Five Proven Shopify Email Campaigns That You Can Implement Today

If you’re ready to take your Shopify marketing to the next level, then you need to consider starting at least one of these proven email campaigns to reach your prospects. This involves thinking more creatively on your email campaigns to entice your customers and go beyond standard email formats.

First, you’ll want to understand the three main types of campaigns and how you can use them. These are transaction emails, informational messages, and drip campaigns.

Let’s take a look at five methods you should use that utilize these techniques. You can start using these immediately for the holiday season or implement them year-round to keep customer engagement high.

1. Understand What Transactional, Informational, and Drip Campaigns Are

A transaction email is when you send a confirmation message of a particular action a targeted prospect made. This could be something like sending a receipt after a purchase, or a confirmation message after opting into exclusive content you provided on your website.

HubSpot gives a clear definition of how to distinguish a transactional email from a marketing one. The difference is a marketing email is a commercial message about your products, and a transaction email works like a receipt.

This isn’t to say the lines sometimes blur, especially if the customer purchased something.

An informational email will likely become a one-shot announcement to tell the prospect about an upcoming sale or other events. These are self-explanatory, though do require specific attention to wording and formatting.

Drip campaigns are when you send a series of marketing emails over time. There are multiple different variations on drip campaigns that you can use to up your revenue.

Klaviyo

Since you’re using Shopify, we highly recommend that you use Klaviyo. It was built specifically to work with Shopify and offers a lot of features that will really help you implement the strategies I’m going to show you.

2. Email Receipt Campaign

Email receipts are a great place to promote additional purchases. You will this in action any time you purchase something from Amazon. They’ll send a transaction email to you after a purchase to confirm the details about your order. However, they also add a section at the bottom showing what other people with similar interests bought.

Some laws differ on straddling this line, depending on where you live. It’s acceptable here in the U.S. as long as you don’t make the marketing overly blatant in the email.

One thing that’s undeniable about these emails is they have good open and click rates. This makes them a great place to offer gifts like coupons to encourage additional purchases.

Also, it’s worth adding personal notes in each email if you’re new and converting your first customers. Those who buy from you will appreciate the personal response and likely become loyal.

You could also ask those receiving these emails to subscribe to further content. It’s a good example of how a transactional email can still become an effective marketing tool.

 

 

3. Use a Drip Campaign for New Customers

With drip campaigns being done over a period of time, you always need to start with an introductory email. These clearly need full attention to set a positive first impression.

After someone makes their first purchase in your store they have mixed feelings. They are excited at the prospect of receiving what they bought from you. But they are also uneasy because they haven’t ordered from you before. They aren’t sure if the item will be the quality they want, if you’re going to get it to them in time, or if you’ll be there for them if there’s a problem.

In some cases, the prospect may want to wait a while and learn more about you before making further purchases. This is why a welcome series is so important.

A drip campaign for new customers is usually outlined like this:

• Create a welcome email explaining what your brand is, what kind of products might best suit the reader, plus your return policy.
• A check-in email several days later to ask if the customer learned everything they need to know. Be sure to make it easy for them to get in touch with you.
• Send an email indicating the product arrival. Sending these two days after expected arrival will allow the customer to contact you if they didn’t receive their order.
• An email asking for a product review five days after the follow-up. It’s important to make the review system simple and to offer support if the buyer isn’t happy with the purchase.
• Another email offering a discount on similar products the customer bought. These should be time sensitive.
• Sending a follow-up email to the time-limited offer to make sure the customer doesn’t miss out.

Setting up this campaign is a great way to build trust in your company while encouraging future sales.

4. Repeat Customer Drip Email Series

Since repeat customers frequently make up a quarter of revenue, you can see how important it is to keep yourself top-of-mind for future purchases.

You’ll want to take this campaign at careful intervals. You don’t want to email them with information that is irrelevant and you don’t want to email them too much too quickly or they will feel like they are being spammed. But, you also don’t want to wait and be forgotten.

Start with a check-in email that ensures the customer received your product and wrote a review. Then try these other steps:

• Provide an email with product recommendations to help customers find something they know they can use. You won’t have to offer discounts because the customer will understand the value in what you provide.
• An email asking customers to share your products, or act as promoter/influencer on social media. These type of loyal customers are very valuable, and you should keep in touch with them as much as possible.

Repeat customers also cost much less to acquire, making it worth all effort you put into marketing content for them.

 

 

5. A Drip Series for Abandoned Carts

Some people will add items to their cart, but they won’t complete their purchase. This is called an abandoned cart. Research says that as many as 81.4% of online shopping carts are abandoned.

That’s a lot of money left on the table. It’s worth all effort to find out why they didn’t complete their purchase and then attempt to get them to come back and finish.

While Business Insider estimates that online retailers will lose as much as $4 trillion to cart abandonment, it also says that businesses can recover around 63% of that lost revenue through abandoned cart email marketing.

Instead of just sending a single email – set up a drip series that sends emails 24, 48, and 72 hours after the cart was abandoned. Watch your analytics and adjust accordingly. You may only need one or two emails to recover those carts – or you may need as many as 7 or 8 emails.

Next Steps

These campaigns are powerful revenue drivers, but they do take some technical ability to set up. Contact us at Future Holidays to see how we can help. We’ll help you set up your emails, monitor their success, make adjustments on an ongoing basis to improve performance over time, and start using user segmentation to make them even stronger.