The five types of ecommerce email marketing you need to be sending

If you don't have a comprehensive email marketing strategy in place for your ecommerce business then you're missing out on the low hanging fruit.

Every strategy will include some kind of regular communication to your customers, whether it's offer-lead email campaigns or content-driven pieces. Alongside this you need to have an automated email programme in place to deliver personalised, relevant communication to your customers. This is the best way to deliver quality communications. As long as your quality remains high, the number of emails you send becomes irrelevant.

A great automated email programme for an ecommerce store should include the following emails:

Post-purchase

As soon as someone has purchased a product an email should be triggered and sent to them confirming their purchase. This email doesn't have to be and shouldn't be dull. It's a prime opportunity to cross-sell related products and begin further engagement. In fact, they are 8x more likely to be opened and 6x more likely to generate revenue than any other type of emails (Experian).

Pre/post-delivery

Never underestimate the importance of good, regular communication. Your customers now expect to be notified as to when they can expect their order. Pre-delivery emails, like the standard 'Your order has been despatched', are a simple and effective way of keeping your customers informed. It also significantly reduces the chance of the them contacting you directly for an update on their order, something which can save you both time and money.

Post-delivery emails are a great way of kicking-in after sales support and generating repeat business. They're also the prime opportunity for you to ask for reviews and feedback. Retailers typically see a 10%-12.5% increase in conversion rates for products with reviews when compared to those without, this leaps up to 80% for products with 20 or more reviews (Shopify).

Put simply, the more positive reviews you get, the more products you'll sell and email is a great way of encouraging people to leave reviews, especially if it's incentivised.

Gifts

Rewarding loyal customers with a gift is one of the strongest ways to build loyalty and repeat business. Triggered emails can be set up where you can reward your top spending customers with store credit after they've spent over a certain amount with you. Collecting useful data, like date of birth or anniversary date, means you can set these dates as triggers to 'gift' something to your customers.

Shopping cart abandonment

Research carried out by Business Insider in 2015 found there could be up to $4 trillion of revenue waiting to be recovered from abandoned shopping carts on an annual basis. They also found that when shopping cart abandonment emails are triggers, 64% then go on to complete a purchase. It is the simplest and most effective way to improve your average order value.

Reactivation

It happens, sometimes your customers will stop buying from you and stop engaging with your content. Figures released by HubSpot found an email list will experience a 25% 'decay' each year. This means reactivating customers has to form part of any serious email marketing strategy. Whether it's a hook, like a deep discount, or a simple 'We miss you' email, you can re-engage up to 45% of your customers with an effective re-activation email programme (MarketingSherpa).

Get the best returns

To do this you need a comprehensive strategy that includes all of the above as well as reaching your customers through search and social campaigns, both paid and organic.

Before creating your strategy you need to ask yourself:

1. How well do I know my customers?
2. How good is my customer data?
3. Do I have the tools in place to deliver on the strategy?
4. Do I have the resource to execute it?
5. How will I measure its success?

And when it comes to measuring, it's fundamental you analyse your secondary data including your social media insights and Google Analytics. It's here you'll be able to see your most popular channels, your conversion rates and your most successful campaigns. This enables you to make data-driven decisions when it comes to future marketing.