How email marketing can help your E-Commerce business grow

If you're an Ecommerce founder, the phrase email marketing probably doesn't get you pumped up. Somewhere along the way, email marketing got a bad rep as this boring, unsexy marketing channel, maybe so that it can work as a superhero undercover for business owners that get it. You simply can't afford to not email, especially if you're in e-commerce. Despite the rumors that email is dead, the overall value of email is actually growing.

So, how do you become an ecommerce email master? Put simply, email has two major components (automations and campaigns) This is the most important distinction you'll need to understand.

• Automations called email flows, are sequences of automated emails that are triggered by events happening on your website. 
• Campaigns, also called newsletters, are one-off emails like holiday sales, product features, and so on. The revenue that you'll generate from email campaigns largely depends on the size of your email list. The revenue you'll generate from email automations, in contrast will largely depend on the traffic on your website.

To have a healthy email marketing strategy, you need to have a good balance of both email campaigns and email automations. The thing that feeds both of these is the email pop-up on your site. For all emails you send, whether they're automated or not, you need to have the email address, and the best way to grow your list is to ask for the email addresses on your site through a pop-up.

Now, I can already hear you screaming inside, "But pop-ups are annoying! People hate pop-ups, and I don't want them to hate my store!" Pop-ups annoying if you make them so. If you offer something truly valuable in your pop-up and make sure that it doesn't show up in the first second of the shopper's visit, then it's actually helpful. Now that shopper can save 15% on the product which they would have had to pay the full price for.

To grow your e-commerce business you'll have to get people to your site. It's going to take some effort, and if you've already taken that effort and paid money in the form of ads or content marketing to get people to your site, not even asking for their email address is a huge missed opportunity.

Create a clean-looking pop-up that offers something valuable

Make sure that it pops up when the shopper is about to close your site. That's called exit intent behavior, and most pop-up tools will have that setting. The average submit rate for a pop-up is 3.5%, but with some testing, we're usually able to get it to 8 or 10%, meaning 10% of all people coming to your site will leave their email address with you. Here are a few pop-ups we created so you can use them as inspiration.

Now that your list is growing, you gotta take care of the two types of emails we talked about (automations and campaigns) With automations, you want to prepare a sequence of emails for all major steps in your shopper's journey. If you can use some help with your email automations, check out Flowmaster. Get blueprints for email flows that generate tens of thousands of dollars in monthly revenue and that will take your ecommerce store to the next level. Here's a list of flows to get you started:

1. Welcome Flow: Welcome the new subscriber into your community, tell them about what makes your brand and your products awesome and provide a welcome discount.
2. Abandoned Cart Flow: This one is a must, You want to remind shoppers who didn't complete checkout about how awesome your products are. Show customer reviews and reassure that your exchanges and refunds are easy and free.
3. Customer Thank You Flow: Don't miss this one your shopping platform sends an automatic order confirmation email, but a thank you email is different, especially if you're a smaller brand. Make it come from the founder and write a personal letter to thank your customer, it makes all the difference.
4. Post Purchase Flow: This one is triggered when the order is shipped. Give tips on how to use your product, answer anticipated questions, and cross-sell your other products. A few weeks after the shipment, ask for a product review.
5. Reorder Flow: A lot of marketers talk about the win backflow, but before you must win a customer back, make it easy for them to repeat their purchase. Provide helpful links to simply reorder their previous selection or cross-sell new products to them. Don't forget to check out Flowmaster which will give you a huge leg up in this as well as five other email flows.

Once you have all of these on autopilot, all you will have left is email campaigns. A good frequency for sending campaigns is once or twice per week. I recommend creating your monthly email calendar in advance. Start with holidays, it's easier to plan around those. 

Throw in some discounts, but make sure you don't overdo it because shoppers will start expecting them and won't purchase without the discounts. Once the holiday emails are in, fill in the other weeks with emails that focus on your products. Keep your emails short, one small topic per campaign. 

Here's a pro tip

Play the hits, or in other words reuse your content. You can also use the content your customers are creating for you, It's called user generated content. So how to do it? Encourage your customers to tag your brand in their Instagram stories, repost those stories on your account so you can save them to your phone, grab three to four stories and turn them into a gif, there are free tools that will help you do that. 

Now include that gif into your email, a few examples that you can see below.

A

This works great because A you don't have to create additional content.

And B,most importantly, this is a very strong social proof for your email readers. When they see other humans using and loving your products, that's a strong indicator that they can trust you, which is exactly what you're after.