To help build a super strong presence online, email marketing is one of the best methods of attracting attention.

According to a number of small businesses, 81% rely on email as their primary customer acquisition channel, and 80% for retention of customers. There are many ways to generate sales as an eCommerce business from Facebook advertising to using chatbots on the site itself. 

However, it seems many are utilizing the benefits of email campaigns to help get customers over the line. There’s certainly been a growing interest in eCommerce businesses online lately which makes it a little harder to garner success. 

With that being said, the better your email campaigns and efforts are in marketing, the more fruitful you’ll be in increasing sales.

This guide will help inform you of the benefits that come with email marketing and why your marketing team should be embracing eCommerce this year.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is a method of marketing that makes full use of emails – one of the primary channels for people to communicate nowadays online. The main goal of email marketing is to help build a relationship between the business and the user.

That user may not yet be a customer and therefore needs to build trust before buying. Through the use of email marketing campaigns, introductions are made and help prospective customers move down the sales funnel.

Email marketing is also useful for the retention of existing customers, helping to build loyalty to the business. Within eCommerce, it’s important that you’re focused on both acquiring and retaining customers.

Email marketing campaigns may consist of any of the following approaches:

• Introductory discounts
• Product launches 
• Personalized transactional emails
• Reminder emails for abandoned shopping baskets

Your emails should be frequent enough but not so frequent that it becomes annoying. Email marketing offers an abundance of advantages but if used too much, it ends up having the opposite effect.

The benefits of email templates for eCommerce 

A great advantage of email marketing is that it’s a fairly low-cost method of marketing. In order to make the most out of your email marketing campaigns, it’s useful to have email templates to work from.

There are four types of emails used within email marketing and they are; promotional, informational, transactional, and re-engagement emails. To spark inspiration in your marketing campaigns, the best email template for eCommerce needs to be visually appealing and engaging in its content.

Using email templates has its benefits. Offering pre-made email structures saves time and the templates themselves adapt accordingly to the type of email you’re sending.

5 ways email campaigns impact eCommerce businesses

In what ways do email campaigns impact eCommerce businesses? How do they help increase sales? Now that you’ve got a better idea of what email marketing is and the benefits of using email templates for your campaigns, let’s look at how it improves your eCommerce.

1. Personalization helps build relationships with your customers.

Email campaigns come in all shapes and sizes. They could be sent to everyone in your email subscriber database, or they could be delivered to a select few for relevancy. 

With email marketing campaigns, you’ve got the opportunity to personalize each email sent out. This has a big influence on the customer and their relationship with you as a business. With eCommerce being a business that exists solely online, creating trust and loyalty is a lot more challenging. You don’t have the in-store experience to rely on. A study found that 67% of consumers trust a purchase on a familiar online market space, even if the product itself is unfamiliar to them.

Building that trust and relationship is crucial to ensure more sales are made through your eCommerce platform. Personalizing your emails attracts users to click on the email and engage with it, especially if their name is mentioned within the subject or opening line of the email.

2.Email campaigns are extremely cost-effective for small businesses.

As an eCommerce business, chances are you’re operating as a small business or startup. The internet has provided many individuals the opportunity to start their own e-commerce businesses on a shoestring budget.

Yes, you may not have the big bucks that some of the well-established eCommerce platforms have but there’s nothing to say you can’t achieve the same success eventually.

The impact of email campaigns goes beyond just helping to increase sales. It’s also a highly effective, low-cost method of marketing. Depending on your email subscriber list, you may have to pay a small amount every month or annually, to make use of automated marketing platforms.

However, the creation of emails is fairly minimal and in comparison to other marketing methods, more affordable for small businesses and those with limited budgets.

3. Helps to reactivate inactive customers for your business.

Email campaigns are helpful when you’ve got customers who’ve seemingly dropped off the face of the planet. It happens within eCommerce, especially as a new one pops up every other day. Customers who haven’t quite committed or become 100% loyal to an eCommerce platform will find themselves shopping on various different sites.

With the use of engaging, attractive email campaigns, helps reactivate those inactive customers who may not have shopped on your site for some time. For whatever reason that might be, your email campaigns might give them a reason to go back onto your site to check out new product launches or top up on products they may be running out of.

While customer acquisition is important for your business, customer retention is where the goldmine is for increasing sales. It has a huge impact on ROI for your marketing budgets, with a 5% increase in customer retention where businesses utilize email marketing.

4. It’s scalable to grow your business with the use of segmentation.

All eCommerce businesses have to begin from the ground up. That’s why it’s important to have systems and tools in place that scale up and down with the business accordingly. A benefit of email marketing campaigns is that they’re a scalable marketing choice.

Segmentation is often used within emails which is great for helping reach and interact appropriately with everyone on your email database. 

For example, a customer who has shopped with the business multiple times will likely want to be notified of new product launches. New users would benefit more from a discount offer on the first order.

By segmenting your emails, it offers the opportunity for your business to maximize its efficiency with all types of customers. Segmentation is also great for automating a lot of processes, which helps when your customer base is growing but you may not have enough resources in-house to manage it all yet.

5.You’re able to easily measure and monitor its performance. 

With an email campaign, you’re easily able to track and monitor its performance. There are plenty of platforms that provide analytics on how certain campaigns are performing.

Being able to measure and monitor the performance of email campaigns is essential, especially in the early days of your eCommerce business. 

You want to be able to have the information and data needed to tweak or change anything within these campaigns to make them more successful. A platform like Zoho is a great one for monitoring the success of your email campaigns.

Top tips for marketing your eCommerce business in 2023

There are plenty of great methods for marketing your eCommerce business this year. Aside from email marketing campaigns, here are a few other great suggestions that we’d recommend doing for your eCommerce business.

Invest in PPC advertising

PPC advertising, otherwise known as pay-per-click, is a popular form of advertising used across many platforms. From Google’s search engine to Facebook advertising, investing in this type of marketing is worthwhile.

As a digital marketing strategy for your eCommerce, it helps keep your products and the store itself, in front of your desired audience. Alongside this, it’s important to do your fair share of organic marketing, i.e social media to help build traffic and revenue.

Make your website user-friendly and SEO-friendly

For eCommerce platforms, it’s important that your website is not only user-friendly but SEO-friendly too. Users should be able to navigate the store with ease, finding everything they need to put into their basket.

Optimizing your site in general will help improve traffic on your site. It helps identify your store as being a site worth indexing and ranking on search engine result pages. There are lots of SEO practices that are worth brushing up on as a business to optimize the site fully.

Utilize social media for cross-channel promotion

As mentioned above, social media is a great way to provide your online store with some organic advertising. Make sure you’re utilizing social media for cross-channel promotion. Link up your Instagram platform and Facebook business page with your store’s site and vice versa.

Take advantage of email campaigns for your eCommerce in 2023

Email marketing offers an abundance of opportunities for eCommerce businesses but more importantly, it helps connect with your customers. Nurturing those relationships helps encourage more of them to shop on your site and transition their shopping basket into a sale. Make full use of email marketing campaigns for your eCommerce in 2023.