There are people today who will say that email marketing is dead but it is most certainly not. In fact, email marketing gets a median ROI of 122% according to research.
Marketing via email constantly beats other methods of marketing such as direct mail, paid search, and even social media. To put this in perspective, email marketing lets you get four times more results compared to other formats.
If you are not using emails to connect with your potential and existing customers, you are missing out and leaving money on the table.
Reaching out to your customers offers many benefits that can grow your ecommerce brand. With email marketing, communications in this channel often fall in one of four categories: welcome, promotion, cart abandonment, and transactional emails.
With that said, let us take a look at some examples of brands that are killing it with each type of email.
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Welcome Emails
Among all of the emails that you send to your subscribers, welcome emails provide the highest open rates. In fact, the open rate for these welcome emails reaches as high as 60%. They are also normally short, ranging from just 50 to 150 words.
Despite being brief, welcome emails can be very effective. Emails that are sent as part of onboarding users can generate app retention by up to 71%.
Below are a few welcome emails created by ecommerce brands that you can follow to build great relationships with new subscribers.
Warby Parker
The welcome email you can see from Warby Parker is simple, straightforward, and easy to look at with many white spaces used. Despite the simplicity, the email looks very modern and entertaining.
New subscribers are provided an effective call to action that is subtle with their “shop now” button in contrasting colours.
Using this type of messaging as well as fun design reflects the branding of Warby Parker along with their vision to make purchasing eyeglasses simple and easy.
Applying the correct amount of white space can be highly effective in email marketing. For your campaigns, you can increase the padding so you can set up modern yet easy-to-view emails for your audience. You may even add a fun GIF if you want.
Email apps such as Outlook can ignore the set margins and padding around your images. To ensure that you are able to keep your white space, use an image editor to add a border that surrounds your image with a colour similar to that of your campaign background. From there, you can upload the design to your campaign with the white space you want.
Patagonia
The welcome email from Patagonia can quickly hit home to many subscribers with an awesome photo that matches its customers. However, the brand could bring in more sales if they utilised a clearer call to action that directs people to their online store.
If you want to improve your welcome emails, make sure that your wording and imagery are inline with your brand. As you use images and text in a side-by-side format, ensure that the layout is responsive to viewers. You want the design to automatically match the single column often seen on mobile devices.
Common email marketing platforms like Constant Contact and MailChimp provide tools that let you have responsive emails. But before you send your emails, make sure you test them to see if there are any tweaks needed before they go live.
When creating welcome emails, make sure you include these six components:
- A thank you message to your new customer/subscriber
- Introduction of your company
- Attached lead magnet or any incentive that was promised in return for their subscription
- Relevant information on what readers can expect from the emails
- Contact details and social links
- Whitelisting instructions
Promotional Emails
When you offer your subscribers something valuable, you are generating attention while encouraging them to interact with your brand. Eventually, the main goal here is to bring in sales.
According to a study, about 70% of millennial shoppers tend to respond to retargeting campaigns that include discounts.
Of course, you still have to pinpoint the right balance that works for your brand. Providing promotions and discounts all the time can have a negative impact on your margins.
If you are worried about this, then what you can do instead is to prioritise sending promotional emails to customers or prospects already interacting with your email campaigns. You can also choose to offer added value by attaching exclusive content such as white papers, guides, webinars, and templates.
Here are a couple of examples of ecommerce brands that do a great job in sending out promotional emails.
REI
REI does an excellent job, letting their subscribers know when they have a sale going on. For REI members, you can get great promotional emails that offer coupons and discounts.
Using an image that has a simple text overlay can be quite effective. Although the call to action may be muted, the spotlight shines on the one that matters for this type of email: the coupon code.
REI also does a good job of sending promotional emails containing a calendar of upcoming events in the local area. Such emails can be simple but are great at informing customers that the brand does not just want to sell items, it also wants to pass down information to their subscribers.
Do keep in mind that you do not always have to place promos and discounts with this type of email. Things such as quality content and upcoming events are sufficient enough to give value to your subscribers as well.
Cart Abandonment Emails
On average, 69% of people abandon their carts, resulting in an estimated amount of $260 billion in revenue lost for ecommerce companies.
The good thing is that there are methods you can apply to lower shopping cart abandonment rates. One of the quickest and easiest ways is by reminding shoppers that they have items left in their cart by sending an abandoned cart email.
These abandoned cart emails have proven to be an effective email marketing tactic. According to data from Salesforce, about 60% of shoppers return to continue their purchase within 24 hours after receiving personalised emails of their abandoned carts.
Furthermore, about three out of four individuals that abandon their shopping carts plan to return after receiving such emails. If you are not leveraging abandoned cart emails, you are definitely losing out.
Here are two brands that do a nice job with their abandoned cart emails.
Glossier
The brand Glossier goes straight to the point to let their shoppers know that the email is sent to them automatically because they left items in their cart. It is entertaining, to say the least, and definitely a refreshing approach that can be quite effective.
What you can do to improve on this is to test if you can obtain better results when you attach an image of an item in their cart that they left out. Besides that, the email example shown above is already eye-catching and straightforward.
Birchbox
Here is another example of a great abandoned cart email. Birchbox did a great job providing customers with reasons why people abandon cart items. The customer realised that they did not want the item in their cart.
The brand showed the shopper the items within their cart while also including a recommendation of a product relevant to what they were looking for.
Transactional Emails
Finally, we have transaction emails which are automatic messages sent as a response to a certain trigger. Actions such as creating an account, placing an order, and billing are all part of transactional emails.
There are a whole group of other transactional emails, but we will be focusing on just the post-purchase examples.
Transactional emails are intended to build excitement concerning a product or to invite people to share with their friends what they just bought.
Here are two brands that we found to have done an ideal job with regard to their transactional emails.
Dollar Shave Club
This order confirmation email from the Dollar Shave Club is direct to the point compared to the quirkiness of their website. It immediately welcomes the buyer and then provides a recap of their order.
Once that is done, they provide an incentive that the shopper can get when they share the Dollar Shave Club with someone they know. The email is then finished off with more details about the brand.
All of the elements that make for an excellent order confirmation have been achieved by the Dollar Shave Club with this email. The messaging is interesting, informative and provides a reminder about the brand’s professionalism.
Zulily
The order confirmation email from Zulily is all about being bright and cheery. The message includes the incentive of inviting a friend along with free shipping offers until midnight on the date the email was sent.
Such an offer can encourage buyers to check out the Zulily website and shop once again, thanks to the email confirming their recent order.
That is why transactional emails should not be ignored as they provide brands with another opportunity to engage their customers and develop brand loyalty.
Make sure that you take time to plan your transactional drip campaigns with the right triggers, with the help of an email marketing automation tool to make things easier.
Conclusion
Many visitors do not purchase from an online shop during their first visit. Seeing as you already put a lot of time, money, and effort into driving traffic to your website, it is only reasonable to try other ways to reconnect with these individuals.
By using email marketing the right way, you can align with your potential and existing customers to encourage them to engage with your brand and eventually, generate sales.