Improve Your Emails With ShipStation & Shopify
Maintaining contact with customers and prospective buyers is a never ending task for ecommerce sellers. One of the most effective ways to achieve this crucial contact is through email marketing. Email may be an old fashioned marketing tool, but it is still very effective. It’s the easiest way to reach relevant consumers directly. And a strong email program should be a focus of every ecommerce business.
Why is email marketing important?
Website traffic is a hard-earned asset for ecommerce sellers. Having a user-friendly signup process for an email list/newsletter is a great way to retain some of this traffic and convert visitors to customers. However, effective emails don’t end with your monthly newsletter or new product roundups—they should follow your customers through their entire buying journey. Shipping confirmation and post-purchase follow up emails also play an important role in retaining customers.
There are many components to a successful email program. We’ll cover some important components to improve and simplify your ecommerce email program.
Make the most of your emails
Order Confirmation & Shipping Confirmation Emails
Shipping confirmation emails may seem mundane, but they are an excellent opportunity to incorporate your brand and build loyalty with your customers. According to a 2016 study by IBM, the mean unique open rate for transactional emails is 47.1%, nearly double that of the 21.6% open rate for non-transactional emails. You will have almost guaranteed higher open rates on order or shipping confirmation emails than you will with promotional emails. The messaging and experience you provide for your customers here matters.
It’s common to not worry about the design and layout of these emails, but don’t skip on this step. Ecommerce solutions can make this process easy, even without the involvement of an email marketing platform. You can send order confirmation emails automatically with Shopify. These emails can be customized to incorporate your business’ unique brand elements and messaging, providing a consistent brand experience for customers.
How Shipping Softwares Help with Shipping Confirmation Emails
There are many reasons to use a shipping software for your shipping and fulfillment process. Not only will you save your team time getting packages out of the door, you can offer a trustworthy shipping experience as part of your competitive advantage. A shipping solution like ShipStation will align your shipping process with branded shipping and delivery emails. ShipStation automatically sends customized shipping and delivery notification emails to your customers.
Keeping your brand messaging clear across platforms and customer touch points will build brand awareness and loyalty among your customers. A solution like ShipStation will ensure buyers are automatically informed about the status of their purchases—minimizing the cost of human error and building trust for your business.
Emails for Subscription Businesses
This section was contributed by our partner Bold Commerce
Subscription customers can become long-term loyal brand advocates—helping to increase revenue, conversions and social reach. Subscribers also help manage order predictability, allowing you to better estimate inventory needs, expenses, and foreseeable revenue.
The best way to retain this vital subset of customers is to maintain consistent communication for both promotional and transactional information. Emails should be segmented based on the type of shopper, with subscribers receiving exclusive emails with discounts, member-only content, product sneak peeks and more. According to a recent study conducted by Bold, 55% of brands that send emails tailored to subscribers report an average lifetime value higher than or equal to one year. In other words, they see better business outcomes when creating segmented content for their subscription customers.
Both transactional and promotional emails should be customized to include branding to be cohesive and trustworthy. Branding means more than a logo—it’s the language, colors, tone and feel that your company portrays.
Customers have come to expect a personalized shopping experience, so why not take this a step further with customized emails? Bold Subscriptions allows you to automate and customize emails using CSS and HTML for subscription notifications, dunning information like when a credit card fails and upcoming orders. Create one template as your default to create on-brand experiences for all emails enabled. With subscription customers often spending 67% more than new customers, custom emails to help engage and retain these subscribers are well worth the effort.
Invest in email, get results
Email marketing may seem traditional, but its importance should not be understated. Consumer expectations will continue to evolve for email content, and it’s important for ecommerce businesses to keep up. Fortunately, ecommerce solutions like ShipStation and Shopify can help you customize and automate your email sends so you can spend less time on logistics and more time growing your business.
