ConvertKit: Best Practices For E-Commerce Email Marketing

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Ecommerce email marketing is not only an effective channel to advertise to your customers, but it is also the most cost-efficient way to scale your ecommerce business. It offers more than 3800% ROI, making email the top choice for 56% of marketers who live by its effectiveness as the best-performing channel to retain customers.

Building a well-rounded ecommerce email marketing plan requires effort and time, but it's well worth the effort because it's the safest way to reach your existing and potential customers. And interestingly enough, the customers agree. 72% of them prefer to hear more from brands through email as compared to social media. And unlike a social following on Facebook or Twitter, you manage and own your opted-in email addresses list.

Additionally, since emails are decentralized, there is no risk of just one large enterprise suddenly making it more costly for you to reach your customer base.

Email as a marketing channel is still as relevant as ever and should not be overlooked just because it's been around a long time. However, your success largely depends on using the right email marketing automation platform like ConvertKit to make sure that you are maximizing the power of this under-valued resource.

Here are some of the best practices for e-commerce email marketing with ConvertKit to enhance your overall digital marketing efforts.

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Automate The Email Processes

A well-thought-out ecommerce email marketing plan is built on marketing automation. Use automated workflows that allow you to segment quickly, personalize your offerings and eventually, enhance the delivery times. 

Without email marketing automation, it can be challenging to scale your ecommerce site effectively. After all, it isn't easy to draft and send emails manually when you have an ever-growing list of customers, prospects, and leads. 

So, it makes sense that the best email marketing practices for online stores include marketing automation. Opt for a feature-rich platform like ConvertKit to create an email marketing automation strategy that lets you send triggered or scheduled promotional emails to people on your mailing list. It also enables you to send tailored messages to prospects and customers on a schedule or when pre-determined conditions are met.

Email automation is one of the top use cases for Convertkit. See here other key Convertkit use cases.

Visual Automation - ConvertKit

Make Sure You A/B Test 

This involves sending one variation of subject lines or email content to one set of subscribers and a different variant to another group of subscribers. The goal of A/B testing is to figure out which variation gets the results you are looking for.

When you use an email tool like ConvertKit, A/B testing your emails becomes very easy. It lets you build two variations of an email and send it out automatically to 2 unique lists to see which email performs the best. 

Once you've found the winning version, the one that gets the most opens and/or click-throughs, you can schedule it to be sent to the rest of your subscribers.

With ConvertKit email marketing, you can quickly create an email broadcast and click on the A/B button beside the field of the email subject line.

This lets you test different email subject line variations to see which ones are worth using. And also see what went wrong with the others to learn from your mistakes.

Build A Better Abandoned Cart Series

Drafting a robust abandoned cart series is also an essential best practice for e-commerce email marketing.

According to Shopify, 67.45% of digital shopping carts are abandoned before the visitor completes a purchase. This indicates that your sales figures are only one-third of what they could have been had everyone placed their orders.

There are multiple ways to build the abandoned cart series. However, even a basic series typically includes three emails. The initial email is sent within 30 - 60 minutes of the cart being abandoned. The next email goes out in 24 hours, and the final one within 3 - 5 days. 

You can A/B test and experiment with different timing and leverage automation with ConvertKit to determine the best frequency and time to deliver the emails.

An effectively abandoned cart series should help you bring back 10% - 15% of clients, and the difference will tell how well you were able to optimize your email sequence. Initially, a 5% improvement might not seem worth the effort but know that you are on a growth trajectory here. The 10% will soon lead to 15% more orders and eventually a  50% enhancement that will continue to pay dividends.

Personalize Emails To Your Subscriber

There is no denying that people love to get addressed by their first name. It makes them feel seen and heard in a world that feels crowded and noisy at times. Tailoring your emails with a customized greeting allows you to create a more robust and meaningful connection with your subscribers.

Since personalized emails are likely to receive 41% higher click-through rates and 29% higher open rates, this element is something you should always pay attention to.

With ConvertKit email marketing, it only takes a few seconds, and this time investment can help you reap big rewards by allowing you to build trust with everyone on your email list.

Build An Email Marketing Content Calendar

Successful ecommerce email marketing is about being consistent and delivering the right message to the right audience. An email marketing calendar is the only way to ensure that your email content is scheduled on time and organized to deliver on those expectations. 

This essential tool lets you plan, schedule, and organize the emails and delivery timings, so your strategy stays on track.

That's why email marketing becomes so much easier and manageable once you have a proper content calendar to follow. Like most other content marketing efforts, a frequently updated content calendar for email marketing can help strategize your future content, ensure your long-term approach stays intact and set KPI goals.

Use the content calendar for your ConvertKit email marketing to keep aside a specific block of time to note down email ideas/tactics and structure them into groups in one sitting. You can go with the same process as when you are generating content for other marketing platforms.

Send Emails From A Person, Not An Entity

Instead of sending your email broadcasts from a business entity, sending your emails with a custom brand-style email address is recommended. And if you already own a personal brand, it can be easier for you since your audience will know your name when signing up for your email list.

However, suppose you are building a larger company. In that case, you can still benefit from a more personalized connection with your customer base by talking to them as the person behind the company.

For instance, your emails can be from "Name from company name" instead of just the "company name" so that your customers get to know who they are communicating with behind the platform.

You can also develop trust by including a friendly headshot of the individual. This should help your subscribers put a face to a name to establish personal connections with the brand.

Segment And Scrub Your Email List

A refined email list is up-to-date and current. Studies reveal that an email list should be cut by an average of 22% each year, so it is imperative to eliminate invalid, dead, wrong, and unengaged addresses frequently and regularly.

Soft and hard bounces, complaints, subscriptions, etc., can adversely impact the sender's reputation. As a result, it becomes challenging to get your emails delivered, clicked, and opened by everyone else on your list.

An unsegmented email list in a study had $28 as an average customer value. That figure rose to a $42 average when segmented.

One of the easiest and fastest techniques to clean and scrub your list is using a verification tool to eradicate hard and soft bounces straight away in just a few attempts. In ConvertKit, you can classify subscribers by demographics, geography, behavioral, psychographics, and more – the smaller the group, the better. 

Tags and Segments - ConvertKit

Wrapping Up

To sum it up, the above-mentioned best practices for e-commerce email marketing are the most effective at yielding desired results. Various active email users check their emails more frequently than on their social media. 

Today, marketing platforms like ConvertKit provide all the essential features to connect with your customer base in the best way you can. Leverage the tools to your benefit, employ your knowledge, and build a sustainable and solid business.Use these e-commerce email marketing best practices to make your emails stand out in the clutter - you want concise, clear, and appealingly presented content delivered to the appropriate people when they need it.

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Written by:
Ricky is the founder of Markletic. He is an expert in Marketing Technology with over 10 years of experience in testing and reviewing MarTech. Ricky's passion is to help companies with fine-tuning their MarTech stack to optimally impact revenue growth.

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