Email Marketing for eCommerce sites
Nowadays, email marketing is one of the prevalent marketing channels for eCommerce platforms. Email marketing allows you to connect with your clients when it’s needed and at the right moment.
If you don’t have a defined strategy and you’re sending bulk emails without previous segmentation work, you’re losing sales, time and money. And worse: you’re ruining your deliverability rate.
On this post we’ll show you the most important factors that you need to pay attention to in order to optimize your eCommerce email marketing campaigns.
How to optimize deliverability on your email campaigns
As good as having an optimized workflow, triggers, content and CTA is, it is sadly not enough. Your email campaigns will suffer if your message doesn’t reach your audience.
These are the most relevant factors you need to take into account to improve (and not worsen) your campaign’s deliverability rate.
Sender’s Reputation
Simply put, it is the reputation of the email address that is delivering your email marketing campaigns.
What factors influence the sender’s reputation?
- Being consistent.
A constant email output, without a sudden frequency increase or decrease, is crucial for the sender’s reputation. We don’t recommend sending 3 messages a week and then switching to 5 on the next. Be consistent with the timing and schedule as long as you can. - Keeping your contact lists clean.
This is common sense, but sometimes we forget about it. Your contact lists must be legitimate. This means they must be lawfully built from our platform through opt-in campaigns that include an explicit authorization from the user. Bounce rate is a basic indicator. There are two types:
- Hard Bounce: when an email is sent to an address that no longer exists. Usually happens when the client makes a typo or provides a fake email address. These contacts must be removed.
- Soft Bounce: when the inbox is full or in auto-reply mode. If soft bouncing persists, removal should be considered.
If your bounce rate is 2% or higher, you’ll need to analyze the causes.
Check your bounce rate regularly on "Insights > Email"
- Avoiding spam reports.
Buying mailing lists is highly discouraged. It is strategically vital that your clients don’t flag your emails as spam. - Spam Traps.
Again, an occurrence derived from buying mailing lists. A spam trap is a nonexistent email address used to catch “marketers” that collect email addresses on the net using email scraping, which is a fancy word for gathering contact information unlawfully. - Getting blacklisted.
These lists contain domains and IPs that send spam mail.
Email Content
Before you schedule a delivery, you need to ponder if the information is going to be valuable for your subscribers. Pay attention to the following elements:
- Be relevant.
You might be sending emails to clients who are not interested in your latest update at all. This means it’s very likely they unsubscribe or, to make matters worse, flag your message as spam. That’s why personalization and segmentation are crucial. - Design consistency.
Your content design needs to be consistent and aligned with your website’s visual style. The audience is used to a certain brand aesthetic, and they don’t expect sudden changes on the emails they get. - Creative subjects.
Subjects are the first thing a user notices before opening an email. They’re a preview of the contents they’re going to get. Make sure not to include terms reported as spam by Google or Outlook, like using All Caps. Plus, you can a run an A/B/X Test using Connectif to try out different versions of your subject and find out which one gets a better opening rate.iferentes variantes del subject y analizar, por ejemplo, cual de ellas presenta mejor tasa de apertura. - Good text-to-image ratio.
This is not a determining factor, but it can optimize deliverability. We recommend a 60/40 text-to-image ratio. - Easy unsubscribing.
Not having a visible unsubscribe button can lead to spam flagging. It is essential to have a clear and accessible option for your users to opt out. - Avoid shorteners.
Including them in an email is usually not advisable, as link masking is frequently used by spammers and it’s reported as spam by most email service providers.
Contact Segmentation
Interaction with your email deliveries is one of the most relevant factors affecting deliverability. Email service providers are able to detect if the recipient interacts with a certain email from a sender, and can even suggest -as Gmail does- to unsubscribe from them.
That’s where segmentation comes in to save the day. Segmenting your contacts allows you to send personalized content that meets the users’ needs, making your email campaigns much more precise and impactful. In short, you’ll be able to impact your audience at the right moment and with the right message.
If you want to find out if your content is aligned with your contacts’ preferences and expectations, you need to look firstly at the opening rate, and secondly to the CTR. There are many interesting insights available, but these two are enough to find out how “healthy” your deliveries are regarding interaction.
You’ll find a list of the essential segments every site should have below. The good news is that you can easily enable them all using Connectif!
- Inactive contacts.
Have some of your contacts been inactive for quite some time? Then you should create a segment to keep them separate from your email marketing activity log. What’s more: suggesting them to unsubscribe is considered a good practice, and also a “gracious” way to clean your contact lists. - Behavioral Segmentation.
Segmentation based on behavioral patterns is one of the most effective methods to generate conversions. This kind of segmentation is applied to: - Visited sections/categories.
- Types of pages visited.
- Visited products or referred articles, among other possibilities.
- Segmentation by Purchase.
Definitely one of the most frequent types. Segmenting by purchase is a requirement for RFM segmentation and is based on frequency and number of completed purchases. - Number of purchases completed in the last 30 days and total value.
- Number of purchases completed in the last 60 days and total value.
- Number of purchases completed in the last 90 days and total value.
Summary: the best email marketing practices for eCommerce sites
- Being consistent with the number of deliveries. Keeping a steady frequency.
- Using lawfully obtained contact lists. Not buying lists.
- Keeping lists clean from spam traps.
- Avoiding spam reports.
- Being careful with blacklisting.
- Providing relevant information. Personalizing content.
- Being consistent on your email design.
- Keeping subjects creative. Conducting A/B/X Tests.
- Always filling in your pre-headers.
- Keeping a good text-to-image ratio.
- Having a visible unsubscribe button.
- Avoiding shorteners.
- Segmenting your contacts by interests, purchases, etc.
- Personalizing your email deliveries based on client expectations and preferences.