on it. Work on your content with creative call-to-actions. Don’t repeat yourself in emails.
6. Be Mobile Friendly: Half of emails opened on mobile devices. Check how your emails look like on mobile devices.

Your email marketing strategy should be aligned with growth, marketing and conversion strategies.

Don’t forget to check Growth Guide, Marketing Guide and Conversion Optimization Guide.