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Could a few eCommerce email marketing hacks help you double your sales? Taking a stand from your side, I’d definitely say it isn’t! You might even think that all these “eCommerce marketing hacks” are totally crazy and you have made a huge mistake venturing into this read!
Calm down and hold your ground! It’s actually possible – you can double your store sales using a few simple yet effective eCommerce email marketing tips!
It’s always common to jump to conclusions like “Email marketing is dead” or “Email marketing isn’t effective anymore”. If you’re an eCommerce store owner and you’ve got similar thoughts, you should think twice.
Top eCommerce stores like Amazon and Walmart have been making effective use of eCommerce email campaigns. And it’s no doubt that they’d be following some of the best eCommerce email marketing strategies to grow their sales! Taking this a step ahead, the exact search for the word ”eCommerce email marketing strategy” has 37,400 results!
Crazy! And definitely promising! So, if you’re looking forward to doubling your store sales, let’s get started then!
Best Email Marketing Hacks for eCommerce
Below mentioned are some of the handpicked effective email marketing strategies and eCommerce marketing hacks that can help create email campaigns that convert. And you on the other hand, can grow your eCommerce sales with ease. All you have to do is sit back, observe, tweak if necessary and carry them out!
Now, to the first email marketing hack for eCommerce,
1. Make Your Copies Worth Reading
Email marketing is more like an elevator pitch! You don’t get more than a minute to pitch to your customers (sometimes, it can be even lesser than that) and you’ve got to make the most out of it! This is why your email copies should be worth the read! And here are a few tips that can help you do the same,
Connect With Your Recipients
Never forget that your customers/subscribers are people just like you and they’d like to be treated well! So, connecting with them should be a good start – works for both your welcome emails and promotional emails. Greet them, try using words like “you”, “your”, “yours” and on the other end, represent yourself as a team – “We”, “Ours”, “Us” and more. This can help create a bond between you and your customers which is not only going to help with the sale but also has immense benefits down the road!
Talk About Benefits, Not About the Features
Personally, this one is a hard-learned email marketing tip! What’s the point in offering your visitors a flat 70% discount if they have no idea how they’re about to benefit from your product? In fact, 8 out of 10 eCommerce stores fail to do this.
Here’s an example where Spotify has done this right!
Take a look at the email copy lines I’ve highlighted. Spotify is letting me know the benefits I get from being one of its users. And here’s the super cool part – Spotify hasn’t revealed the benefits I get when I become a Premium User (curiosity pays off well most of the time). Anyways, that’s how you talk about the benefits and not the features! And as for this example, Spotify has given Free Premium access which makes it too hard to ignore!
Clean Error-Free Copies
This might not seem like an eCommerce email marketing strategy either! But you have no idea how important it is to come up with clean, error-free email copies. even a small typography error can make it look awkward. The typo mistake was made on purpose – seems awkward right?
So, make sure your copies are error-free by proofreading them twice or thrice. The last thing you’d want to see is a response email from your customer pinpointing your mistake! Also, there are some exceptional marketing tools out there that can help you with it.
That’s it for the first eCommerce email marketing tip. Let’s move on to the next eCommerce marketing hack!
2. Personalization Can Save the Day
How could one miss personalization from the eCommerce email marketing best practices list? Not a chance! Before we get to know more about this eCommerce marketing hack, here are a few statistics and an example!
- A huge 74% of marketers stated that targeted personalization can increase customer engagement to a great extent.
- Personalized emails have the potential to increase transaction rates up to 6x times.
- In a survey, 33% of marketers stated that personalization will be the most important aspect of marketing in the future.
- eCommerce email campaigns that are sent with personalized subject lines have a 26% increased chance of getting opened.
And there are more statistics that can be jotted down but the idea is to help you understand how important this eCommerce email marketing strategy is!
Also, it’s time that you took a look at the example!
Personalization doesn’t stop with adding your customer’s first name in the subject line or the salutation – there’s actually more to this! The above is an email that I received from a popular food delivery chain business! And they’ve tracked down my history including the number of times I ordered food, my favorite restaurant (the choice of my cuisine😉), and more! I did feel an instant connection with the business!
So, that’s how powerful this overlooked eCommerce marketing hack called personalization can get!
Here are a few personalization tips that can help double your eCommerce sales (assume it is more like a journey).
Greet Them With Their First Names
This simple eCommerce email marketing tip has been winning hearts for decades! Greeting your customers/subscribers delivers an instant connection and increases your email open rate to a great extent (when you include first names in the email subject). It’d help your recipients realize that it’s not just a bulk email but you’ve taken the efforts to address it to them. And this simple eCommerce marketing hack is being used by millions of eCommerce stores worldwide!
Automated Emails Based on Decisions
Delivering the right information to your visitors at the right time is crucial and helps them make informed decisions, eventually leading to increased sales. All you have to do is create automated eCommerce email campaigns by chalking out strategies as to what can be sent to a visitor after he/she takes a specific action. Here’s a quick example of how an online grocery store can send out emails,
The above is a small example based on only two actions – Subscription & Cart Abandonment. Similarly, you can create drip campaigns for multiple actions by jotting down the possible actions a visitor can take on your store.
Creating automated eCommerce email campaigns has helped businesses drive sales to a great extent! And it’s no doubt you’ll be benefitted from the same provided you do it right!
P.S. Cart Abandonment and FOMO are both great effective email marketing strategies. We’ll know more about them in a separate sub-heading.
Here’s what you should do next.
Re-Direct Them to Dedicated Landing Pages
What started as a simple personalized greeting email will reach places when your recipients start to interact with them. And one possible destination they might reach is a landing page that you’ve created.
When your visitors reach the destination (in this case, the landing page), you’ve got to make sure that the personalization experience continues! Prepare tailored content that correlates with the email you’ve sent before. It should be like the visitor is seeing an extended version of your email and there should be no room for distractions.
Making sure that the journey of your customer/new visitor is streamlined and personalized at every moment is a great eCommerce marketing hack that helps you to double your sales!
And to the next great eCommerce email marketing strategy!
3. Creating a Sense of Urgency – Fear of Missing Out
Assume you’re getting a flat 60% off on your favorite headphones and the offer is about to end in two days! There’s a 74% chance that you’ll buy it without fail on the very first day. And that’s called “Fear of Missing Out”.
Here are some stats and an example to help you understand better,
- Approximately, 60% of people purchase because of FOMO. And they do it within the first 24 hours.
- FOMO is experienced by people who are between the ages of 18 and 30. They cover 56% of the total people experiencing FOMO.
- 69% of millennials (people born between 1980 and 2020) experience FOMO on a daily basis!
While social media handles and ads are ideal ways to create FOMO, sending them via emails is always great – the results have made it clear that this is also one of the best email marketing strategies for eCommerce.
And here’s an example of how eCommerce stores use the “FOMO” factor to increase their sales
J.Crew has done this great by clearly letting its subscribers know that their offer is about to end today and it’s available only in stores. Also, they’ve made sure to kick off the temptation barrel by displaying a 30% and 50% discount on the same email!
You can come up with an email like J.Crew or a flashy, colorful GIF like this one,
So, the above are some examples of emails with the FOMO strategy. Similarly, you can come up with an email for your store and send them out during the end of deals/seasonal sales – should help boost your sales within a short period of time!
Always make sure that your audience gets the message clearly – the end date, the discounts, and any other specific instructions you’d want them to know! Also, you can add countdown timers within your email to create more urgency!
So, let’s move on to the next eCommerce email marketing tip!
4. Cross-Sell to Your Customers
Cross-selling, is a forever evergreen eCommerce marketing hack that you really can’t afford to miss! Cross-selling is the technique where you try to sell relevant products to your customers when they’ve purchased something. This helps you to generate more sales and revenue for your eCommerce store.
And as for the question of how you can upsell to your customers, the answer is emails without a doubt!
So, here are a few tips that can help you send perfect cross-sell emails to your customers
Choose the Right Products to Cross-Sell
Relevancy is highly important when it comes to cross-selling. Because no customer of yours would want to buy something that’s totally unnecessary (even if he/she is an impulsive purchaser). For example, when your customer buys a pair of sneakers, it’s a good idea to cross-sell appropriate denim, not deodorants! To do this, you need to know the behavior of your customers, segment them accordingly and create automated email campaigns for each product!
Know When to Cross-Sell Using Emails
Another crucial factor you should take a look into if you want your cross-selling email campaign to turn out successful. When it comes to emails, there’s this one thing you should remember – you cannot send them as and when you like. There should be a good reason behind the same. Simply asking your visitor to buy something is not going to work but, you can find appropriate opportunities to do the same. Here are two instances where you can cross-sell products with emails
- Order Confirmation Emails – This is a great opportunity to cross-sell products to your customers. It’s because the customer has recently completed a purchase and seeing something relevant to it in the order confirmation email might make him/her consider buying the product!
- Product Review Emails – Reaching out to your customers to know how they feel about their recent purchase is not only a good gesture but also an excellent opportunity for cross-selling. Using phrases like “Since you bought this, we thought you might find this useful” should help.
Remember, cross-selling is not about pushing. It’s about luring potential customers to buy more! All you need to do cross-selling is a couple of shortcodes and an email drip sequence. And you can see crazy sales numbers!
What do you think?
Hold that thought.
We’ll get to the next eCommerce marketing hack on our list!
5. Focus Only on One Result
On a scale of 1 – 10, how much do you agree with the fact that things can get a bit messy and ugly if you try to accomplish many things at once?
If you’re somewhere between the 2 – 6 range, you definitely need to rethink. But if you’re above 7, great! Trying to do too many things at once is never going to yield good results. And the same applies to eCommerce email marketing as well!
When reaching out to your customer, make sure the entire email is focused on only one thing – it could be about your new product launch or your upcoming seasonal deals! Make sure you speak only about that and nothing else. It’s because your customers/subscribers have a very short attention span and you’ve got to make the most out of this.
Also, when you ask your visitors to do multiple things at once, they get distracted and there’ll be no action taken at the end of the day.
So, make sure you focus only on one thing in your email and see it work like a charm!
6. Use CTA Buttons
Call-to-action buttons – the words themselves explains what it is all about. You are calling your visitors to take action with the help of a button. CTA buttons can be often seen in between blog posts, website popups, and a few other places. But using them in your eCommerce email campaigns can increase your sales numbers to a whole new level and is used by almost all online stores today.
If you’ve got a hard time believing this, take a look at the above examples. Almost every one of them has a CTA button! And that’s all the proof you need to start using them!
So, let’s get to the real question – what can you do differently to make your CTA buttons stand out and drive instant sales?
- Make Good Use of Colors – If it isn’t for the white color border in the J.Crew example, you wouldn’t have realized that there’s a CTA button in the first place. So, make sure you use contrast colors (like the Spotify example) and see that your CTA button is clearly visible!
- Compelling Text – Yet another important factor that’ll help your CTA buttons stand out. Include words like “Now”, “Grab”, “Get Yours” and more to grab attention and drive sales.
- Use Multiple CTAs If Needed – Sometimes, you might have to draft long email copies (which is not recommended) to convey your message to your customers. And it’s likely that your CTA button will go unnoticed at such times. Coming up with multiple CTA buttons can avoid such mishaps from happening. But make sure not to spam your customers/subscribers with the motive to drive more sales.
And that should help you create effective CTA buttons!
7. eCommerce Email Segmentation
A quick poll!
Which of the following would work?
- 5 Emails to a Subscriber That’s Vaguely Sent
- 1 Crafted, Personalized Email Sent Based on Segmentation
Pretty sure you’d go with the second option (unless you have an urge to spam)! This should also be giving you an idea of how important eCommerce email segmentation can be!
And as for those who have no idea what segmentation is, it’s the process of classifying your email list based on a set of certain factors and sending them emails accordingly. In fact, marketers who created segmented email campaigns were able to see an increase in revenue of as much as 760%.
So, here are a few ideas based on which you can segment your email list,
- Geolocation – based on which country/region your user is.
- Customer Value – the present value and future prospects.
- Customer behavior – how your customer responds to emails & products.
- Buying Frequency – how often your customer has purchased in the past 30 days.
- Age & Interests – segment users based on their age & interests.
- Past Purchases – segment users based on their past purchases.
The list can really get long but the above-mentioned segmentation categories are the most prominent ones!
And when you’ve segmented your emails, all that’s left is to send them based on ideal delivery times! And that’s exactly the next eCommerce marketing hack you’re about to see!
8. Best Times to Send eCommerce Emails
What’s the point in sending out your eCommerce marketing emails when your customer is asleep or on a day where he/she is never going to check the inbox? That’s a lot of time and effort going in vain!
So, if you’re against the idea of ending up at the wrong time in the recipient’s inbox, you’ve got to do some research and come up with the best times to send eCommerce emails. Start off by deciding the criteria based on which you’d want to send your emails. For example, I’ve come up with a list that tells you the ideal day and time to send emails based on continents.
- Australia – The ideal day would be Tuesday (it’s because Tuesdays have the highest email open rate) and the timing would be between 11 am and 3 am.
- Europe – The ideal day and time to send emails to a European customer would be on Thursdays between 11 am and 2 pm.
- Asia – It’s quite flexible here. Any day from Tuesday to Thursday would be perfect. As for the timing, it’s between 10 am – 11 am and 1 pm – 2 pm.
- The US & Canada – The best day and time to send emails to Canada and the US is on Tuesday at 10 am. On failing to do so, you can send it out at 2 pm or during the evening hours from 8 pm to 10 pm.
- The Middle East – Wednesdays are hands-down the best day to send emails to customers in the Middle East. 7 am – 8.30 should be an ideal time to send them out.
Similarly, you can create a list based on the industries or any other factor you think can help drive sales!
Doing it this way can make your email more visible to your customers!
9. Abandoned Cart Emails
I saved the best eCommerce marketing hack for the last! And that’s going to be cart recovery emails.
Here’s a stat to make sure that you’re giving undivided attention,
“The Average Cart Abandonment Rate Across All Industries is a Huge 70%”
This actually means that 7 out of your 10 eCommerce visitors fail to complete a purchase after they’ve added items to the shopping cart!
That’s potential money left on the table. And being a store owner, you can’t let such things happen on your watch!
So, the perfect solution to win back your customers and make them complete the purchase would be to send abandoned cart emails!
Let’s consider this scenario. You’ve got a couple of minutes and you started taking a look at your favorite headphones. There was a 25% offer and you thought there was going to be no better time. You’ve added the item to the cart and were about to complete the purchase but unfortunately were interrupted by a call. It was important and you had to leave.
The cart was abandoned!
And a few hours later, there’s this email letting you know that you’ve abandoned your headphones. Also, it comes with an additional 5% off!
Bingo! You complete the purchase right away!
So, that’s how effective cart abandonment emails can be! To make it work, all you need is an abandoned cart recovery plugin, the perfect abandoned cart email template, and a plan to send them out at the right intervals.
Here’s a suggested email sequence interval you should consider using for your abandoned cart campaign,
- First Cart Recovery Email – 1 hour after your visitor abandons the cart (reminder email)
- Second Cart Recovery Email – 1 day after cart abandonment (low stocks – FOMO)
- Third Cart Recovery Email – 3 days after cart abandonment (with additional discount)
- Fourth Cart Recovery Email – 5 days after cart abandonment (cart expiry date & feedback)
You can even come up with a fifth recovery email but the above should work like a charm!
P.S. If you’re looking to reduce cart abandonment in your eCommerce store, exit-intent popups can help you get this done!
And here’s a sample abandoned cart recovery email from Stripo
The template looks great! It has abandoned items, a 15% discount offer, and the offer expiry date as well!
So, that’s it about the abandoned cart eCommerce marketing hack. Let’s move to the final part of the read!
10. Put It All Together
This is neither an eCommerce marketing hack nor an email marketing strategy for eCommerce. But, it’s something more important!
It’s great that you’ve come across some of the best email marketing hacks for eCommerce. But what’s even more important is, how well you make use of them to drive eCommerce sales.
So, I thought it’d be better, to sum up everything and come up with a possible sequential order!
Note: The below-mentioned order is a possible way to work things out. It may or may not suit your business!
- Start off by segmenting your email list based on the above-mentioned factors. It helps you to come up with more ideas and gives you clear insights about your sales prospects.
- Once you’ve completed segmenting your email list, it’s time to start creating email copies. Make sure your copies are worth reading by following the above-mentioned steps.
- Remember that the personalization factor can increase your sales number to a great extent. Induce personalization factors to your email copies while crafting them!
- While crafting your email, focus only on one result. I guess we came across the part what will happen when too many things are done at once?
- Create a sense of urgency in your email copies. This totally depends on what kind of emails you are sending. If it’s a sales promotional email, make sure that you include the FOMO factor in it.
- Almost done. Include CTA buttons to provide a seamless experience to your customers – the easier you make it for them, the higher will your sales numbers be!
- And now it’s time to send your emails. Make sure you’ve found the best delivery time based on whatsoever factor you’ve come up with!
So, that’s how you put all the eCommerce email marketing best practices into a single email copy. And you can later cross-sell once your customer completes his/her purchase!
In case your visitor fails to complete the purchase, you’ve got the abandoned cart hack up your sleeve! So, there’s actually no way out😉!
Final Few Lines
Over the past few decades, a lot has changed. The consumer landscape has witnessed a huge transition from the brick and mortar stores to eCommerce stores (thanks to their instant availability and seamless experiences), making it an era where online purchasing is embraced and continuously increasing. So, if you’re running an eCommerce store, it’s time that you start sending out emails to your customers if you haven’t already!
If you are, then tweak them a little and see your sales numbers go up eventually!
With that said, I am not going to hold you back anymore!
Good luck with the sales numbers!
