Email marketing can be your best friend when it comes to promoting your eCommerce business. But to make it happen, you need to make sure you’re doing it right — and that you’re taking advantage of all the various email opportunities available to you.

There are four billion email users around the globe, and that number is expected to jump to 4.6 billion by 2025. That’s a huge advantage for eCommerce businesses, and especially small ones, since, with just one marketing tactic, you have the ability to reach a huge pool of potential customers. And in an age when the competition is both fierce and constant, it’s important you’re putting to use any tool you have for staying top of mind with — and converting — your audience.

Ready to make the most of your email marketing strategy? Here’s what you need to know about email marketing for eCommerce businesses, including helpful tips for making every email count.

What is eCommerce Marketing?

eCommerce marketing is any sort of promotional activity that your business does for the purpose of selling your goods or services. Email marketing is just one type of eCommerce marketing, with other tactics such as social media, print media, and blog articles all contributing to this same overarching goal.

As for why emails are such a popular marketing medium (about nine out of every ten marketers use them for organic outreach), there are two big reasons: emails are inexpensive and extremely effective. For every $1 that your eCommerce business spends on email marketing, you can generate a potential return of up to $42, which is probably why 80% of marketers say that if they had to choose, they’d keep email marketing over social media.

Of course, while selling products and services is the ultimate goal of email marketing and eCommerce marketing in general, it’s not the only one. eCommerce businesses rely on their marketing efforts to achieve a wide range of other benefits, from increasing brand awareness to building loyalty in existing customers. Regardless of your primary objectives, you’ll have to nail it if you want your business to grow, and it’s definitely not something that any eCommerce business can afford to neglect.

7 Essential eCommerce Email Marketing Tips

You know that you have to hit it out of the park with your emails, but do you know how to do it? There are lots of tricks and tactics for helping your emails go the distance, as well as tried-and-true strategies for creating emails that connect. Whether you’re new to email marketing for eCommerce or you’re just looking for ways to improve, try out these tips to better sell your brand.

1. Stay Consistent with Promotional Emails

Promotional emails — i.e., emails offering discounts on certain goods — are an excellent way to build buzz with your audience. Use automation software to roll out promo emails on a regular basis and include a call to action in each of them to encourage your readers to pull the trigger.  

2. Optimize Your Transactional Emails

Transactional emails serve a key purpose, which is to keep your customers updated from checkout to delivery. Keep them from going to the spam folder by using a different sender and IP address for transactional emails than you do for promo emails, and encourage future purchases by including personalized recommendations in the email body.

3. Personalize Your Messages

Speaking of personalization, it’s one of the best things you can do to build strong relationships with your subscribers. Non-personalized emails are a major turn-off for more than half of customers, and 82% of marketers report seeing an increase in open rates after working personalization into their strategy.

4. Segment Your Contacts

Batch-and-blast emails are rarely effective. If you want to make the biggest impact, segment your contacts and separate customers into various lists based on demographics, behaviors, and/or where they are in the buyer’s journey. From there, you’ll be able to send the right content to the right people, which should increase conversion rates and lead to more sales.

5. Embrace the Welcome Email

Be sure to send a welcome email to all new subscribers. Welcome emails get four times as many opens and five times as many clicks as other marketing emails, making them one of the single most valuable types of emails that you can send.

For eCommerce businesses, welcome emails are a great way to thank a new subscriber for joining your list and assuring them that they’ll be the first to know when discounts, promos, and sales roll out. 

6. Start a Loyalty Program

Loyalty programs can increase customer engagement and keep your customers coming back. Use email to build out your loyalty campaigns, sending promos, offers, and updates that keep customers aware of the value they get out of the program. You can (and should) also recruit new customers to the program as part of your transactional email content.

7. Follow Up with Abandoned Cart Emails

Nearly 70% of carts will be abandoned. And while you can’t turn all of them around, you can get some customers to come back and pull the trigger on their purchases. How? With abandoned cart emails that remind customers what they’re missing. Use A/B testing to figure out how soon you should send them, starting with one hour after abandonment and stretching it out from there if necessary based on your results.

Selling more starts with streamlining your email marketing efforts. Try out the tips above and discover what works with your audience so you can market your eCommerce business more efficiently and, hopefully, see your products fly off the digital shelves.