9 Must Have Email Automation Flows for Your Online Store
Sending emails one by one takes time that e-commerce businesses simply don’t have. It’s just not scalable. On the other hand, using email automation can create opportunities for you to make sales in addition to your manual email marketing and newsletter blasts which makes it a natural addition to your email marketing strategy.
To help you get started with e-commerce marketing automation, here are 9 must have email automation flows for your online store.
1. Welcome Emails for New Signups
The welcome email has become the standard in all industries, especially for e-commerce email marketing. Every customer expects to receive a formal greeting from a company after signing up.
With a welcome email, you can give customers an idea of what to expect from your brand and what they need to do next after signing up.
Automating this process is critical because e-commerce is a 24/7 business. Your email could be the trigger that they need to make a purchase because oftentimes customers expect to receive a first-time customer discount with their emails.
2. Personalized Product Recommendations
If you have an email list for existing customers, you can make their shopping experience more personalized with product recommendations via email automation. E-commerce emails of this type should be triggered by what a customer has already browsed for you on a website or purchased previously.
3. Discount Email Automations
One interesting thing that you can do with email automation is that you can target it to the exact moment when a customer is about to make a purchase.
By sending the discount right before they head to the cart based on previous sales data, you can make sure that you eliminate price as an objection before they make a sale.
In addition, you can also use discount emails to reach customers who have purchased a product multiple times but haven’t shopped for it in awhile. In this context a discount email would serve as a means of reactivating a dormant customer account.
4. Stop Cart Abandonment
Most abandoned shopping carts on e-commerce sites are the result of a customer encountering an unexpected situation during checkout. For example, there may be taxes, shipping or extra delivery time added to the order at the last step that the customer didn’t anticipate.
By setting up an abandoned email cart flow for your e-commerce store, you can reach the customer after they’ve just left your side and gently remind them to come back. You can also send several email follow ups: one after the first hour, 12 hours later, and 24 hours after the cart is abandoned.
5. Order Confirmation and Shipping Notifications for Purchases
The order confirmation and shipping emails are standard for e-commerce. However, there is no need to send these emails manually. By integrating your email marketing with your existing e-commerce business tools, you can provide the reassurance and transparency that your customers demand after a purchase.
6. Stop Browse Abandonment
Browse abandonment is a trickier problem to deal with than cart abandonment because of the fact that it can happen for a wide variety of reasons. With cart abandonment, price is usually the reason why the customer doesn’t complete the purchase. However, with browser abandonment, you have very limited insight (just the few pages that they browsed) in order to determine what actually occurred.
To combat this problem, you can add email automations that are triggered by category browsing. Then send emails with the products that the browser was interested in, along with one or two products that complements those as well.
7. Customer Feedback and Reviews
Customer reviews are critical for e-commerce stores. Having great reviews is the difference between building a loyal customer base and one-off sales with customers who never return.
Instead of avoiding asking your customers about their experiences, set up a simple timed email automation workflow that will go out a certain number of days after the customer has placed or received their order.
8. Thinking of You and Birthday Emails
Sending emails on the spur of the moment or for a birthday is easy to do with email automation. All it takes is adding an extra special touch like this to ensure that your customer will never avoid opening your emails again.
9. Re-Engagement Emails
If you have some customers whose accounts have gone dormant, re-engagement emails can fix this. By using email automation to reactivate customers, you can avoid churning and raise new interest by sharing recommendations, new products, and updates since their account was last active.
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