With all the chatter around social media channels like Instagram, Twitter & Facebook, one can easily forget the status of email as the most influential channel currently for driving business.
And the reason is that individuals prefer receiving emails over others. A study from Marketing Sherpa reveals how 72% of adults in the US alone prefer communication via email with companies.
However, manually sending emails requires a ton of work that is not sustainable enough long-term for growing e-commerce businesses. This is how email automation can create opportunities where the manual email marketing sector fails to reach.
Let’s have a look at 8 automated email flows worth keeping at the forefront of every e-commerce store to spike the revenue and keep audiences well engaged.
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1. Spice up The Welcome Emails
Welcome emails have become a basic feature across the internet, with users expecting a friendly email when signing up for something online. It is often taken as the first instance of contact for you and your new/or potential customer, so the right message flow will either make or break it with your audience.
Any experienced digital marketer is aware of some sign-up incentive involved in creating an efficient email list. As such, a strong welcome email should include features like a free trial or discount incentives, CTAs to your blogs or social media account, and avoid spam trigger words.
The likelihood of welcome emails instantly opened increases when such incentives are offered, either through exit-intent popups or a timer. Welcome emails work because they provide customers a sense of what they can expect from you while also giving out instructions.
2. Follow Up after Purchase
A timeless sales technique is following up, a type of marketing gesture that conveys a sense of appreciation and duty to customers from your end, even after receiving payment from their purchase.
From today’s digital perspective, this is an effective way to ensure and even secure your relevance while increasing client reviews, including elementary selling tools. So, what exactly sets a good follow-up apart from others?
Make sure to employ elements like requesting outright reviews and be sure it’s easily accessible (UGC marketing tool can be helpful in this), display similar products at the bottom, include an information section for product care, cases & FAQs, and let’s not forget, thanking the customer.
3. Employing Behavior Generated Discounts
In a world characterized by online shopping, who doesn’t love a discount? We’re certain everyone does, and sure enough, one of the impressive perks of utilizing email automation is targeting customers at the peak of their purchase through behavioral triggers.
Take, for instance, a customer that hasn’t made any purchases in a while but regularly visits a particular product. By the time the customer makes a third or fourth visit, you can trigger a discount pop-up, and it could be the very thing that pushes the customer to close the deal finally.
These types of automated emails pair well and effectively influence certain cases like welcome email incentives (as illustrated in the above point) and abandoned carts or browse abandonment, which we’ll get to in a minute.
4. Set Abandoned Cart Reminders
We’ve all been there, adding products to our cart and effortlessly walking away because of a distraction or something else. But a cart reminder is exactly the thing that keeps those almost-purchase products fresh in our heads.
Since adding products to a cart is a close act to purchasing a product, customers may only need a nudge to seal the deal, and automated reminders do exactly that.
You can easily utilize email automation software such as MailChimp and GetResponse, which are ideal to ensure whether auto-responders are sending out messages at optimized times. These are high-value tools and have built-in features to forward, abandoned cart emails as well.
5. Pay Attention to Browse Abandonment Emails
Now, this one is a lot trickier than the previous point. As with cart abandonment, you’re able to perceive a clear picture of a customer’s wants & needs. However, browse abandonment only offers a notion of the customer’s interest, either category wise or several products they browsed.
In such cases, setting a time-based behavioral trigger is a great idea. By observing time spent by a customer within a specific category, you can send an email containing that product recommendation.
When sending products of their interest, you can also add products that complement well with those products. This way, they can find it easier to move forward with other purchases in case the products they are interested in don’t impress them much.
6. Prompt User Re-engagement
Many e-commerce businesses have encountered large swaths of email lists that drastically fell within the category of “disengaged audience.” These audiences haven’t made any purchases, site visits, or email clicks in several months.
However, all isn’t lost, as these are people/customers that have already familiarized with your brand, they’re much warmer audiences compared to strangers. All you need to do is utilize re-engagement prompts and have them back browsing & purchasing.
Re-engagement prompt messages usually feature some irresistible offer displayed either on the main title or subject, be it a discount, free product, a fresh start, or you can go with the relationship-focused approach and use phrases such as “We Miss You.” Whatever it may be, make sure you’re offering prominent incentives.
7. Create Trust via Order Confirmation and Shipping Notification Emails
Every success story begins with trust, and when it falls on carving a successful e-commerce platform, nothing can quite compete against the benefit of fostering a reliable and trusted relationship with your customers.
When customers push forward with a purchase yet fail to receive any confirmation emails, they begin to doubt the entire procedure and, not to forget, the level of anxiety pressed against them.
This causes quite a hindrance. Hence, your customers should not face this type of service when shopping.
So, confirmation emails and friendly shipping notifications that assure customers of their purchase are a must if you want positive client feedback. Remember, when customers are satisfied, they are likely to make a comeback and purchase again.
8. Keep Information & Updates Relevant
Most users subscribe to your e-commerce email list for one reason: to stay informed and up to date with various promotions, sales, and new product arrival/launches. With that said, most customers want the information to remain relevant.
If they’re getting bombarded with emails that seem irrelevant to their interest, they might avoid opening the emails altogether or even halt their subscription. The key to avoiding this is implementing segmented lists to send messages to your relevant audience subsets selectively.
By syncing the list with previous purchase data, you’ll be able to forward specific product messages. For instance, send a leather boot update to customers that purchased leather goods earlier or those who purchased boots.
Final Thoughts
Automated emails are great for ensuring relevance, which makes them successful in generating higher revenue than manual work. While automated emails may require a bit of set-up time, it runs on autopilot, hence amassing long-term sales for your business.
Whether you’re sending offers or inviting them out to an email list, an automated email flow can instantly drive conversions and take off an enormous amount of burden from you.
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