Email marketing has a lot of friends in our digital world. One of its best friends is eCommerce.

After all, your relationship with your customers shouldn’t end when the first purchase is made.

Email marketing can help you engage and interact with your customers after that initial conversion in many productive ways for your customers and your business.

Let’s take a look at how you should be doing this.

Top Integrations for Email Marketing and eCommerce

Integrate Your Email Marketing and eCommerce

Hopefully, you already know about the eCommerce integrations offered by Benchmark.

With our PieSync partnership, we’ve added a few more to the mix:

  • Shopify
  • BigCommerce
  • Contactlab Marketing Cloud

What Can You Accomplish with Email Marketing & eCommerce Integrations?

As we mentioned before, your customer purchasing something is the beginning of a new communication cycle with consumers.

By integrating your email marketing account with an eCommerce store, you can keep growing your relationships with your customers.

Here’s what you can accomplish by integrating email marketing and eCommerce:

Trigger an Automation

An individual making a purchase can be the action that initiates an automation.

Let’s take a look at what that might look like:

Welcome Series

Once a customer buys something, you can send out a confirmation email to thank them for making the purchase.

You can make them feel good about their purchase by following up a couple of days later with an email boasting customer testimonials.

Now that they’re a little more confident with their purchase, you can follow-up with an email promoting some related products they may want to consider.

You may even want to inspire them to get more use of your products by sending an email that demonstrates how others have put your goods to use.

Then, if it’s a product that will run out, you can send them an email when it’s time to buy more. If they don’t convert after that one, you can follow up with a small discount to encourage the repeat business.

Abandoned Cart Reminder

On average, the cart abandonment rate in 2017 was 78.65%.

That’s a lot of potential sales left sitting in your cart.

If you’re not sending an abandoned cart reminder automation, you’re leaving sales on the table.

Don’t do that!

Those are high-value leads because they had enough interest in your products to get them that far.

By integrating your eCommerce store with your email marketing account, you can trigger an automation to send when someone abandons their shopping cart.

Give your customers enough time that it doesn’t feel pushy, but when a cart is abandoned, follow-up with a reminder 12-24 hours later.

If they still haven’t purchased the 48-hour mark, follow-up with one last email offering a small discount or free shipping.

That’s usually enough to seal the deal.

Request a Review

Social proof in the form of customer reviews goes a long way toward helping others feel confident enough to buy your goods or services.

In fact, 84% of consumers trust an online review as much as one of their friends.

So, it’s important that you work to get as many positive online reviews as possible.

If you’ve integrated your eCommerce store with your email marketing and can identify loyal customers, you can send them a review request.

After all, if they keep coming back for more, they’re probably pretty happy with what you’re selling them. Ask them to tell the world about it!

Upsell Offers

It is far more difficult to acquire a new customer than it is to sell to an existing one.

That’s why an upsell campaign can be successful.

If your eCommerce store and email marketing account are integrated, you can create a campaign to upsell to your existing customers.

Send a follow-up telling them if they’re enjoying their purchase, there are some related products that may be of interest to them.

Do It All with Automation Pro

For the campaigns outlined above and several others, there are strategy templates available to you with Benchmark Email’s marketing automation tool, Automation Pro.

The entry point for any automation can be when someone is added to a list.

You can use PieSync to integrate your eCommerce store with your email marketing account and create a special list for that group.

When someone is added to that list, it can trigger any one of a number of strategies available to be created with a template.

Here are the strategy templates available to you in Automation Pro:

  • Welcome Series
  • Promo Emails
  • Follow-up Series
  • Abandoned Cart
  • Review Request
  • Feedback Request

Wrapping Up

A customer making a purchase with your company is simply an opportunity for new email marketing campaigns.

Being able to easily integrate your eCommerce store and your email marketing account is a powerful way to generate more sales.

Don’t forget, you can sync up to 2,000 contacts for free thanks to our partnership with PieSync.

You can learn more about how to integrate your Benchmark Email account with PieSync, in this helpful FAQ.

We’ll be co-hosting a webinar with our friends at PieSync. It’s called “How to Save Time And Quickly Grow Your Most Valuable Marketing Asset: Your List.” Register today.

Have you successfully integrated your eCommerce and email marketing? Share your tips or success stories in the comments below!