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Take an interactive tour »Email marketing might be the most important digital marketing channel for eCommerce businesses. Email marketing is hands down the best way for businesses without a physical storefront to connect with customers in a timely and relevant way.
If your email marketing is program is underperforming, you’re missing out on a huge chunk of revenue (even if you do have a physical storefront).
This guide will show you exactly which emails to send and when to send them to maximize your email ROI and ensure that you’re getting as much revenue from your email marketing as possible.
The customer lifecycle simply explains how a customer interacts with your brand at every stage of the buying process. If you understand the customer lifecycle, you can track and anticipate buying behavior and send targeted emails that say exactly what customers need to hear to make a purchase.
The customer lifecycle is sometimes called the customer journey. It traces the customer’s progress from first visiting your site, to the first purchase, then repeat purchases, and finally to becoming a loyal customer.
If your email marketing is well executed, the customer lifecycle can be a true cycle, where customers return to earlier stages in the cycle and make multiple purchases. You achieve that with triggered emails that send automatically, based on key customer buying behaviors.
A complete eCommerce lifecycle email marketing program consists of 8 triggered emails and email series. Each triggered email reaches the customer when they are most likely to convert and increases your customer lifetime value and overall email marketing ROI.
But, before you can use the lifecycle eCommerce email marketing strategy, you need the proper email deliverability infrastructure and behavior tracking mechanisms in place.
Even if your behavior tracking is perfect and you’re sending excellent triggered emails, your email marketing performance is going to suffer if your emails don’t reach the inbox.
So, implementing the proper email authentication protocols and following deliverability best practices is vital to the success of your email program. Spam filters don’t care if your CTA is perfect or if the email design is beautiful. If your email fails deliverability checks, it goes to the spam folder or gets blocked entirely.
Here’s how to keep all your hard work from going to the spam folder.
There are three email authentication protocols that your emails need: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
You need all three in place to ensure optimal email deliverability because different email servers may use different authentication methods. And, some email servers use all three authentication protocols.
Your SPF record is simply a list of computers that are authorized to send emails from your sending domain. The SPF record for your domain is published in a Domain Name System (DNS) record.
When an email server receives an email from your domain, the email server will check the SPF record to ensure that the sending domain is on the list. If the domain is listed in your SPF record, the email server sends the email through to the inbox. Otherwise, the email is rejected.
SPF authentication detects malicious emails from false email addresses. Implementing this authentication protocol helps ensure email deliverability and protects your email domain from being used by cyber criminals.
DKIM stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail. It’s an authentication protocol that encrypts your emails, and attaches a DKIM signature to your email header so that email servers and authenticate and decrypt your emails.
Like your SPF record, your DKIM record is published in a DNS record. Email servers use the DKIM signature to locate your DKIM record and retrieve the decryption key.
DKIM authentication helps prevent email spoofing and spam.
DMARC is a big part of email authentication. And it’s critical to maximizing email deliverability.
Your DMARC record is published in the DNS record (just like SPF and DKIM). Then, your DMARC record gives receiving email servers information about your email authentication infrastructure and which authentication protocols should be present.
That way, if a malicious email shows up claiming to be from you, the receiving email can check your DMARC record and see that you use SPF and DKIM authentication.
Then, even if the malicious email somehow passes one of the authentication checks (which is very unlikely, but we’ll pretend for the sake of demonstration) but doesn’t have the other authentication protocol in place, the email server can confidently reject or send the email to the spam folder.
So, DMARC helps improve email security and deliverability by enabling email servers to communicate which email authentication protocols are setup on each email domain.
Before you get too deep in the weeds of implementing email authentication, find out which protocols you’re missing. These protocols may already be in place, depending on your email service provider.
You can check your email authentication protocols with simple online tools.
SPF check: MXToolbox SPF Record Check
DKIM check: MXToolbox DKIM Record Check
DMARC check: DMARCian DMARC Inspector
If any email authentication protocols are missing, work with your email service provider, system administrator, or development team to get all three protocols setup.
When you first get an IP address for sending emails, that IP address has no sender reputation. Your IP address reputation is like an email sending credit score. A better reputation indicates to receiving email servers that your IP address is trustworthy and sends good emails.
But, when an IP address has no sending history and no reputation, receiving email servers are wary of emails from that IP address. If you start sending tons of emails from a brand new IP address, receiving email servers may mistake you for a spammer.
So, you must ramp up your send volumes gradually, to establish credibility with email service providers and build your sender reputation. Steadily increasing your email sends each day is called IP address warmup.
Most email providers won’t even notice that you’re sending emails until you send about 100 emails a day. So, 100 emails per day is a good starting point. After that, ramp up your daily send volume over the course of about 15 days. On about day 15, you should hit your max send volume.
Your IP warmup schedule may vary, depending on your maximum send volume. But, the important thing is that you don’t just max out your email sends on day 1 of using a new IP address.
Also, email providers evaluate the quality of your emails during the warmup period. So, send real, high-quality emails. Also, leverage emails with reliably high open rates—like transactional emails, which we’ll cover further on—to make your emails appear more trustworthy to email servers.
People often keep inactive subscribers on their email lists because it feels counterintuitive to make your lists smaller. But properly identifying and removing inactive subscribers can improve your email marketing ROI and email deliverability. Here’s how it works:
If you think about it, sending an email to a truly inactive subscriber is a waste of an email. They’re not going to open it, much less click-through or convert. And unsubscribes and unopened emails aren’t good for your sender reputation. So, waiting until an inactive subscriber unsubscribes on their own isn’t helpful.
At worst, an inactive subscriber may get annoyed that you keep emailing them and mark your emails as spam. In short, proactively removing inactive subscribers from your list is best for your deliverability and your ROI.
The key is knowing when a subscriber is truly inactive.
It’s impossible to read people’s minds. So, the best way to identify inactive subscribers and remove them is by establishing a sunset policy based on how often you send emails. A sunset policy defines how long you keep subscribers who aren’t engaging with your emails at all.
If you send a lot of emails—a daily email, for example—you should remove inactive subscribers faster. If you send only a few emails a month, you can keep inactive subscribers on your list longer, to give them a chance to engage.
But, once you’ve established sunsetting policies, stick to them. Your email marketing metrics will give you all the information you need to identify inactive subscribers and remove them from your lists. Set up a schedule to evaluate your subscriber behavior and purge your lists of subscribers that are outside your sunsetting policy.
This will improve your email marketing performance—because you’ll no longer be sending emails to people who aren’t going to open them—and it will improve your ROI, since you’ll be sending fewer emails, overall.
The foundation of any email marketing strategy is identifying new customers and collecting email addresses, and spotting existing customers when they return to your site. There are four ways to identify anonymous customers and gather new subscribers:
Make it easy for customers to login to their account.
If someone has purchased from you in the past, they may already have an account with you. Getting returning customers to log in and stay logged in each time they get on your site enables you to identify existing customers and track browsing and buying behavior for better email targeting.
Use pre-submit tracking.
Visitors in the checkout process are invisible until they sign in or submit their information. Pre-submit tracking collects information that’s entered into form fields even if the customer doesn’t click the submit button or complete their sign in. This enables you to identify far more sessions and collect more email addresses.
Implement email append into your current email program.
The Rejoiner email append feature enables you to leverage your existing newsletter sends to identify more customers.
Use on-site email capture.
Email capture technology offers multiple ways to capture email addresses on-site and identify visitors (we like JustUno).
But, regardless of which email capture provider you use, there are three email capture methods that offer the best conversion rates:
Pop ups for first time visitors that offer an incentive (20% off, free shipping, $10 off, etc.) in exchange for their email address.
This builds your email subscriber base and encourages new customers to make that first purchase.
Exit intent pop ups to engage and convert visitors with targeted offers.
This is presented at the moment a visitor demonstrates intent to leave your site. This also helps you gather more email addresses. But, it can also help reduce browse abandonment and shopping cart abandonment rates.
A contest pop up which offers the chance to win a great prize in exchange for an email address.
This method is great because it collects emails at a very low cost per email address (unlike a discount, only one or a few customers win. But, they all enter their email addresses).
All of these methods identify anonymous visitors, so you’re able to send relevant, personalized, and perfectly timed emails and track customer buying behavior sitewide. Tracking customer behavior will generate a ton of data that will help you understand what products a customer is most interested in and what email marketing campaigns will get the sale.
Once you’re collecting email addresses and tracking customer behavior, the next step is to identify which behaviors indicate the best opportunities to increase sales. Then, there’s an eCommerce email campaign specifically designed to capitalize on each conversion opportunity.
All of these eCommerce email marketing campaigns are triggered emails. That simply means that they are sent automatically when a customer takes a certain action on your site. Sending triggered emails has three main benefits:
1. You can automate triggered emails.
Since all the actions that trigger an email are tracked by your analytics and email marketing software, you can automate all of your campaigns so you never miss conversion opportunities or send irrelevant emails.
2. Triggered emails offer the best opportunities for email personalization.
You can use all the information you’ve collected to make personalized product recommendations, offer the highest converting discounts, and follow up with other relevant email campaigns.
3. You can generate more revenue by sending fewer emails.
Since you only send emails when a customer’s behavior indicates that they’ll be receptive to your message, you send far fewer emails in the long run.
This may seem counter intuitive. But, you’ll never send emails to customers who don’t want them. So, triggered emails lower your unsubscribe rate and make your email marketing more cost efficient (and therefore more profitable).
With all that in mind, these are the triggered email campaigns you need to send, along with the behavioral trigger for each.
This is not a secret: customers enjoy window shopping. Browse abandonment emails turn these window shoppers into customers.
The behavioral trigger for browse abandonment emails is when a customer visits a product page or product category a certain number of times without buying. You can set the number of browsing sessions as high as you want. But, keep in mind that setting the threshold too high will cause you to miss opportunities.
A good tactic for optimizing your browse abandonment email campaigns is to test different thresholds (three browsing sessions vs two browsing sessions, etc.) and behavioral triggers. Then identify where you get the best conversion rates without causing unsubscribes.
Also, track multiple browsing behaviors to identify purchase intent, and test each one:
Lastly, browse abandonment emails are sent only to website visitors who have not added any items to their shopping cart. Potential customers who have filled their cart get an abandoned cart email, which we’ll cover shortly.
Here’s what will make your browse abandonment emails successful:
Here’s an excellent example of a two-part browse abandonment campaign from Fully:
Subscribing to your email list is essentially the first major step in the buying process (visiting your site being the first step).
So, it’s important that you continue the conversation, deepen the relationship, and guide your new subscribers to the next step. That’s what your new subscriber welcome series is for.
This is your opportunity to introduce your brand, show new subscribers what to expect from your email program, and provide potential customers with the resources they need to move through the buying process.
When should the welcome series go out? Immediately.
New subscribers are interested in your products and seeking more information. This is no time to be coy. Also, new subscriber welcome emails get 4x more opens and 5x more clicks than most other promotional emails. If you don’t send a welcome email, you’re missing a huge engagement and conversion opportunity.
However, remember that this email goes only to new email subscribers. Customers who have just made their first purchase get a different welcome email, which we’ll talk about next.
Here’s how to get the best results from your new subscriber welcome emails:
However, if you included a limited time offer in your first email (like the example below), you can mention that the offer expires soon.
Here’s a great example of a new subscriber welcome email from Mother Dirt that demonstrates how simple your first welcome email can be:
The new customer welcome series is the email that you send once a customer has made their first purchase. The first objective of your new customer welcome email is to provide an excellent buying experience by welcoming new customers to your brand and including them in your brand story.
Once that’s done, then you go after that second purchase. Although the customer experience is your priority, it’s important that you take the opportunity to encourage new customers to make a second purchase.
When you consider the cost of acquiring a new customer, the first purchase is the least valuable in terms of profit margin. Repeat purchases are what really maximize your customer lifetime value and power explosive revenue growth. So, use your new customer welcome emails to grease the rails for future purchases.
Here’s how to create welcome emails that turn new customers into loyal customers:
Here’s an example of a solid welcome email series from Peak Design:
We can pretty much guarantee that abandoned cart emails will be one of the most profitable promotional emails you send. In some cases, your abandoned cart email campaign will be your most profitable campaign. Abandoned cart emails are so valuable that we can’t cover everything here.
Check out our abandoned cart email guide for a really in-depth look at how to create hugely profitable abandoned cart email campaigns. That said, the most recent card abandonment studies showed that nearly 70% of eCommerce shopping carts are abandoned. If you do the math based on your website traffic, you’ll probably be horrified by how many carts are being abandoned on your site.
The bottom line is that an abandoned cart email campaign enables you to reach out to customers who have abandoned their cart, and bring them back to your online store to complete their purchase. These customers have demonstrated massive buying intent. So, you’ll often win the sale. That’s why abandoned cart campaigns are so profitable. And, since they’re so profitable, abandoned cart emails are an absolute necessity for eCommerce email marketing.
As we mentioned earlier, we have a much more thorough guide on abandoned cart emails. But, here’s a quick rundown of how to create abandoned cart email campaigns that convert:
Here’s an example of a great abandoned cart email from H.V.M.N.:
When an item is out of stock, it’s inconvenient for you and the customer. But it’s a legitimate reason for a customer not to buy. However, the buying intent is still there. And, it’s an easy buying obstacle to remove. All you need to do is let the customer know when the item is back in stock.
The behavioral trigger is also easy to detect, especially if you’re already sending browse abandonment or cart abandonment emails. If a customer browses an out-of-stock item or adds one to their cart, sending an email when the product gets restocked is an excellent conversion opportunity.
If all the items a customer browsed or abandoned were out of stock, you can send a back in stock notification when the item comes available, rather than sending a browse abandonment or cart abandonment email. This saves customers from clicking through on an abandonment email only to discover that the item is still out of stock.
But, you can still send browse abandonment and cart abandonment emails for products that were in stock when the customer abandoned them. Simply exclude the out of stock items from the abandonment email. Then send back in stock emails for those items later, if your email software has this capability.
Here’s how to make the most of an inconvenient situation with back in stock notifications:
Here’s a perfectly executed back in stock email from UNIQLO:
Price drop emails help extend the life of your browse abandonment and cart abandonment emails. If you send a browse abandonment or cart abandonment series to a customer, and they don’t complete their purchase, there’s still an opportunity to win the sale: when the price of the abandoned product goes down.
The trigger is fairly simple. When you reduce the price of an item, send a price drop email to all the customers who received a browse abandonment or cart abandonment email for that item, but haven’t purchased yet. It provides one more conversion opportunity with customers who demonstrated high buying intent. And it gives you a built-in list of interested customers for sales and clearance items.
Here’s how to ensure that you’re always letting your most interested customers know when the deal gets even better:
Here’s a simple price drop email example from Triumph:
When a customer purchases an item, they’ll have a lot of excitement and anticipation while they wait for it to arrive. A production education email gives them information that will help them get the most from their product when they get it.
It’s easy to trigger production education emails. Identify products that you have educational materials for in your email software. Then, an email will send whenever a customer purchases one of those items. Your production education email should arrive after the transactional email (more on those later on) and before the product actually arrives.
This may not seem like a marketing email. But it improves your email marketing in a couple of ways:
It might be tempting to focus on the cross sells, because that’s the immediate money maker. But the main purpose of a production education email is customer service. So, put the product information, and links to instructional videos and content up front. That way, you’ve delivered excellent customer service before you make any buying asks.
If you do it right, sending production education emails builds brand loyalty and improves your customer lifetime value.
Production education emails are all about customer service. Here’s how to make sure your production education emails help you retain customers and maximize your customer lifetime value:
Here’s a few examples from Peak Design who cares a lot about product education:
If someone purchases one of your products, and you know they would get value from a related or complementary item, then it’s the perfect time to send a cross sell email to that customer (not to be confused with an upsell, which usually happens during the checkout process).
To make this campaign work, just find two products that can be used together. Then, using your email service provider’s segment builder, build a segment of customers who have purchased one product, but not the other. You should only send this campaign for products that work perfectly together. So, when someone opens this email, their first thought will be: “This looks useful…” That response entices them to return to your site, in buying mode.
Even though cross sell emails may have a small audience, they’re valuable because any conversion is a repeat purchase. So, the ROI from these emails can be very high, in terms of profit margin.
It might be tempting to focus on the cross sells, because that’s the immediate money maker. But the main purpose of a production education email is customer service. So, put the product information, and links to instructional videos and content up front. That way, you’ve delivered excellent customer service before you make any buying asks.
If you do it right, sending production education emails builds brand loyalty and improves your customer lifetime value.
Cross sell emails are fairly straight forward. But, here’s our advice:
Here’s a beautiful cross sell email example from Bavsound (notice how the value of the recommended product almost depends on the customer having purchased the original product):
No matter what, you’re going to have a small percentage of customers that you wish all your customers could be like. This fact is explained by the Pareto Principle, otherwise known as the 80/20 rule.
The 80/20 rule states that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. In business, the 80/20 rule means that 80% of your profits are generated by 20% of your customers.
In eCommerce, that ratio can be even more dramatic, because the 80/20 rule is fractal. This means: 20% of 20% of customers (4% of customers) will deliver 80% of the total 80% profit (64% of profits). In summary: 4% of your customers are worth 64% of your total profits.
VIP emails target your most valuable customers (the 4%), and incentivize them to continue making purchases.
Now, you must define what makes a customer a VIP to your business. Loyal customers aren’t always VIP customers. Consider these factors as you define your VIP customers:
The goal is to identify what makes a customer most valuable to your business, based on your profit margins, sales volume, and so on. Then identify the behaviors that your most valuable customers exhibit.
Lastly, you create a customer segment based on these behaviors, so you can thank your best customers for their business and give them special treatment. And, special treatment doesn’t mean just give them another discount.
VIP’s are already loyal customers. This group of customers don’t necessarily need (or want) more discounts. They want to feel special. An excellent way to make VIP customers feel special is to offer them exclusivity.
Here are a few ideas for offering exclusivity to your VIPs:
Scarcity and exclusivity help create a VIP loyalty program that makes VIPs feel special and connected to your brand, and that just makes them want to buy more.
Here’s a personalized VIP email example from DAVIDsTEA that illustrates how you can also use VIP emails to connect with your customers:
Replenishment emails are the one eCommerce email campaign that may not be useful to every eCommerce store.
That’s because replenishment emails work best for products that have predictable usage cycles. So, you can anticipate when a customer will need to buy again. Here are some examples of products that are good candidates for replenishment emails:
There are others. But, you get the idea.
If you sell consumable products, determine the typical consumption timeline for those products, and create triggered replenishment emails that send near the end of that consumption timeline.
That way, right about the time that the customer needs more, they get an email that helps them reorder quickly and easily. Replenishment emails are a great way to generate recurring revenue.
Here’s how to reliably generate recurring revenue with replenishment emails:
Here’s a replenishment email example from Rockin’ Wellness with two emails, one sent 10 days before the product runs out and one email sent 5 days before the product runs out:
A win-back email campaign re-engages customers who are exhibiting signs of defection. Defection means that the customer has not purchased for an abnormally long period of time.
The key is to measure what “normal” and “abnormal” periods of time are for your customer base. You need to know how long does it take the average customer to go from their first purchase to their second purchase, and from their second purchase to their third, and so on. Understanding the average time between purchases enables you to assess when customers have crossed the threshold into “abnormal” behavior.
If you plot the average time between purchases, you can see what the customer lifecycle looks like for any business. Here’s an example:
In the early stages of the customer lifecycle, engagement with the company is accelerating, and the time between each purchase decreases. This is when customers are heavily engaged with your brand and want more.
After the fourth purchase, engagement decreases, and the latency between purchases increases. This is ordinary human behavior. Customers start off heavily engaged with a brand, then lose interest over time.
The important part of this analysis as it relates to win-back campaigns is determining when customers start to lose interest. In the example above, customers begin to lose interest after the fourth purchase.
When a customer starts to exhibit behavior which indicates they are losing interest, that’s when you trigger your win-back email campaign.
Your win-back campaign is where you pull out all the stops. Extending the customer lifecycle is pure profit, especially if you’re scooping up fourth and fifth purchases. And, the customer has shown that they’re ready to defect to another brand. So, this is where you send your big discounts.
Here’s how to win those extra purchases with win-back emails:
Here’s a win-back email example from VetRXDirect that shows how easy it is to be customer focused in your win-back email campaign:
Date-based emails are some of the easiest to send because they’re incredibly easy to trigger. Any email that gets sent on a specific date is a date-based email. This includes:
The low-hanging fruit here is birthday emails and anniversary emails. Congratulatory emails are those that you send on days like a baby due date. Then, you can also create campaigns for other personal dates, based on what information you’re able to collect about your customers.
But, birthday emails and anniversary emails are pretty much gimmes. Both of these events offer a natural way to reach out to customers and make them feel important. As a bonus, you also have an opportunity to make an offer or two.
Birthdays are fairly easy to collect. Simply add a birth date form field in places like:
You can also offer an option for customers to set their birthdate in their email subscription preferences.
Regardless of where you ask for a customer’s birth date, it’s a good idea to add some copy that explains what the customer will get for telling you their birthday. Usually, offering a birthday discount is enough to entice them to enter their birthdate, since they’re already giving you other information.
Anniversary emails are emails that you send to customers on the anniversary of their first purchase. Just something small to thank customers for buying from you (and help them buy again).
Date-based emails are a great way to stay in contact with your customers and send discounts in an organic, non-intrusive way.
It’s easy to setup date-based email campaigns. Here’s how to make sure they generate revenue:
Here’s an example of a really crisp, concise birthday email from Rent The Runway:
Technically, welcome emails and abandoned cart emails are transactional emails. But, we’ve already covered those.
Here, we’re talking about the more mundane transactional emails:
The first rule of transactional emails is that they have to do their primary job first. Nobody wants an order confirmation email that doesn’t confirm the order. The second rule of transactional emails is that you need to optimize them to help customers take the next step in making another purchase.
Every transactional email is potential real estate for cross sells. Or, you can remind customers of products they browsed but didn’t buy. Either way, the email has an opportunity for the customer to make another purchase.
The beauty of optimizing your transactional emails for conversions is that many transactional emails are associated with making a purchase or taking a step toward making a purchase. So, customers are receptive to product recommendations in transactional emails.
In short, optimizing transactional emails for conversions takes advantage of every possible sales opportunity, without being intrusive.
The transaction part of transactional emails is pretty straightforward. Here’s how to nail the email marketing part of transactional emails:
Here’s a brilliant order confirmation email from Huckberry that shows how you can casually optimize your transactional emails for conversions:
We’ve covered a whole bunch of eCommerce marketing emails. You’ve probably noticed some common themes between all of them. So, here’s a quick list of best practices that apply to almost any eCommerce marketing email you send:
These are the big three things that you should nail down before you start tweaking the tiny details of your email marketing. If you get these things right, your email marketing program will be in good shape, before you even start optimizing.
Lastly, here’s some bonus information to help with your eCommerce email newsletters.
An email newsletter may not be the most profitable email you send. Most of your email ROI will come from the eight triggered email campaigns we’ve covered here. However, newsletters are still a useful digital marketing tool.
But, here’s the key thing to understand about email newsletters: there’s no possible way that a single email can be relevant to every one of your customers. Therefore, you should stop blasting email newsletters to all of your customers. Here’s what to do instead.
Timing and personalization go a long way in email marketing. So, segment your audience, and create newsletters that will be relevant to each audience segment. There are plenty of email segmentation strategies. Which one you use depends on your product and audience.
Here’s a whole list of email segmentation ideas can be used for your email newsletter and other lifecycle email marketing campaigns:
It may not be cost or time efficient to create a separate newsletter for every possible audience segment. But, you can identify the most valuable segments of your email lists, and send them a newsletter when you have relevant news for them.
For example, if you’re having a sale on a particular product or category of products, use your behavioral data to identify the customers who have visited the relevant product pages or clicked on those items in previous emails, and only send the sale announcement newsletter to that particular audience segment.
Essentially, what you’re doing here is applying the principles of triggered email to your email newsletters. This enables you to get the best email revenue from your newsletters, while sending fewer emails.
Sending consistent, high-quality content builds trust with your audience. When your subscribers realize that your newsletter consistently delivers excellent information, they’ll start opening and clicking more. Here’s the thing: a sales pitch is not what people consider to be excellent information in their inbox.
You’ll get far better results if you take an editorial approach. Think of your brand as a publisher. Produce a newsletter with the type of information that your audience might like to read in a newspaper, magazine, or on a popular blog.
Be informative and helpful in your newsletters. That way, your subscribers trust your emails, and will be more open to your message when you do send marketing emails.
We covered this earlier. But it’s especially important to remove inactive subscribers from your list if you send an email newsletter.
Broadcasting an email newsletter means that you’re sending more emails. So, inactive subscribers send more negative email engagement signals to email service providers. It just diminishes your sender reputation even more when you continually send email newsletters to inactive subscribers.
If you include a discount in your email newsletter, it’s hard to avoid turning your newsletter into a sales email. It also erodes the value the discounts you send in other emails. There’s no urgency or scarcity involved with a discount if the customer knows that they’ll get another one in your next newsletter.
Additionally, offering too many discounts can have a significant impact on your bottom line. It’s harder to grow your business when you’re giving away a lot of profit margin. Your newsletter simply isn’t the best place for discounts. Save them for when they really matter.
There are a lot of email marketing metrics you can use to evaluate and improve the various aspects of your emails and email marketing campaigns.
However, the ultimate goal of email marketing is to generate revenue. It’s wise to track things like your open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. But these metrics give you a very zoomed-in view of specific parts of your email program.
There are a few email marketing metrics that you need to track to evaluate how much revenue your email marketing program is generating on the whole.
Some say that first-click attribution is more important than last-click attribution. But it’s not an either-or situation. Both the first click and the last click are important. These two metrics simply tell you different things.
The first click tells what brought a customer to your site in the first place. That’s valuable information. But customers may visit your site and interact through several different marketing channels before they make a purchase. The last click tells you what closed the deal.
Email marketing is direct marketing. Its purpose is to get the sale. So, tracking last-click revenue gives you the clearest picture of whether or not your email marketing is increasing your revenue the way that it should.
Fortunately, most analytics software—including Google analytics—has an option to track the last click (it’s easier to record what the customer clicked just before buying than to find out what they clicked days ago when they first visited your site).
Tracking last-click revenue isn’t the only attribution model. But if email is part of your marketing strategy, tracking the last click is important.
Most marketers track conversion rates. We intuitively understand that conversions are important. But it’s a common mistake to get hyper focused on other metrics. The trouble with spending too much time on other metrics is that they don’t necessarily lead to more sales.
For example, improving your open rates is good. But if you get more opens, and that doesn’t lead to more conversions, then your email subject lines may be appealing to the wrong audience or the content of your emails may need to be adjusted to take advantage of the additional email opens.
In this situation, further improving your open rates most likely won’t lead to more revenue. In conclusion, tracking and improving the various aspects of your email marketing is smart. But always keep an eye on your conversion rates and how changes impact your conversion rates.
That brings us to making changes.
Marketing is more science than art. That means it’s best to take a methodical approach to making changes and measuring improvement. The best approach is akin to the scientific method.
The overall process looks like this:
The original email and group of subscribers that you emailed that campaign to is the control group. If the second email campaign beats the original in terms of performance, it can become the new control group.
This method enables you to methodically ratchet up the performance of your email marketing by isolating each element and iterating on it until you’ve found the optimal version. It also ensures that you can accurately attribute improvements in performance to specific changes.
If you make several changes to an email campaign, it’s impossible to know which change (or changes) actually produced that improvement. That makes it challenging to replicate those changes in other email marketing campaigns or to understand which elements didn’t need to be revised.
There are two common ways to utilize control groups, identify successful changes, and consistently improve your email marketing:
These two types of testing are cornerstones of conversion rate optimization. And you need to create control groups and a methodical process to use both of them.
If you take this steady approach to your email marketing, you’ll improve your email marketing ROI in two ways:
So, using control groups for methodical testing and improvement is a double boost to your email marketing revenue.
This entire guide really boils down to these two things: timing and relevance.
That’s what lifecycle email marketing is all about: identifying the best time to send an email and the best message to send. And, then sending an email with the most relevant message at that moment, based on customer behavior.
If you implement behavioral tracking, and start sending these eight eCommerce email marketing campaigns, your email marketing ROI will go up, and your overall revenue will grow. There’s no doubt about it.
So, start building your ecommerce email marketing today.
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