Email marketing for your e-commerce business can be a great way to promote your products directly to people who have already shown interest. The potential ROI with email marketing is huge when done well. I covered more about why you should consider focussing on email marketing as part of your strategy and considerations in part one, so part two I am going to cover what you need to think about for your emails.
What should go in your newsletter?
The format of your newsletter like most things will come down to your brands strategy and positioning. For example if your business is about you as a creator or maker then the email may benefit from a more personal welcome and featuring you and what you do. Whereas a product business that doesn’t have a personal brand attached will probably have a short bit of text but mostly be focussed on the latest or a selection of products themed around your content plan.
A typical e-commerce email newsletter might have:
- A welcome/intro message
- Featured products
- Any offers, promotions or sales
- Any call-to-actions
Design & Content
Whilst some email marketing software has design limitations, I do feel it is important to try to keep as on brand as possible for fashion and lifestyle e-commerce in particular. Even more basic software should allow for colour changes and changing fonts to best suit your brand – ideally use your brand fonts if possible!
Choosing a suitable template or custom creating one can help the emails look consistent and build your brand awareness further and if you think that you might be sending out emails weekly it’s important to get the look and feel right.
Think about the following when designing your email:
- Engaging photography
- Sections and headings to add visual interest and allow the reader to scan
- Strong calls to action where applicable
- A responsive design
- Find the balance between the amount of products not being too much or too little
- Using an appealing, relevant header image at the top of the email – this might be something seasonal or a graphic to show a sale for example and I’d recommend changing it each email so that it looks like a new email each time
- Keep your logo header part the same each time for consistency though!
- Never try to remove the unsubscribe link from your email
Relevancy
Make sure that your emails are seasonal and targeted if applicable to your products and audience (eg. If you are a fashion brand that does mens and womens clothes then segment your list)
Ethical considerations
There are some ethical considerations that must be made when using email marketing as a form of advertising or promotion. You should of course follow the laws of your country, such as GDPR and CAN-SPAM. Always getting permission to add customers on to your email list.
Whilst segmenting your list can be helpful to ensure it is relevant to your audience like mentioned above what you don’t want to be doing is excluding people in ways that mean they are discriminated against for example.
- Use alt tags for your images for accessibility
- Find the balance for how many emails
- Don’t buy your email lists, chances are they probably aren’t your ideal customers anyway and it’s just a bit…shady…
- Avoiding click-bait or misleading subject lines
- Make opting out easy (mentioned a few times in this post I know!)
Greener emails
Don’t forget that like everything your emails have a carbon footprint too, so not excessively sending an email, keeping them relatively concise and aiming to keep image sizes low for example will all make a small difference – that adds up. Most people don’t love to see that someone has unsubscribed but if only the people who want to receive the emails are the ones that do then it reduces unnecessary emails going out which is only a good thing!
Abandoned cart emails
If you aren’t familiar with the term an abandoned cart email is when someone has started the checkout process including entering their email and then not completed the purchase, the shop might then send an email with something like “You’ve left items in your bag” or “Did you forget xyz” or even “want X% off your order”
In terms of GDPR they are from my research considered ok to send, of course follow best practice and allow people to unsubscribe. I’d recommend not sending more than one email for this, to not seem pushy or annoying. And it can be helpful to add a coupon to encourage the purchase.
Should you do it? Hmm, that one is up to you!
Expectations and what can affect your email marketing results
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach your customers, but it can take time to build your list and find the sweet spot of this form of marketing to get the results you want.
Test your emails before you send them, this can help you to catch any embarrassing or costly mistakes and avoid you having to send that oops sorry email we’ve all seen (and possibly had to do!) Plus like I mentioned about the environmental impact, essentially all those mistake emails are a complete waste 🙁
Unsubscribes
Averages – E-Commerce 0.27% and Retail 0.25% (Mailchimp 2022 research)
Try not to be disheartened if you get unsubscribes from your emails, it is part and parcel plus people choose to unsubscribe for many reasons. Let’s be honest we all get a lot of promotional emails nowadays (unless you are very strict with your inbox!). It also doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve lost them as a customer because they might be following you elsewhere anyway. They also might choose to go back on your list again in future.
Open rate
Averages – E-Commerce 15.68% and Retail 18.39% (Mailchimp 2022 research)
- Choose engaging subject lines, perhaps including personalisation
- Keep your emails short, concise, relevant
- Ensure they are visually interesting
- Offer value to your subscribers such as sneak peeks, special coupons, early sale access etc this helps to incentives customers to stay on the list and rewards your most engaged customers
Improving deliverability
There are a number of ways to improve email deliverability. The first thing you can do is to authenticate your domain via DKIM, this will help to show email clients that they are genuine emails sent from the domain owner – you! Another way is to have a great sender score, which is the measure of how often your emails are opened and clicked. You will also need to have a low spam complaint rate, which means that your emails are not being marked as spam.
Avoiding being reported as spam – Remind people how they signed up eg. “You are being sent this email as you subscribed via our website or at an event” (and ensure this is true – please do not buy your email lists). Make it easy and clear to unsubscribe so people don’t feel tempted to mark as spam to get your email out of their inbox!
Next up: Part 3 – Which email marketing software to go with?
