When running a Shopify store, you want to drive as many sales as possible to grow your revenue. That’s why there’s a need to actively engage your audience through email marketing campaigns.
Fortunately, Shopify lets you create and send emails right within the Shopify Email platform so you can easily build email marketing campaigns to drive more sales. This guide provides you with 10 Shopify email marketing tips to boost your sales.
Shopify Email Marketing Tips to Boost Your Sales:
- 1. Build a Solid Email Subscriber List
- 2. Segment Your List for Increased Relevance
- 3. Schedule Your Emails for Optimal Send Times
- 4. Design Eye-Catching Emails to Drive Engagement
- 5. Use Template Branding for Cohesive Campaigns
- 6. Increase Open Rates with Enticing Subject Lines
- 7. Write Compelling Email Content
- 8. Set Up Automation Workflows to Perfect Your Timing
- 9. A/B Test Your Emails for Effectiveness
- 10. Stay on Top of Compliance and Legal Considerations
1. Build a Solid Email Subscriber List
The key to email marketing success is ensuring that you’re sending your emails to the right people. Your email recipients should find your email content relevant to their interests, needs, and pain points. This is why it’s so important to start out by building a solid email subscriber list so your email marketing efforts are focused on people who really matter.
It’s important that you collect email subscribers through the right source. This would typically be people who have visited your website to check out your content or products as well as those who’ve bought something from you before.
You can further strengthen your subscriber list by using a double opt-in email signup process, which would require additional confirmation steps to subscribe to your marketing emails. These steps ensure that you’re getting explicit permission to send them an email, which also means you’re more likely to reach people who are actually interested in your emails.
2. Segment Your List for Increased Relevance
Not all of your emails may be relevant to each and every subscriber on your list. Not everyone is an inactive customer who needs a little reminder. And not everyone may be eligible for the exclusive members-only sale you’re promoting. Similarly, recipients in some locations may be interested in your rainwear collection while others may be in the market for swimwear.
This makes it crucial to segment your email list to ensure that every recipient gets an email that’s relevant to their needs and interests. There are a number of ways to segment your subscriber list, which include demographics, source, engagement habits, and customer journey stage.
For example, you’d always want to segment your new customers separately from your long-time customers. In this case, the previous group would need a little more nurturing while the second group would be more interested in emails that acknowledge and reward their loyalty.
Alternatively, those who signed up through your lead magnet landing page may be more interested in similar types of valuable content. Meanwhile, those who signed up through your product page may want to find out all about how to use your product or what features have been added.
Shopify Email lets you build custom email segments to help you engage your audience with highly relevant messages. You can target customers based on their behavioral data such as whether they opened the email and clicked on it or whether they marked it as spam. It allows you to target recipients in specific locations so you can entice them with location-based offers. Additionally, you can also create custom segments based on what your customers have bought so you can craft campaigns based on their interests.
3. Schedule Your Emails for Optimal Send Times
Timing is vital to ensure that your email is hitting your subscribers’ inboxes at a time when they’re most likely to open it. This might be early in the morning when most people check their inboxes for new mail or even during the weekends when they have more free time to make purchases. Either way, it’s important to deliver your emails at optimal send times.
Optimal send times may vary depending on your industry, time zone, and more. So it’s important to test different timings to see when your recipients are most likely to engage with your emails. You can then use email scheduling to automatically send out your emails at those ideal send times. Keep in mind that you may need to send out your emails in several batches to cater to recipients across various time zones.
4. Design Eye-Catching Emails to Drive Engagement
How your email looks is one of the main factors that will influence how people engage with it. In fact, it may be a key factor that gets them to read the rest of your email. It doesn’t matter how enticing the offer is, if it doesn’t look good, they may not even give it a second glance. So it’s important that you design eye-catching emails that will entice your recipients to take a closer look at what the email has to say.
Make sure to include relevant and attractive visual elements that would instantly catch the eye. However, be careful not to overload your emails with visuals as it may impact load times and be too distracting. Pay close attention to formatting so as to ensure that recipients can easily skim the email and still understand what it’s trying to say. This would also mean you should avoid text-heavy emails that would take several minutes to get through.
Here's an excellent example from Framebridge where there’s a good balance of text and visual content. The formatting makes it easy for recipients to quickly skim the email while still getting a clear idea of what it’s trying to say.
Additionally, make sure the design is optimized for mobile. According to the latest email marketing stats, mobile devices are the most popular medium for reading emails. So it’s important that your email design looks great on mobile devices as well.
5. Use Template Branding for Cohesive Campaigns
Branding is a key component of email marketing as it helps people instantly recognize that the email is coming from you. Using proper branding in your emails can help you create more cohesive campaigns that improve brand recognition.
To ensure that you maintain consistent branding across your email marketing campaigns, you can create branded email templates to easily reuse over and over again. These templates will contain your brand elements such as logo and colors. All you need to do is insert fresh email copy and images to customize these branded templates.
Shopify Email makes it easy to automatically apply your brand’s logo, colors, and products to existing email templates. You can even create your own templates for a fully customized on-brand experience.
6. Increase Open Rates with Enticing Subject Lines
One of the first things people will notice about your email is the subject line. In fact, it’s a key factor that determines whether people will open your email. Invesp reports that 47% of email recipients open their emails based on the subject line. At the same time, 69% report an email as spam solely because of the subject line.
In other words, this is where you get to make a good first impression and persuade people to open your email. So it’s crucial to make it as enticing and as compelling as possible. Personalizing it, for instance, is a great way to improve your open rates as personalized subject lines are 22.2% more likely to be opened. Simply including a first name could make a huge difference for your email marketing campaign.
As for the subject line copy, it’s important to avoid sounding “spammy” so as to not dissuade people from opening the email. Keep it short and straight to the point, giving recipients an idea of what’s in store and why they should open the email.
Take a look at the following subject lines from Semrush. They’re short and to the point, telling you exactly what the email is about. This helps you decide whether the email is relevant to you and whether you should open it.
7. Write Compelling Email Content
Of course, the content is going to be the meat and bones of your email. This is where you should really drive your point home and deliver your message in a way that resonates with your audience. So it’s important to follow best practices in writing an email to make sure you get this right.
Remember that people receive dozens of emails a day, so you don’t want to overwhelm them with too much information. Otherwise, you’ll risk recipients clicking away in the middle of reading your email. Try to keep it brief and get straight to the point so they don’t miss the main point of your message. In other words, the information should be obvious but delivered in a language that the audience can connect with.
Check out the following email copy from Asos promoting an extra 15% discount. It clearly specifies all the important details and only includes an additional sentence to clarify what the email is about. The language used is fun, casual, and relatable for the type of audience that Asos wants to target.
8. Set Up Automation Workflows to Perfect Your Timing
Scheduling is one way to deliver your emails at the right time, but it can only get you so far. It doesn’t help you deliver timely messages based on changes in your recipients’ behavior. As a result, you may end up with plenty of missed opportunities to engage your audience. To better take advantage of relevant opportunities, you can set up email automation workflows based on various conditions and behavioral triggers.
With these automation workflows, you can ensure that your emails reach recipients at a time when they’re most likely to find them relevant. For example, you may set up reminder emails to go out after a customer abandons their shopping cart. Or you could send a request for feedback after they’ve made a purchase.
Shopify Email simplifies email automation with ready-to-use templates that have workflows set up based on pre-selected conditions, actions, and triggers. Alternatively, you can create custom workflows by setting specific triggers and conditions according to your goals. That way, you can always take advantage of relevant opportunities by engaging your subscribers at just the right time.
9. A/B Test Your Emails for Effectiveness
Even if you follow common email marketing best practices, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get the desired results instantly. That’s why it helps to first test your emails to see just how well they work and if they need any improvements. Make sure to run an A/B test on your emails to gauge what resonates with your subscribers. This will help you to craft even more effective email marketing campaigns in the future.
For each test, you can experiment with variations of one email element such as the subject line, CTA language, email body, design, and more. So you’ll be able to pinpoint the element that makes a difference. For example, simply switching words or adding a first name in your subject line might result in more open rates, which you can then apply to your next email campaign.
Make sure you closely monitor your email analytics to understand your campaign performance. You can compare various performance metrics such as open rates, click-throughs, sales, and more to see whether your campaign is working. This will allow you to refine your approach and strengthen your email marketing campaigns over time.
10. Stay on Top of Compliance and Legal Considerations
Every marketer wants to drive results from their email marketing campaign. However, that ambition shouldn’t get in the way of regulations and laws that are in place to protect consumers. Otherwise, you risk getting penalized for lack of compliance, which could result in expensive fines and complicated issues that could threaten your organization as a whole.
So make sure to stay on top of compliance and legal considerations when building any email marketing campaign. This may involve complying with anti-spam regulations and meeting the requirements of laws such as GDPR. The laws and regulations may also vary depending on your region, so it’s important to always be updated with the latest changes.
Winning with Powerful Shopify Email Marketing
Email marketing is an excellent way to engage your Shopify customers and drive more sales. The above list only contains a few of the main tips that will help you improve your Shopify email marketing efforts. Make the most of them to start building powerful email marketing campaigns that drive results. Don’t forget to keep experimenting and testing to fine-tune your strategy for a greater impact.
