4 eCommerce Email Marketing Tips for 2023 (with Proof)

If you found this article by Googling “email marketing tips”, you’re probably aware that most articles on the topic list about a million different ways you can ensure everything from the best open rate to the most conversions.

Fortunately, we’ve found that it’s A LOT simpler than that.

At IWD, we specialize in email marketing services specifically for eCommerce companies. And while these strategies definitely require certain components, we’ve found that four tips are enough to get companies impressive results in a short period of time.

Furthermore, we have PROOF they work.

Here’s how one of our email marketing clients’ annual numbers stack up against their industry’s average (according to Campaign Monitor’s review of email benchmarks):

• Avg. Daily Open Rate: 35.1% vs. 21.7% -61.75% better
• Avg. Daily Click Through Rate: 9.99% vs. 3.6% - 177.5% better

Those numbers resulted in:

• Total Value of Revenue by Campaign: $719.3K
• Revenue: $1,205,986- 13% of the company’s total revenue

And if you’re not familiar with some of those terms, don’t worry.

We’re going to cover that next.

Whether your current email campaign has been struggling or you’re just now starting your first attempt from scratch, these four email marketing tips will ensure you’re bringing recipients to your site who are primed to become customers.  

Before you can build out an actual email campaign, you need to know which metrics are most important for measuring its effectiveness.

Too many eCommerce companies only monitor their conversion rates. If they go up – and, therefore, their campaigns bring in revenue – they’re happy.

That’s about the end of it.

Only slightly better are the eCommerce business owners who also pay attention to their open rates.

But there are actually six important email metrics you should be monitoring to determine if your campaigns are as successful as possible.

These metrics are:

• Open Rate –Out of all the emails you sent out, how many were opened? That percentage is your “open rate.” The reason it’s – justifiably – one of the “big two” eCommerce metrics almost every business owner monitors is because, well, if people don’t open your emails, you can’t convert them and make money.
• Total Received Emails –This is simply the number of emails that were opened. Obviously, just like with your open rate, you want to see this number continue to grow over time. Improving your open rate always needs to be a priority, but your “Total Received Emails” will eventually plateau if you don’t continue growing your email list, too.
• Clickthrough Rate –If you’re sending an eCommerce email, it needs to include a link to the page with your product or products, so customers can place their orders. The percentage of people who “click through” to view these products compared to the entirety of your list will give you your click through rate.
• Conversion Rate –Conversion rate is arguably the most important metric for your email campaigns. It tells you what percentage of your email recipients actually placed an order with your company. So, if 10 out of 100 recipients converted, your conversion rate would be 10%.
• Total Value of Revenue –The whole point of your email campaign. You can’t calculate the ROI of your email marketing efforts if you don’t know how much revenue you’re bringing in.
• Unsubscribe Rate –Keeping track of your revenue isn’t enough, though. If you don’t keep an eye on your subscription rate, your emails could be bringing money from some subscribers while actually pushing even more subscribers away. Before you know it, you could find that you don’t have any subscribers left to email. This is why you have to monitor your unsubscribe rate.
  

These metrics are absolutely essential to track, but the good news is that there are only six of them. Monitor those closely, make adjustments as necessary, and your campaigns are destined for success.

The first thing we do when constructing an email campaign is choose the topics they’ll cover.

In other words, what product (or products) do we want our campaigns to sell?

Then, we get busy creating emails for these topics that will optimize these results.

And one very important way we do this is by creating three different emails for each of these topics.

The first one goes out to every one of our client’s email subscribers.

After that, we can begin segmenting our email list based on how those recipients respond.

So, a few days later, we send those initial recipients another email depending on the action they took upon receiving the first one.

If they opened that email but didn’t click through and make a purchase, that becomes a new segment and we’ll send that segment another email with a new subject line, tagline, and banner image. This way, they don’t feel as though they’re simply getting the exact same email twice.

If they didn’t open that initial email, that’s another segment. We’ll send them that exact same email again just with that new subject line I just mentioned. Oftentimes, this is all it takes to get many of the original recipients to open the email, even though we didn’t have to go through the trouble of creating brand-new messages.

We then send out a third email to all recipients who opened any one of those aforementioned emails. These have completely new banner images and taglines. Again, this way we’re still focusing on the same products/categories without spending time on creating completely new copy.

Now, if recipients didn’t open the first one, we send them it again but with this new subject and tagline.

And the same applies to any recipients who did open that first email but then ignored the second one. We’ll send them the content of that second email again with the subject line we’ve designed for email three.

Aside from saving our clients money by limiting the amount of content and graphics we need for each email, this approach maximizes their open rates and conversions for the products and categories highlighted in these campaigns.

On top of that, this strategy also works well for bringing customers back to our clients’ sites who may have left behind abandoned carts. In fact, learning to write an effective abandoned cart email may be one of the quickest - and cheapest - ways to increase your company's revenue.

Monitoring the success of each email and the overall health of your campaigns is essential to seeing a positive ROI from your efforts.

For our clients, we produce monthly email marketing reports, but as entire campaigns can often stretch for 30+ days, we can adjust our reporting for specific time frames.

At IWD, we use Klaviyo, which makes it really easy to track results through their dashboard. We can then pull the data from these campaigns, so we can quickly create user-friendly reports for our clients that track the benchmarks we outlined in the first section.

Here’s an example of what a monthly report looks like for our clients:

For the best possible results, you have to be ready to make adjustments if you notice your emails aren’t having the desired results.

That’s why the final step to a successful eCommerce email marketing campaign is staying flexible. Monitoring your results is important, but that won’t do you much good if you’re not able to quickly take action on what you’re seeing.

Even after we’ve done numerous campaigns for the same client, we still sometimes see things that surprise us and need to act fast to protect the ROI.

One of the most common examples is actually when everything with an email marketing campaign is going completely right – too right, even. When a client’s emails are doing so well that they actually run out of the product they’re highlighting, we need to act right away to shift that focus or the rest of the campaign will be for nothing.

Often, this means sending recipients who clicked through a new email that lets them know the product they wanted is out-of-stock, but they can sign up to be notified when we have them back in our inventory.

Other factors completely outside of our control can affect the trajectory of an email campaign, too.

For example, the success of email marketing for agricultural companies depends heavily on the weather of each season. If the campaign is based around winter products for snowy conditions but the weather is unseasonably warm, we need to shift gears and try another campaign in order to ensure our client still sees a positive ROI.

Every email marketing strategy is going to be different based on the unique client and their industry.

However, as we just outlined, building a successful email marketing campaign really only requires four simple steps. Start there, remember to stay flexible, and add to your strategies as time goes on to continue increasing your email marketing’s ROI.

And if you'd like any help at all, please feel free to contact us.