Email marketing is a strategy loved by a whole lot of businesses worldwide and for a lot of reasons. Firstly, it gives an average ROI of $42 for every $1 spent. With the number of email users estimated to hit 4.3 billion by 2022 and grow further to hit 4.6 billion by 2025, you know that email marketing isn’t going away soon. As a matter of fact, aside from micro-influencing marketing, email marketing is the most potent marketing scheme for Shopify stores.
Looking at this, you want to know how you can get the best out of this marketing strategy and we are certainly here for you. Here are a few things to know about email marketing, as well as the best email marketing practices you want to integrate into your Shopify email marketing operations for full effectiveness.
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is the use of emails to drive marketing operations. It is a marketing technique in which emails are used to promote products and also build relationships with current and potential customers. Using Shopify email marketing strategy, you get a lot of benefits in terms of brand building and customer relationship management. This is especially in the area of content personalization for your customers and cost savings for your eCommerce business.
Best Shopify Email Marketing Practices
Make Use Of Email Marketing Software
Undoubtedly, the software makes everything much easier. Shopify email marketing software offers you a lot of benefits. Automations through scheduled messaging cut your workload and help you save time for other business activities. You achieve higher customer interactions and you easily collect measurable data to improve your email marketing operations.
Personalization is key
We have previously advised that you personalize your Shopify search bar experience, you must also personalize emails sent for marketing purposes. A very effective practice ensuring emails are opened, personalizing elements of your email is one thing you always want to do. This is especially so within the email greeting.
While avoiding the use of "dear", you want to make use of actual names of the customer or email contact, as this is sure to capture his or her attention. Top email marketing software programs help make this easy. With an advanced Shopify email marketing tool, names of email contacts are easily extracted from the email HTML and you don't even have to manually include them in messages. They do that for you.
Apply A/B Testing To Your Email Elements
No email template proves to be a 100% effective. What you want to do is identify the best template that fits your Shopify email campaign.
A/B testing involves the use of different variations of email elements sent to different groups of email recipients. The main goal is to choose the email template that performs better and apply this to all your email marketing campaigns.
The most important elements you want to apply this A/B testing practice to are your subject line and calls to action. Your subject line determines how many email contacts open up the message (open rate). Your calls to action determine how many contacts exit the email message with your goal achieved (click-through rate).
You find out the most effective email marketing template and apply this to all your campaigns. Of course, this is only effective if the content required to convince them is top-notch.
Do Not Purchase Email Contact Lists
One of the most crucial factors that assure you of sales when it comes to eCommerce is organic traffic or audience. This is no different when it comes to email marketing.
For your Shopify email marketing campaigns, the last thing you want to do is purchase email contact Lists. You don't want your emails popularly recognized as spam by email platforms either because of a very poor open rate or users marking it as spam. What you want is to relate with individuals you have had previous interactions with, and who you think should recognize your brand when contacted.
For European territories, possessing and utilizing an email contact for your marketing campaigns without consent is against GDPR. You could find your eCommerce business in real trouble.
Avoid Including "No Reply" Within Your Email Address
If your eCommerce business is based in the US, another practice that keeps you on the good side of the law is to avoid including "no-reply" within your sender's email address. Included in legislation known as the CAN-SPAM, the rule has to do with US laws protecting the rights of its citizens to reply to emails.
Nonetheless, why would you want to use an email like that? Personalizing with a name, even if it's fake, gives you a higher open rate. You also stay within email regulations.
Always Review Your Email Contact List
For a healthy open rate, you want to stick to this. You have email contacts that never open your emails and this inevitably affects your campaign. Resisting the urge to have a massive contact list is hard. So our advice on cleaning up your contact list includes gradually taking away contacts by moving them through lists.
You identify contacts that don't interact with your emails for a consecutive number of times and move them to weekly, monthly, or quarterly newsletter lists. The more engaging contacts are kept in your daily newsletter list and, this way, you get more value from your campaign without affecting your open rate.
Keep Important Elements Above The Fold
Important elements here relate to your message and call to action. Research from the Neilson Norman Group shows that email viewers spend 57% of their time on content above the fold. They then spend 17% on the next full screen of content and a continuously decreasing amount of time on other parts.
You want to utilize the highest part of your email to include your most important message as well as a CTA for click-through.
Keep Email Templates Below 650 Pixels
Your user experience is important. Having a template exceeding 650 pixels means your contacts, especially the ones using mobile devices, need to scroll horizontally to have a view of the whole content.
You don't want this. You also don't want your templates to be below 500 pixels to ensure it is large enough to be viewed. All these ensure easy readability for your contacts.
In addition to all these, some other practices you want to get involved in include adding your offer to your subject line(subject to A/B testing), embedding your logos and signatures, avoiding sending newsletters on Mondays, sending emails early in the morning, and maintaining a maximum of two common fonts. You also want to properly optimize your preview text by making your first line supplement the subject line, among others.
Make The Most Of Your Shopify email Campaigns
Email Marketing is one of the most lucrative marketing strategies you could engage in. As a Shopify store, you want to make use of the best Shopify email marketing tools available to you. In addition to them, you also want to make use of the best software programs available in the Shopify app marketplace. You want tools that don't affect your email marketing operations.
For advanced search functionalities, Sparq is your go-to tool. Get the most out of your email marketing campaigns today.
