How Email Marketing Drives E-commerce Conversions
In today's bustling digital marketplace, standing out from the crowd and maintaining a loyal customer base is more challenging than ever. Email marketing remains one of the most effective tools for online store owners to increase conversions and generate revenue. Here's how.
Start With Understanding Your Audience
Every customer is unique, with specific needs, preferences, and buying behaviors. By understanding your audience, you can communicate in more personalized and meaningful ways, increasing the likelihood of conversions.
With platforms like Klaviyo integrated with Shopify, store owners can capture and analyze a wealth of data about their customers. This, in turn, allows for targeted email and SMS messaging campaigns that resonate with recipients and encourage them to take action.
The Importance of Setting Up Right
The effectiveness of your email marketing efforts is closely tied to how you set up your account in your email provider of choice. Proper initial setup ensures that you capture the right data from the start. Errors can lead to misguided decisions, potentially alienating customers or missing out on sales opportunities.
Proper setup includes ensuring that your emails adhere to best practices so they don't end up in the spam folder. This involves setting up authentication methods like SPF and DKIM and creating a reputable sender profile so that your emails are delivered successfully to recipients' inboxes, rather than being filtered into spam or junk folders.
When you integrate Shopify with Klaviyo, the two platforms "talk" to each other, syncing vital data. Information like customer details, purchase histories, browsing behavior, and more are shared, enabling store owners to craft messages that are relevant to individual customers.
Types of Signup Forms - Capturing Emails
There are three primary types of signup forms used for capturing emails off of your website:
Popups: These are the boxes that appear on top of website content, often with a special offer or call to action. They're impactful because they grab the user's immediate attention.
Flyouts: These slide in from the side or bottom of the page. They are less intrusive than popups, they're often used to present supplementary information or encourage sign-ups without disrupting the user's browsing experience.
Embeded Forms: These are placed directly into the website's content and provide a way for visitors to sign up without being overly assertive.
Regardless of the type of form you use, the main purpose of these signup forms is to capture visitor information. Using this information will help to drive e-commerce conversions in your online store by delivering the right message to them at the right time.
The Power of Message Flows
A message flow is a series of automated emails triggered by specific user actions or behaviors. With Klaviyo and Shopify's integration, store owners can set up various message flows, including:
Automatic cart flow:
If a customer starts but doesn't finish a checkout, they might receive an automated message reminding them of their abandoned cart, often sweetened with a discount or special offer. The synchronization between the email platform and the online store allows these messages to be highly personalized, showing the customer the exact products they left behind.
Image Source:Klaviyo
Image Source:Girlfriend Collective
Transactional alerts:
Inform customers when their order is on its way, reinforcing trust and building excitement.
Post-purchase thank you messages:
These nurture the relationship with the customer, potentially leading to more sales in the future.
Advantages of Message Flows and Their Impact on Conversions
Message flows streamline communication, ensuring customers receive the right message at the right time. This relevancy drives higher engagement and, consequently, higher conversion rates. They help in:
Reducing cart abandonment: Reminders with incentives can motivate customers to complete their purchase.
Building trust: Transactional alerts keep customers informed, leading to increased trust and satisfaction.
Encouraging repeat business: Thank you messages, combined with special offers or product recommendations, can drive further sales.
The Right Message at the Right Time
Sending the right message at the right time with email marketing ensures that recipients receive content that is timely and relevant to their current needs or interests, maximizing the likelihood of engagement. Properly timed messages can increase open rates, click-through rates, and conversions in your ecommerce store. A less is more approach works very well. Instead of blasting your whole list, it's proven that targeted messaging to segments of your list results in more email revenue and avoids unsubscribes from people feeling like they are getting spammed. You can read examples of email personalization success stories with ecommerce brands using Klaviyo.
Email Personalized Product Recommendations
By analyzing the browsing and purchase behavior of subscribers, email marketing platforms can predict what products a customer might be interested in next and send out personalized emails showcasing products they've shown interest in.
For example, if a customer recently purchased running shoes, they might be interested in athletic wear or running accessories. Personalized recommendations can increase impulse purchases and increase the average order value of your store.
Provide Time-Sensitive Offers
With an email marketing platform like Klaviyo, you can segment customers based on their purchase frequency. For example, you can create a list of everyone who hasn't made a purchase in a while and then email these people with time-sensitive discount codes or special offers to reignite their interest. This creates a sense of urgency, encouraging subscribers to revisit your store and make a purchase.
Every Store Should Have Abandoned Cart Sequences
Not every person who visits your Shopify store is going to follow through with purchasing the products they added to their cart. People are busy and distracted and may not follow through for many reasons. By crafting a sequence of emails to someone after they abandon their cart, you can re-engage someone who were on the fence, enticing them to complete their purchase.
The first email can be a simple reminder, the second could offer a discount, and the third might showcase reviews of the product they left behind.
Emails Based on Behavior and Customer Loyalty
You can keep track of milestones in someone's journey as a customer with your store. Some milestones include:
- Signing Up
- Their first purchase
- Anniversary of joining your mailing list
- Their birthday
- When they achieve a 'VIP' status based on purchase volume.
Image Source: Really Good Emails
Your email marketing tool can automate emails to your customers celebrating these milestones and offer a special deal or gift. This strengthens brand loyalty and encourages repeat purchases from your valued customers.
Integrating your email marketing with your e-commerce store isn't just about convenience; it's about creating a unified system where every component works in tandem to enhance the customer experience. The seamless interplay between platforms like Shopify and Klaviyo provides store owners with the tools they need to engage customers, nurture relationships, and ultimately drive conversions.
Interested in learning more?
Click the button below to schedule a call to get the conversation started.
We can't wait to learn about your business!