An Insanely Decisive Email Program for Ecommerce in 2020
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An Insanely Decisive Email Program for Ecommerce in 2020
Table of Contents
An Insanely Decisive Email Program for Ecommerce in 2020 03
Attract 04
Welcome Them With An Impact 04
Leverage Website Popups 06
Talk About Your Product And Benefits 06
Engage 08
Segmented Campaigns Are A Winner 08
Design Transactional Campaigns Wisely 09
Send Your Best Wishes With An Offer 09
Product Survey Campaigns 10
Reward Your Frequent Shoppers 11
Brand Talk 11
Weekend Sale Offers To Boost Reach And Conversion 12
Community Scoring And Chat 12
An Offer Just Because We Miss You 13
Why Did You Stop Responding? 13
You Have Been Removed 14
New Technologies that are Changing the Email Landscape 14
Here’s What Your Users Would Be Able To Do With
AMP-Powered Emails 15
How will AMP Emails benefit Ecommerce Brands 16
Dynamic And Up-To-Date Automated And Promotional Content 16
Better Customer Experience 16
Hyper-Personalization Of Content 17
Better Engaging Emails 17
Parting Thoughts 17An Insanely Decisive Email Program for
Ecommerce in 2020
E-commerce brands need to build relationships with their customers to
generate sales and nurture them for success in the long term. Your
brand should add some value to your customers in order for them to
remain your customer and build trust with them.
What better marketing channel than Email to meet your business
objectives?
Statistics from various surveys show Email will always provide a higher
ROI than any other channel in Marketing. With Email Marketing, you can
create promotional offers for your brand to test out a certain
demographic market and analyze your results if what you sell is working
or not.
By 2021, global Retail E-commerce sales will reach $4.5 trillion.
With brands like Amazon, Flipkart, Tokopedia, Walmart all leading the
line for delightful E-commerce experience, there will always be some
room to improve for the other brands which are competing for eyeballs
and conversions with their prospective customers.
All the more so in 2020 as Email is undergoing a renaissance like period
of continuous evolution and some new technologies like AMP which will
be shortly changing Email as you have ever known before.
To not have an email address is the digital equivalent of being
homeless. Without it you can’t shop online, bank online or
engage with social media. ~ Dela Quist
An Insanely Decisive Email Program for Ecommerce in 2020 03This Guide will include definitive strategies to segment your database,
what campaigns you should be sending and better conversion tricks to
have up your sleeve in order to slay the Email Marketing game. We shall
also be talking about new Email technology called AMP for Email plus
how to put these to use for converting your customers into conversions.
When we talk about designing an efficient Email Program for the E-
commerce and Retail industry we need to take into consideration the
user life cycle journey. Your Email Program depends on the customer
persona and the relevant content that needs to be targeted to them
based on where they belong in the buyer’s life-cycle journey.
There are 3 stages of the customer life cycle on your E-commerce
platform that we have identified and analyzed to provide an invincible
Email Program to execute them in chronological order. The stages are:
• Attract • Engage • Reactivate
Attract
The priority is first to entice new potential customers to your website
and reach out to them with information on what you are all about. This
stage consists of displaying to your customer, your uniqueness in the
industry and something different you are ready to offer to them so that
they can stay your customer for the long term. Which brings us to…
Welcome Them With An Impact
According to a survey done on Welcome Mailers, it was found that 74.4%
of customers expect a welcome mailer to sign up.
We recommend that you have an opt-in verification for your sign up
process on the website. Thus the welcome mailer should ideally have an
An Insanely Decisive Email Program for Ecommerce in 2020 04Email verification link to click on and confirm your details or there
should be a Google or social signup to your website. Also, it should talk
about your brand in a broad way and provide an incentive to the user to
click on the content and be directed to your website for a first purchase!
Collect the interests and preferences of the users when they are signing
up with a preference center for products interested, mailing frequency,
etc. This would help you
to target the first time users with an offer on their product of choice for
the first purchase in the welcome mailer.
This mailer by Nykaa fashion does a suave welcome mailer.
An Insanely Decisive Email Program for Ecommerce in 2020 05This mailer talks about what the brand is all about and then provides
10% off offers on select styles of clothes. The overall design is attractive
to persuade a new subscriber to at least check out the website and the
offer.
In this way, if you display your category of products in the welcome mail,
your customers will have them in their minds. The next time they need
to shop for a particular product, your online website will be in their
search results.
Leverage Website Popups
Website Popups offer a creative way of collecting details of website
browsers and thus increasing your user base. When a new user enters
your website and browses for at least 5 minutes, you can trigger a
website popup to collect their details.
Even though they are not yet your subscribers, you can send them a
mailer with an offer on your best selling product and ask them to
subscribe to your website.
Talk About Your Product And Benefits
The next mailer that you should send to your new subscribers should
Fig: contain informative content that provides more insight into your
brand values and what you can offer to your users.
Eg: You are a retail brand with a specialty in stocking high-quality jeans.
Then your content should talk about Jeans as a selling point.
This can include, how Jeans were discovered, how they came into vogue,
what are the different types of jeans available today. A little background
on your products will pique that interest in your subscribers.
An Insanely Decisive Email Program for Ecommerce in 2020 06There should be a concrete offer say 50% off in the mailer to get the
the customer educated about your brand and then re-direct them to do
their first purchase with you.
A welcome and educative mailer from Koovs.com ticks all the right boxes.
It offers a welcome alongwith a 30% offer on select products with
benefits outlined below on what makes Koovs unique from other brands.
That’s a welcome mailer that hits the bull’s eye!
An Insanely Decisive Email Program for Ecommerce in 2020 07Engage
At this stage of the buyer’s life-cycle, either they have already
purchased once from your store or they have shown interest in your
products.
The further leap now is to get them to transact more often and start
engaging them with an eye on retaining them as long term customers.
We suggest to create an opportunity, to send targeted communication to
your customers, which will keep them coming for more rather than a
batch and blast campaign to the whole database.
Don’t make this mistake. Large reach out doesn’t always guarantee large
conversions. Instead, once the user has been sent a welcome mail or
any purchase order mail, target them with a product that they might like
to buy and send a time-sensitive campaign for the same.
This campaign can be sent 2 days before the offer on the product
expires. Of course, you will have to target these users with product
categories that they have shown an interest in or bought frequently
from your online store.
There should be a last mailer sent to these users on the day of the offer
expiry to avail the product at a discounted price before it expires.
Segmented Campaigns Are A Winner
You can categorize your campaign calendar based on the user base to
be targeted on specific days and experimenting with the impact on sales
with these mailers. Eg: - Sending mailers to Men/Women categories
separately. - New subscribers in last 1 month who have visited your
online store. - Users who have bought products from a particular
category like shoes, dresses, trousers, etc.
An Insanely Decisive Email Program for Ecommerce in 2020 08Make these campaigns highly personalized with creative subject lines
and content. These campaigns will be a winner in terms of engagement
and getting your customers to revisit your store and transact for more
products. It’s a sure-shot way of retaining your customers and amazing
them with your targeted content.
Design Transactional Campaigns Wisely
If you are sending your order confirmation, or your abandon cart
mailers, there is a way to introduce some promotional themes in them
and boost your sales. User engagement is typically high for your
transactional type mailers which often land in primary tab of Gmail .
They provide an average of 30-40% of open rates and high click rates of
5% plus.
That means the audience opening these mails is highly engaged and
thus can be targeted for a promotional offer as well. Design your trigger
campaigns by embedding a discount offer on your best selling product
of that period. This will help generate more traction for those products
on the website and boost your conversions by an extra 5%. The average
cart abandonment rate is 67.91% in the E-commerce industry.
A good discount price can be offered to the customer who has that
product in their cart. This will require a segmented trigger campaign
that should help to convert the customer to purchase the product.
Send Your Best Wishes With An Offer
Collect birth dates of your users to send them a birthday wish mailer
with promotional offers exclusively for them in order to make a birthday
purchase. Sending our personalized content with positive vibes and
wishes will attract the user to your brand and raise the bar for your
brand affinity.
An Insanely Decisive Email Program for Ecommerce in 2020 09Who knows? Maybe the user will buy their birthday surprise from your
store. Sending out these feeler emails will definitely engage your users
with your brand.
Product Survey Campaigns
Get in touch with your online users. Your brand should care about the
expectations and feedback of the customers. Run product survey
campaigns after 2 days of shipping the product to the customer.
Run general feedback campaigns on their user experience and
website/service experience to the entire user set to know more about
how you can improve on your interactions.
This Myntra mailer for product feedback is the perfect way to show you
care to your customers:
Bonus points for rating your service from your customers
An Insanely Decisive Email Program for Ecommerce in 2020 10Reward Your Frequent Shoppers
According to a popular survey 80% sales for Ecommerce are generated
by 20% users.
These include your frequently transacting , happy with your brand , loyal
shoppers who you should be treating like royalty. These shoppers form
80% of your online revenue and they keep on coming back for more
products, thus they need to be provided something special to continue
the cycle.
Have exclusive deals designed just for your frequent transactors like
Make My Trip has a MMT Black membership for privilege users.
You can also have a special loyalty point program designed for these
subscribers who shall be receiving extra discount and offers with your
mailer atleast once a week so that they can purchase uninhibitedly and
develop trust and a relationship with your brand. Treat them well to
keep them happy.
Brand Talk
For those customers who have not yet transacted with your brand, the
idea should be to send them a mailer with benefits that they receive on
buying from your brand. These could range from free shipping , COD
option available , less delivery time , extra offers on E-wallet payments ,
cards etc.
Also there should be some content generated about your brand values
and how you stick to them in the larger scheme of Ecommerce.
Eg: You don’t negotiate on your quality instead you use authenticity as a
measure for customer success.
An Insanely Decisive Email Program for Ecommerce in 2020 11We strongly believe that online customers are looking for benefits they
can get in sticking with your brand and hence need to be educated on
the same on a timely basis.
Weekend Sale Offers To Boost Reach And Conversion
Now, this is not to say that you shouldn’t reach out to the rest of the
user base. Ofcourse, you should. When sale season comes in, you can
send your entire mailing list attractive offers on all your products say
twice a week and expand the reach of your audience.
You will gain new “openers” of your Email campaign and you can include
these users in your stage wise Email Program as mentioned in the above
points.
Make sure you are not “over sending” mailers to the entire set of users
as majority of them could be inactive. They would require special
campaigns to re-activate them, which brings us to the next point.
Community Scoring And Chat
There can be a scoring system set for your customers where the users
will be rated based on the number of purchases , sharing your content
on social media or re-tweeting it, will incur some score for the user and
the user can use this score to get discounts on future products they
wish to share.
The community chat will enable the user to discuss your products and
report any changes or improvements to your system rather than just
leaving a feedback.
This could also involve discussions on latest trends in fashion and other
products they wish to see on your website which you should be stocking
up on.
An Insanely Decisive Email Program for Ecommerce in 2020 12Friend referrals will be rewarded with special offers and discounts.
Promote the app community chat across all channel. A good community
outreach program will scale the brownie points on your brand
popularity.
There will come a time when a part of your mailing list will stop
responding to your offers. They can get cold and stop opening your
targeted offer for them. These users need to be re-engaged with the
brand.
There are a set of campaigns you can run to re-activate these dormant
users. These should be targeted to users who have not opened your
Emails for more than 90 days.
An Offer Just Because We Miss You
You should up the effort when you are trying to design an Email Re-
engagement campaign. It should have a “We have missed you” theme.
You need to offer discounts which are bigger than the usual ones like
30-40% off on products so as to entice these users to click on links and
get to the website.
This re-engagement mailer from Netflix does all the right things on
reactivating the unsubscribed user to get them back to Netflix and chill:
Why Did You Stop Responding?
You can send a mailer to your dormant users asking them the reason for
the dried up interest in your mailers. It will be a simple text mail which
can be replied to so as to collect feedback.
This could provide valuable insight into what your users want out of
your campaigns.
An Insanely Decisive Email Program for Ecommerce in 2020 13You Have Been Removed
If the subscribers still fail to respond to the above mailers then it is time
to let go of them.
Send them an automated email saying that since they have been “quiet”
since last 3 months, they will be removed from the mailing list or they
can click on “Don’t Remove me” button to remain a subscriber and
receive relevant offers.
New Technologies that are Changing the
Email Landscape
It is time to move on from static Email designs which offered very little
interactivity to Email users.
AMP is a technology to create a faster and more interactive way of
rolling out web pages on mobile devices. AMP for Email - an expansion
of the AMP project will include dynamic Emails. It will support useful
and interactive content within Email to provide a refreshing and modern
experience.
AMP powered Emails will allow "rich engaging Emails, making
modern app functionality available within Email."
An Insanely Decisive Email Program for Ecommerce in 2020 14Here’s What Your Users Would Be Able
To Do With AMP-Powered Emails
• Scroll image carousels
• Add items to the shopping cart
• Fill up a form or a questionnaire
• Open a product card, choose and buy the products
• Participate in surveys or polls right in the inbox
• Reply to comments in an Email
AMP for Email will make dynamic content like videos, GIFs, graphics
available on your Email client in a moment to browse and interact with!
With AMP operational, users can easily RSVP to an event, browse a
catalog of an online store, fill out a form without leaving your Email
client.
The feature is being rolled out in the Gmail web client and then will be
provided on mobile. With time, other ISPs like Yahoo, Outlook, and
Mail.ru, etc. will also support it.
Ecommerce will be thus the industry which could benefit the most from
AMP with the extent of interaction that the users will get to have on the
Email client as stated above.
An Insanely Decisive Email Program for Ecommerce in 2020 15How will AMP Emails benefit Ecommerce
Brands
A common notion is often seen and heard and probably questioned that
AMP will benefit Ecommerce Brands. But, How? That is a big question!
Let's have a look on how AMP Emails can benefit Ecommerce Brands.
Dynamic And Up-To-Date Automated And Promotional Content
With instant call to actions now feasible on AMP, you can get more
creative with designing Email triggers fitting in your users in the various
stages of the user life cycle journey.
How about reducing that cart abandonment activity and designing your
Email in such a way that the user will be inclined to transact from his
Email client itself without any fuss?
Better Customer Experience
The content of the web pages being dynamic & interactive will allure the
users to act. The improved user experience would lead to an improved
affinity for your brand. This should also reduce the traffic flow on the
website which used to drop in terms of transactions/signups as all this
can be done easily hereupon in the Email itself.
After implementing AMP, Tokopedia - one of the largest E-commerce
brands in Indonesia reached four important mobile milestones: a 5X
jump in conversion rates, a 40% increase in organic traffic, 65% faster
page load times, and a 60% lower bounce rate, which highlighted better
engagement.
An Insanely Decisive Email Program for Ecommerce in 2020 16Hyper-Personalization Of Content
Now is the era of hyper-personalization in Emails. With AMP for Email,
this will be taken to the highest level where your users’ choices can be
met in the Email itself. That means, subscribing to a service or agreeing
to be part of an event or else choosing a product from a personally
curated range of catalog and transacting to secure the delivery.
This will empower Email marketers like you to design creatives in a more
personalized way where a user can get everything done easily and
quickly.
Better Engaging Emails
Till now the content of Emails has stayed static and small changes like
introducing GIFs or videos inside the creative content have been limited.
With AMP, the bar will be raised high in terms of the aesthetic value of
the Email. The website will also need to feature more dynamic and
visually actionable content to tempt the users to choose from the
products offered.
Parting Thoughts
Thus, with all the above strategies mentioned it all trickles down to
targeting your users based on the customer life cycle stage that they are
in at that time.
Email Marketing is just not about batch and blast a campaign to your
entire user list and expect your business to grow. It is more about
targeting your specific users with content and offers that they would like.
Every campaign of yours should be designed with a goal of providing
An Insanely Decisive Email Program for Ecommerce in 2020 17more value to your customer and letting them choose your brand than
anyone else’s for purchase.
Thus the general layout of a good Email Program for Ecommerce websites
will be comprised of:
Every stage of this life cycle will require your attention and efforts to
build that trust with your subscribers and let your brand speak for itself.
New technology like AMP is going to fuel further demand on Ecommerce
brands to flex their muscles in terms of attractive and dynamic content
both transactional and promotional to lure their customers. With the
advent of AMP , users will start spending more time on Email client and
hence will require your campaigns to be innovative enough to hold their
attention.
The ability to interact with cart and payment options, or providing a
feedback on the mail itself will prove game-changing for an Ecommerce
brand as that will mean more conversions and smoother interactions
with less drop off points in the attract to purchase journey.
Author
Tejas Pitkar
Tejas Pitkar is a Deliverability Expert at Netcore Solutions.
Writer | Email Expert | Marketing strategist | Avid TravelerYou can also read
