Smartphones revolutionize our lives. We have the world in our hands now. With e-commerce, shopping has gotten even better and more accessible. The world can have your store in their hands. One of the advantages of e-commerce stores is the location barrier it breaks. You get the chance to have personalized communication with multiple people, either customers or potential customers.
In brick and mortar businesses, contact with potential customers is mostly one-time. Communication after a sale or a potential sale is not common and can’t be automated. However, with e-commerce, you can have some form of contact or communication with either customers or potential customers via several channels.
Surprisingly, interesting statistics by MarketingSherpa show that 72% of adults in the US prefer to communicate with companies through email. Besides, being a preferred choice for customers when automated saves a considerable amount of time and drives sales.
With the enormous benefits email messaging affords us, it’s up to you to optimize the power of creative storytelling in creating value. Irrespective of the kind of email sent, the audience must be able to connect with it easily. The average email open rate is 18%. Most of your audience won’t always open your emails. But, whenever they do, make sure to grab their attention with creative storytelling.
To allow the emails to load quickly, ensure the size of the images or videos in the message are not too big- this allows the loading time to be minimal, increasing the chance of the customer reading the mail and resultant click-through rate.
Starting with Sendmunk email automation for your eCommerce store is very simple. With our pre-set template, you can instantly get ahead with email automation after some tweaks.
Standard email flows every e-commerce store should automate include:
- Welcome Message: Personalized, friendly and concise- these are essential considerations for a welcome message. For e-commerce stores, welcome messages could also serve as a purchase confirmation. They are an excellent way to onboard new customers and make them feel a part of a family.
A lot of e-commerce businesses send welcome messages. According to BlueHornet, 74.4% of customers expect it after subscribing or giving you their email addresses – just in the same way customers expect a salesperson to greet them in a brick and mortar store. Providing valuable content starts from here- so they don’t end up unsubscribing or mark the emails as spam. In a welcome message, it is advisable to define how often emails will be sent and what they should expect from them. Asking how often the audience prefers to receive emails is a thoughtful way of making them feel involved.
There are several templates to choose from on Sendmunk. These templates are visually attractive and save time and effort spent in building from scratch. All that is left to do is to personalize it for your company and the campaign in particular- Add a logo, brand story, Customers name on the subject line etc. A few of the welcome message templates are shown below:
– Post-purchase follow up
Recently, individuals have started to build trust in e-commerce and now buy a lot of stuff online. Keeping in touch with your customer after a purchase benefits both you and the customer. The post-purchase follow up can involve a series of emails- a confirmation of order placed, upselling and product review.
Post-purchase email like the one above helps the customer trust the store more and is essential for every purchase.
A while after the goods have been delivered a product feedback email should be sent. It helps to know how to improve in the future and make the customer feel like an essential part of the company’s decision-making process.
A good part of a post-purchase follow-up campaign is upselling. For example, if the customer got a journal, you can also encourage them to buy a pen because most people use it alongside the journal. It will be of interest to your audience if positive reviews of customers who got the pen are added. There are chances that they see how it meets a need and might as well purchase the pen.
– Customer win-back
Customer win-back can do two things – drive sales, and maintain contact list hygiene. Several templates like these are available on Sendmunk:
Emails like the one above bring back your brand to the memory of your customers. Adding a discount code could encourage them to make a purchase.
It is good email practice to review mail engagement from time to time and re-engage or remove inactive subscribers before they unsubscribe. This gives you a hygienic contact list and decreases spam complaints. Pre-set templates like the one above was designed for this purpose.
– Customer loyalty
Everyone likes being rewarded. Keep sales going by providing discounts or reward points to repeat customers. An example of a Sendmunk template for this is:
– Product/ Sale announcement/Trending products: Let your subscribers know what is trending and why. Most people don’t want to be left out on trends that make life better.
– Abandoned Cart
Many people come to your store for different reasons. Some add products to their cart, and others don’t. Some also abandon the cart and never checkout. It could happen for various reasons. You might want to remind your customers of their abandoned cart or know why they didn’t check out.
Some attractive templates on Sendmunk you can personalize are:
– Events: Black Friday, Christmas, New year are opportunities to increase sales. People save up for this time, and we all know that consumer spending increases. Templates for this are numerous on Sendmunk.
– Newsletter: If you have valuable information for your contact list, do well to provide them with it. However, you don’t want to spam your contact list. A monthly, quarterly or bi-annual newsletter won’t hurt.
The ball is in your court, using Sendmunk pre-set templates or creating from scratch. Email automation for e-commerce never got any easier. Creating from scratch involves only two major steps:
– The first thing is to name the template. With Sendmunks’ email builder, the drag and drop feature is all you need to design beautiful templates of your taste without any need for code.
– Preview your template to see if your design is optimized for both desktop and phone.
Adopt best email practices to achieve the best results and increase the Click-through rate.
