Email marketing for online shops: Advantages, examples and ideas

Do you want to optimise the conversion of your WooCommerce online shop or other providers? Then you shouldn’t just rely on one marketing channel or expect your sales figures to skyrocket without additional advertising. Emails are an effective and simple way to increase sales.

Most people – including the customers of your online shop – check their inbox every day. With targeted, personalised and appealing mailings, you have a significant influence on the purchasing decisions of those who are interested in your shop.

This article tells you more about the benefits of e-commerce newsletters, which types of emails are particularly important for online shops and how exactly you can get started with email marketing.

Why you should start with email marketing

For retailers of online shops, emails are the perfect channel (in addition to their own shop website) to market products and increase sales. Almost every professional e-commerce company uses transactional emails and other email campaigns to strengthen customer loyalty and keep customers informed about their order throughout their entire customer journey.

With a clever email marketing strategy, you can build a loyal community and improve the reputation of your online shop. You personalise your marketing activities and can collect social proof from satisfied customers, among other things.

With e-commerce mailings, you can be sure that you are addressing a target group that is really interested in your online shop. This is because those who receive the emails must register for a newsletter themselves and agree to the opt-in procedure so that you can contact them. This in turn means that you build up a high-quality group of addressees.

What’s more, you can use a win-back newsletter campaign to prevent your customers from forgetting you. Then you can keep them from forgetting about your online shop with just one (or several) emails and encourage them to buy again.

As a marketing tool, the email channel is cheaper than many other channels. The costs incurred are limited to the software you use for email marketing. The same applies to the time required to set up the campaigns. Newsletters often achieve the highest ROI (return on investment) of all online marketing channels.

Do you want to make your newsletter campaigns easier? E-commerce mailings can be largely automated. Email marketing automation with a focus on e-commerce is part of every good tool on the market. As a rule, all you have to do is select the target group for your campaign, choose a template for the email content, customise it and decide when the email should be sent or what it should trigger.

What are transactional emails?

You will often hear the term “transactional emails” in connection with email marketing for e-commerce. In short, transactional emails are messages that require a transaction by a customer.

This transaction acts as a trigger for sending these emails. Examples of transactional emails are

• Registration confirmations
• Order and dispatch confirmations
• Welcome e-mails
• Autoresponder
• Order status updates
• Feedback mails

Transactional emails guide your customers through every stage of the order journey and lay the foundation for healthy communication between retailers and customers in e-commerce. They are therefore also the basis for customer satisfaction.

Important emails for your online shop

But what types of e-commerce emails should every online shop send? Here are some examples and tips for your shop’s newsletter strategy that your customers will expect.

Welcome e-mail

After your customers have registered for your email contact list, you should welcome them. A short email with a few friendly words and confirmation that the newsletter registration was successful is sufficient.

Many online shops also offer their contacts a welcome discount to encourage the recipient to make a purchase as soon as possible.

Order and dispatch confirmation

To give your customers peace of mind and avoid any doubts about the reliability of your shop, you should always keep them informed about the status of their purchase. In concrete terms, this means that the following follow-up emails should be part of your email strategy:

• Order confirmations
• Invoice e-mails and possibly a confirmation of receipt of payment
• Shipping confirmation with tracking number and information about the selected shipping service provider
• Emails if the order is delayed or something has gone wrong

Updates on successfully completed orders in your online shop should be a matter of course and can be easily automated on email marketing platforms. So you have little work with this type of email.

Discount codes and special offers

Discounts, vouchers, sales promotions and special offers are probably some of the most tried and tested online marketing methods for e-commerce companies to drive your sales figures to record heights.

You will have even more success with these campaigns if you advertise them to your customers via direct marketing emails. This will make your customers aware of your special offers and make them even more likely to consider browsing through your shop. After all, who doesn’t like getting something for free?

Include a few pictures of your current reduced products in the email – preferably of products that the prospective customers have already viewed or saved to give them a flavour of what is on offer in your shop.

Seasonal e-mail campaigns

Christmas, Easter and other public holidays are the perfect opportunity to prepare special, thematically relevant mailings for your customer group. On the one hand, your online shop’s customers are willing to spend more money on public holidays. On the other hand, the aforementioned discount and special promotions are particularly present on public holidays.

Come up with something special for the Easter or Christmas design of your emails to get your customers in the mood for the festive season. Offer them a special voucher code for the festive period and you’ll see your sales increase.

Birthday e-mail

A birthday email is also one of the easiest e-commerce emails you can send to your customers. If your customers have entered their date of birth in the newsletter registration form or in their account, you can use this information as a trigger date for a happy birthday email.

Discounts and vouchers for the respective day or week are also a nice idea here to turn contacts into buyers. However, be aware that the conversion of your newsletter registration can drop significantly if you ask for too much information.

You should also seek advice from a law firm specialising in online law on which customer data you are allowed to request and under what conditions. And note that some target groups deactivate the newsletter if they receive too many emails in too short a time.

Product range update

Have you expanded your range or launched a new product line? Then inform your customers about it by email. Include a sneak peek of the new products and a call to action button (CTA) that takes them directly to the advertised products.

Product recommendation

Over time (and with the right software) you will get to know your customers better and get a feel for what they like and are interested in. Good newsletter software collects this information for you.

Based on past orders and favourite products, you can recommend similar products to certain customer segments. It is likely that they will also like your recommendations and order again.

“Your product is available again”

If interested persons have already decided on a product, but the order has to be cancelled due to limited availability, inform them when the respective version, size or colour of the product is available again.

In the best online shops, customers can specifically choose whether they want to be informed about renewed availability. In this case, you already have prospective buyers close to the end of the e-commerce funnel. As a rule, they only need this one impulse to finalise the order.

Win Back E-Mails

As already mentioned, you can also use email marketing to win back order cancellations or inactive customers. However, please note that special legal conditions and a “watertight” opt-in are sometimes required for this to be permitted – you should also seek good advice here.

You can programme how many days must have passed since the last completed order for a reactivation email to be sent. Think about what your customers need in order to order from you again:

• Is it a discount?
• Free shipping?
• Or a free gift?

One of the most popular emails to win back customers are messages to shopping basket abandoners. These remind those who have already filled their shopping basket but have not completed the checkout what they are missing out on.

“Were you satisfied?”

As in any other online marketing business, it is also extremely important in e-commerce to find out what works in your marketing strategy and what is not well received. You should send feedback emails to customers who have already placed an order in your online shop or who have been in contact with your customer service.

Ask for a rating, feedback or even a review that you can later use as social proof or as a testimonial to attract new customers. The more positive reviews you get, the more people will take notice of you. You can even learn from the more critical reviews and improve your shop.

Email marketing step by step

But where should you start if you want to establish an email marketing strategy for your online shop? Here are a few simple steps you can follow:

• Research which email marketing software you want to use. There are numerous plugins and software that can be linked to providers such as WooCommerce.
• Collect contacts. You can do this via a registration form or pop-up on your shop page. You decide what information you need from your customers. Email address, name and possibly date of birth are important.
• Obtain consent for sending emails. By means of an opt-in procedure in which your contacts must confirm the registration manually, for example by agreeing to the terms and conditions when registering using the form. This ensures that you are conducting legal email marketing.
• Activate transactional emails such as order confirmations in your e-commerce or email marketing platform. With many online shops, such as those from WooCommerce or Shopify, you can activate the function in the shop settings. Of course, it is also a good idea to use your newsletter tool to have all emails in one place.
• Design your first email. Start with the welcome emails. Use a template from your email marketing programme or design your own email from scratch. Include a logo. The colours should reflect your brand and the text should be crisp and inspiring. Don’t forget the call to action with a link to your shop as well as visual elements such as images, gifs or videos.
• Define key figures and targets for your newsletters that you can use to measure the success of your email campaigns. This allows you to create inspiring reports and learn from them for future campaigns.

If you utilise the considerable potential that e-commerce emails offer your business, you will see how quickly your conversion rate improves. Newsletters and transactional emails can be the key to the kind of customer loyalty you’ve always wanted for your shop.

If you are new to newsletter marketing or your online shop, there are numerous resources and solutions to help you plan and implement your email marketing campaigns. Just give it a try – and see for yourself the benefits of direct customer communication via email.