Email Marketing For eCommerce: Why Is It Important?

You’ve probably sent out a newsletter or two and used email marketing for your eCommerce.

But here’s the burning question: are you aware of the full extent of the remarkable impact that email marketing can have on your business?

With the ability to deliver personalized messages, capture customers’ attention, and generate high returns on investment, this type of marketing has found its way into the core of eCommerce businesses worldwide.

If you’re yet to be convinced to use it, let us guide you through the key reasons why emails are crucial to include in every eCommerce marketing strategy.

After you fully understand the potential of email marketing, you’ll be inclined to leverage it more.  

So if you want to stay competitive and make your business thrive continuously, explore what the hype is all about!

Emails are Well Received By Your Customers 

When it comes to the realm of eCommerce; customers want to hear from merchants via email. 

Research showed that more than half of customers prefer businesses to contact them via email. 

That, in itself, is a significant reason why you should make this mode of communication a part of your marketing strategy.

Illustration: Flashy / Data: Constant Contact

At this point, you might be wondering why customers would want to receive emails from businesses when their inboxes are probably crowded already. 

The answer lies in the value they’re getting from the eCommerce emails.

That’s something businesses in other industries don’t have.  

Although businesses can email their subscribers to remind them that they exist or to share what’s new. But in eCommerce, it’s more common to include discounts, gifts, or rewards in marketing emails. 

That makes them more valuable and well-received.

You can see a great example of this practice in the screenshot below, where Loftie, a wellness eCommerce company, sends subscribers a 10% off coupon for no special occasion.

Source: Really Good Emails

Receiving such an email doesn’t only show the customers that they’re a valued part of the business.

It also creates a sense of anticipation whenever the customers will open future emails from the company because they know they can expect exciting purchasing opportunities. After all, who doesn’t love a discount?

All in all, while it may seem counterintuitive at first, customers appreciate receiving emails from businesses that provide value. And eCommerce stores do. 

Allows You to Capture and Keep Your Audience

Another significant benefit of email marketing is that it helps your eCommerce business capture your audience’s attention, increasing the likelihood of keeping them purchasing from your shop. 

Let’s see how.

Email allows you to reach your subscribers’ inboxes directly.

If you can email the customers, that means that they’ve already shown interest in your eCommerce store - enough to give you their names and email addresses. 

Of course, to capture a new email subscriber, you might need to give a little incentive. Like a discount shown in the example below: 

Source: Flashyapp  

Keeping the audience you captured depends on your ability to build a relationship with subscribers, and the quality of your email campaigns, but email is regarded as “owned media” compared to social channels where you depend on someone else’s algorithm.  

That’s why Robbie Fitzwater, founder of the digital marketing company MKTG Rhythm, compares social media marketing with building a house on rented land, while email marketing lets you build your house on land you own.

Source: Flashy

Fitzwater also calls email marketing a low-risk channel because it allows you to experiment with multiple strategies until you find what works best for your audience.

A good email marketing solution will help you both segment your audience and tailor personalized messages and content relevant to each of your customers. This will ensure that you’re always telling the right thing to the right people.

And when you send emails that customers gladly open and read, you’ll be able to nurture customer relationships, influence purchasing decisions, and, ultimately, propel the growth of your eCommerce business, which is our next topic.

Makes It Easier for You to Grow Your Business

There are multiple ways to grow your eCommerce business, and email marketing can help you with several of those.

According to Fitzwater, the marketing expert that we’ve mentioned above, email marketing helps with three avenues of growing eCommerce businesses. 

He claims that emails help to:

• Increase the number of customers
• Increase the average order value
• Increase the lifetime value of each customer.

The first method is the most straightforward: with engaging emails, you can turn inactive subscribers into paying customers.

For instance, a person might visit your website and enter their email address to register as a user, but they never complete the first purchase. 

That’s your chance to send an engaging welcome email. 

If you need some inspiration, take a look at one such email below.

Source: Really Good Emails

As you can see, the welcome email includes a captivating copy about the company’s values and invites subscribers to join a good cause.

A 10% discount is added as an incentive to make the first purchase.

The more people you nudge toward making their first purchase, the more you grow your customer base. So that’s how you tackle the first problem. 

When it comes to growing the business by increasing the average order value, emails can help you persuade customers to spend more than they usually would. 

This can be done in different ways; by offering matching product recommendations, or promoting upsells for unlocking free shipping.  

You could send an email like the one below.

Source: Really Good Emails

By alerting customers that they are only a few dollars away from qualifying for free shipping, they are motivated to add another product or two to their shopping carts.

In the end, they make a larger purchase in order to take advantage of the free shipping opportunity, resulting in an increased order value.

Lastly, emails can help you increase the revenue that each customer generates for your business over the course of the relationship with you.

Rather than only sending transactional messages after the purchase is complete, well-crafted email campaigns provide an opportunity to communicate with customers regularly, build trust and loyalty, and encourage repeat purchases.

All of these elements combined will lead to long-term customer relationships, resulting in higher customer retention and higher spending levels.

Helps You With Customer Lifecycle Optimization

Blasting all customers with the same email won’t help you increase sales. 

The modern customer expects personalized communication, so you have to know at what time to send what messages and to whom. That is how you keep your customers’ life cycle longer and more fruitful for your business. 

Automated email marketing can help you optimize the customer lifecycle and maximize the value that you get from each customer relationship.

Think about it.

Some of your subscribers have just given you their emails, some have made their fourth purchase this year, and some haven’t bought anything for a long time. 

To put it another way, they’re at different stages of the customer lifecycle.

You can engage all those customers by delivering timely and relevant messages tailored to their specific behaviors. The image below shows you what email options there are at different stages.

Source: Sellberry

From browse abandonment emails intended for new customers to win-back messages aimed at inactive ones, there are numerous ways you can reach individuals who are at different points along their customer journey.

But who would want to track so many customer segments and send personalized emails manually?

Not you, at least not if you value your time.

Luckily, a capable eCommerce marketing platform, such as our Flashy, can do the hard work instead of you.

Flashy gathers information on customers based on their behavior and uses that information to develop the customer’s journey via personalized emails.

For instance, it can detect visitors viewing your eCommerce store and nudge them to sign up for your newsletter. Once they do, Flashy automatically sends engaging emails motivating them to make the first purchase.

Source: Flashy

That’s just one example of how quality email marketing software can help you optimize the customer lifecycle.

It could also persuade big spenders to join the loyalty program, send cart abandonment emails to indecisive customers, and more.

Regardless of the customer journey stage where each of your customers is, well-designed automated email campaigns can help you guide them through the sales funnel and ultimately drive them toward making repeat purchases.

Provides You With a High Return on Investment

With the sheer number of various marketing channels to invest your time and resources into, you want to ensure that you get the best possible return on your investment. This is another area where email marketing is unbeatable.

In general, marketers receive $36 in return for every dollar they invest in email marketing, according to a Litmus report. But the ROI is even higher for eCommerce businesses, where every dollar invested generates a remarkable $45 return.

Illustration: Flashy / Data: Litmus

The data may sound too good to be true, but there are real-life success stories that validate the effectiveness of email marketing in generating high returns for eCommerce businesses.

One such example is the story of Island Olive Oil Company, a gourmet food store. After implementing an emailing tool in the marketing strategy, the owner of the store saw an increase in conversions and revenue.

Automated emails were a game-changer.

Angèl Foster, the owner of the store, claims that despite comprising only 1.22% of their total email volume, Island Olive Oil’s automated emails are responsible for 39% of their marketing email revenue.

You can see an example of an automated email from the company below.

Source: Private inbox / Island Olive Oil Company

The screenshot you’ve seen above shows the first of three emails from the welcome series. It introduces the shop and its owners.

The series then covers the company’s mission, best-sellers, and popular gourmet products.

As this eCommerce shows, emails have the power to transform the initial effort of creating email templates and automations into a long-term revenue generator, which is an invaluable asset for any eCommerce business.

Simplifies the Evaluation of Marketing Performance

Your marketing efforts are all for naught if you don’t know how successful they are.

Fortunately, email marketing is a measurable marketing form with clear-cut metrics that allow you to evaluate its effectiveness.

Metrics such as revenue per email, revenue per campaign, and open rate can tell you a lot about how the design and the content of your emails are performing. 

Of course, these are tedious to track by hand, so your email marketing tool of choice should have good reporting capabilities.

This is what a campaign report overview looks like in Flashy.

Source: Flashy

So, if you went to your emailing platform and saw low open rates, you could examine the subject lines of the emails you send and find ways to make them sound more attractive.

We’ll now list some subject line examples to show you the difference between boring and engaging ones.

❌	✅
Newsletter Issue #3	Your Must-Read Guide to Brewing Tea: Issue #3
New Products Available	Don’t Miss Out - Irresistible Summer Arrivals
Spring Sale Announcement	Spring into Savings: Our Biggest Sale of the Season

Such simple alterations can help you increase your open rates and click-through rates, resulting in more sales.

Similarly, a high unsubscribe rate could mean that you’re sending emails too frequently, which you could rectify by implementing a strategic approach to your email frequency.

All in all, going through the metrics that your marketing platform provides will give you an insight into the engagement levels, audience preferences, and overall performance of your email marketing campaigns.

Based on these insights, you can make data-driven decisions, refine your email marketing approach, and increase its effectiveness.

Conclusion

As the examples in the article have shown, the power of email marketing for eCommerce businesses can’t be overstated.

This channel lets you provide the customers with what they want while driving growth and maximizing your ROI.

The opportunities that email marketing presents for customer engagement and measurable results are too valuable to ignore. So, if you haven’t already embraced emails, now is the time.