7 ways you can use email marketing to drive eCommerce growth in 2023

Email marketing is a serious channel for eCommerce brands.

It currently drives $9.62bn of revenue in 2022, and is tipped to nearly double by 2027 to $17.9bn.

But to get the very most out of this channel, eCommerce brands need to go further than a one-size-fits-all approach. Focusing instead on regular, relevant, personalised communications that recipients genuinely want to receive.

To help brands achieve this, here are our top 7 ways you can use email marketing to drive eCommerce growth in 2023.

Get your data in order

Implement automation

Increase personalisation

Set up behavioural triggers

Promote social proof

Automate transactional updates

Review results

How an email marketing agency can help

Get your data in order

The first stage in executing successful email marketing is to get your data in order.

Because without the correct data, sending emails that will drive growth becomes near impossible.

Start by collecting the right kind of data for your communications. This can begin with basic demographic data, such as age, gender, or location. But can be expanded to send more advanced email marketing, by collecting data on consumers’ behaviour (pages visited, products browsed), and purchase data (items regularly purchased, amount spent).

Implement automation

Gone are the days of successful email marketing being a manual process.

To ensure that your emails are landing in the right inboxes, at the right time, you need to implement automation technology that does the hard work for you.

By utilising this technology, you can ensure that emails are triggered when a specific event of action is taken. Automatically pulling through the correct data to each email, and sending with little to no manual intervention.

This could be a welcome campaign, an order confirmation, abandoned basket reminder, or birthday celebration. The list is endless. This means that marketers can set up automated email sequences to run seamlessly in the background and ensure continuous, relevant communications with their recipients.

Increase personalisation

Once you have your data and automation processes in order, you can begin to practise different levels of personalisation within your communications.

Segmentation is a great place to start for more basic personalisation. This involves grouping recipients based on commonalities, such as their demographics, stage in their buying lifecycle, or the frequency they spend.

However, you can go a step further and ensure that every single email communication is tailored to the individual. By embedding dynamic content blocks within your email, you can automatically populate your communications with highly personalised banners, imagery, products, and copy. All completely tailored to the individual's demographic data, behaviour, and purchases.

Set up behavioural triggers

We’ve talked a lot about the importance of behavioural data, that’s because triggered emails based on behaviour are one of the most effective ways to drive growth.

Consumers make a wide variety of behavioural actions that go beyond making a purchase. All of which offer an opportunity to engage and move the recipients through the buying journey.

With the use of your automation technology, you can send out relevant communication such as:

• Welcome campaigns - for when a recipient makes their first purchase
• Abandoned basket reminders - to offer a nudge to complete a purchase
• Cross-sell and up-sell suggestions - related products based on items browsed
• Re-engagement campaigns - for those recipients who haven’t engaged in a while

Promote social proof

Sometimes relevancy isn’t enough to encourage a recipient to make a purchase.

In fact, 89% of purchasers won’t take action until they read reviews. Making social proof from other happy consumers essential for growing your customer base.

When talking about social proof, we are referring to evidence from other customers who have regular, successful purchasing experiences with your brand.

And this can be showcased in a number of ways:

• Positive reviews and ratings - taken from review sites or gathered via surveys
• User-generated content - such as posts on their own social media profiles

Influencer campaigns - working with influencers to promote your product and offering

Automate transactional updates

Once a purchase is successfully made, the hard work doesn’t stop.

In fact, post-purchase, transactional emails are key to ensuring a customer continues to have trust in your brand once they have handed over their hard-earned cash.

This can be achieved through a series of automated transactional emails, reassuring the recipient that their order has gone through correctly, when it has been dispatched, and when it will be delivered.

This is also a great opportunity to gain feedback from the recipient. So, consider sending out a survey or asking for product reviews and ratings to help with your own social proof.

Review results

No channel can maintain continuous growth without regular reviews of results.

By keeping on top of how your emails are performing, you can address any issues or poor performance quickly. Whilst also learning from what does work, and replicating these elements in future emails.

As well as the standard open and click-through metrics, you should also monitor deliverability and spam rates, heat and scroll maps, conversion rates, and overall ROI of your campaigns.

How an email marketing agency can help

eCommerce is an increasingly competitive landscape. Any brand that wants to ensure eCommerce growth in 2023 needs to be on top of their game when it comes to email.

No matter what size your business, resource, and budget, this can often be a challenge.

And sometimes, it’s best to ask for the help of email marketing experts to ensure your communications are ticking all the right boxes. If you’d like to learn more about how an email marketing agency could help you, then download our Ultimate Guide to Outsourcing your Email Marketing, or get in touch with one of our experts to understand how we can support you.