5 Advanced Email Marketing Strategies for eCommerce: Do it or Lose it 

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Did you know that the total number of email users in 2021 was 4.03 billion people? That beats every other marketing channel you know of in terms of sheer size. 

As for potential, we are sure you already know that email marketing is a winner. In the year 2019, email marketing fetched $42 for every dollar spent.

Use advanced email marketing strategies and hit your own goals out of the park. Little tweaks, some smart campaigns, and you'll fundamentally change how you grow your eCommerce business. 

The power of email marketing is undeniable and here are some Advanced Email Strategies for your eCommerce business.

Collect Subscribers & Focus On Email Segmentation

You'll be surprised to note that despite all the talk about just how important email marketing for eCommerce is, most eCommerce stores (including Shopify stores) don't do it.

Don't be that kind of a store.

The first step is to collect email subscribers (which is relatively easy). 

By industry averages, your average conversion for signing up email subscribers for your eCommerce store should be around 2%, according to BigCommerce

Just by segmenting your email subscribers (might or might not include customers, and you should), you get to grow your revenue, boost the average order value, total revenue, and profits.

When you send emails to segmented email lists, your emails perform better. Just how better, you ask?

According to MailChimp, here's how well they perform overall, across parameters such as open rates, abuse reports, clicks, bounces, and more. 

Segmented email campaigns perform 100.95% higher (on average, in terms of clickthrough-rate or CTR) than non-segmented ones.

Segmented & well-crafted email campaigns have a significant impact on your email marketing channel, your bottom line, and your profits. 

Second (and the more important one, which almost every business just misses out on) is segmentation.

Instead of putting every single subscriber in one long list, segment them according to various parameters (and several email marketing tools or providers help you with this).

Think of "segments" as "buckets". Group your email subscribers (this'll include customers as well) into specific categories depending on various parameters.

Segment email subscribers as follows (some more important than others, so you take the call:

  • The average order value, lifetime value of a customer, or purchase history.
  • Browsing behavior/interests [What products are your subscribers looking at, what do they do on your site? What pages do they visit? ]
  • Where are they in the customer lifecycle? [Signed up for a discount coupon but never purchased? Purchased a product just once? ]
  • If you do have lead magnets (such as discount coupons, PDF downloadables, etc), which lead magnet they signed up for? Discount coupons sign up for which product category or collections on Shopify?
  • Demographics, email frequency preferences, email open rates, email click rates.

Here’s an example of a welcome email for eCommerce (and this email is sent precisely to people who signed up or browsed the store but didn’t make a purchase yet). 

Collect data. Segment your email subscribers. Make the magic happen. 

Improve Sales Conversions & Revenue With eCommerce Email Best Practices

There are some things you could do with your email marketing (it takes work, of course) that drastically change how your email marketing campaigns perform.

Here are some of those eCommerce email best practices you should be using:

  • Focus on the little things: Microcopy (the bits of text here and there inside your email), the email preheader text, the salutation, the design layout (and hopefully, it’s mobile responsive as well). 
  • The subject lines: Work more on the subject lines than you’d with anything else. Keep subject lines short, invoke emotion if possible, split test your subject lines, and more. 
  • Understand your customers: Based on demographics, geolocation, and other factors),  optimize the email send time. 
  • Use email marketing segmentation (above): Personalize your emails (with names, with browsing activity, with timing, and with data in your hands). 
  • Utilize different types of offers: Experiment with product discounts, coupon codes, price matching or free shipping to encourage more purchases. 
  • Use A/B testing to your advantage: With a large enough sample size, deploy A/B tests or split testing (as it's called) to understand what works (whims, preconceived notions, and ideas won't work by themselves).
  • Don’t forget Post-purchase emails: You don't have to stop at a single sale. Send out "post-purchase" trigger emails to make upsells and cross-selling work for your business (Like Amazon does).
  • Use GIFs and Video: If your email service provides a way for you to add videos directly, use it to your advantage. Also experiment with custom-made GIFs and video thumbnails inside your emails. 

At La Hutte, we help eCommerce brands tap into the power of email marketing (among other things). 

Check out our eCommerce strategy services to learn more

Regain Customers by Regaining Abandoned Carts

Each time someone abandons your cart, you lose sales. Practically, that's money that's just gone out of the window (and not into your profit stream).

According to Barilliance, the average shopping cart abandonment rate is at a worrying 77.24% to 78.65% (through the years 2016 to 2017). That's more than 3/4ths of everyone who could have been your customer (but isn't).

To help regain customers One of the best ways to use  advanced email marketing strategies for eCommerce is to reduce shopping cart abandonments, increase sales, and bring in the revenue that you'd have lost.

  • Instead of sending a single email, use multi-stage triggered emails to "nurture" potential customers who just abandoned your shopping cart. Research is clear that around 2nd or 3rd such nurturing (but targeted and triggered) emails are clear winners.
  • Send out emails with a discount code to rekindle interest in abandoned carts.
  • Offer an incentive like free shipping or something else that the customer might want when they come back on your site. Provide a link inside of this email for them to click and continue shopping so you can avoid any cart abandonment issues later on.

Here’s an example of how a triggered email for eCommerce looks like: 

Scale Up With Relevant Platforms For More

Remember the segmentation tactic (above)? It has another powerful use case paving the way for even more advanced email marketing strategies.

Pick up high-value audiences from your segmentation data such as

  • Customers who abandoned their shopping carts
  • Customers with a purchase history of less than $100
  • Customers who purchased "this" but not "that"
  • Customers who showed interest, browsed your eCommerce store, didn't make a purchase yet, etc.

Once you have these specific groups, you can tap into the power of platforms such as Facebook and Google and find audiences very similar to these groups.

Facebook calls these audiences 'Lookalike audiences'

Google calls these audiences 'Similar audiences' [ This is on top of other audiences Google has in store for you such as "In-Market" audiences and more].

By creating specific lists and uploading these lists to each of the platforms above (you also have more choices such as Quora PPC, Instagram, and others, of course), you'll have access to potential customers you haven't reached out to yet. 

Tap into a potential base of millions of potential customers you'd normally not have access to.

Use Images & Always Include a Call to action (CTA) 

We are visual creatures. We make decisions based on visual imagery.

We learn visually. Our brains comprehend the world around us visually. Brains make sense of incoming information and process information visually.

Visuals are everything.

While text-based emails do have a place in your advanced eCommerce strategy (such as those for cancellation email triggers, order update emails, and others), for regular email marketing for eCommerce, you should use images.

Email recipients who received an email with images were likely to open the message and spend more time browsing within it, as well as book higher conversion rates.

When you send out emails for eCommerce, using images inside your emails is a no-brainer. Ensure that you use high quality images highlighting your product, use the visual imagery to let your customers visualize how the products actually look (even better if you can show someone using these products). 

Finally, always remember to use a Call to action (as a button or as text, but buttons are visual as well). 

Calls to action guide your customers to take action. They are designed to invoke action. Customers taking action of some sort is what makes real money for your eCommerce store (while knowing how many people open, click, the number of emails bounced, etc., are just nice to have). 

Don’t send out emails without a call-to-action: period. 

Which of these advanced email marketing strategies are you going to use for your Shopify eCommerce store? Tell us all about it. 

If you need help with advanced email marketing strategies (the whole nine years), including strategy, implementation, reporting, and actually getting results, see what we do for eCommerce strategies at La Hutte

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