What’s not to like? 

Except, building an ecommerce website can feel incredibly overwhelming. Luckily, there are a ton of dedicated, cheap ecommerce platforms out there that make it quick and easy.

We’ve selected the best ecommerce platforms for small business to help you set up an online storefront and start selling products.

If the fear of searching for an ecommerce solution is holding you back – don’t let it! This is the perfect time to create an ecommerce store to complement in-person shopping opportunities.

The Best and Cheapest Ecommerce Platforms

Let’s start the roundup of the top ecommerce platforms for small business with a quick glance at monthly starting prices:

Here are a few more of our resources for small businesses:

• 31 of the Best Free Marketing Tools for Small Businesses
• Small Business Email Marketing Strategy & Tips for 2022
• What is Ecommerce Marketing?

1. WooCommerce

WooCommerce is an open-source ecommerce platform. It’s the easiest way to add ecommerce functionality to a WordPress site. It’s essentially a WordPress plugin that allows you to create shoppable pages on your website using premade templates and a drag and drop store builder. 

If you don’t already have a WordPress site, it’s quick and easy to set one up. This guide here takes you through the process step by step.

Forest Whole Foods uses WooCommerce to power their store. 

The great thing about WooCommerce is that it’s very flexible. You can create a small storefront for your cookbook to be sold on your blog. Or you can create a multi-channel enterprise ecommerce business with a number of products. There are no limits!

Best of all, it’s totally free to use. You can use free themes, print shipping labels, and do order management without spending a thing. Тhe plugin’s own secure payment gateway, WooCommerce Payments, only charges a transaction fee on each sale.

Of course, paid third-party plugins are also available for more payment processors (like Stripe, Square, Amazon Pay, and PayPal), and other custom features. You’ll also need to pay a small monthly fee for web hosting and custom domain name as WooCommerce is self-hosted. This means hosting isn’t provided by the platform although they give you a few top options for best results.

In case you’ve decided to go with this platform and are thinking about your marketing strategy already, here’s our guide to WooCommerce email.

Price: Free to use in conjunction with WordPress

2. Shopify

Shopify is probably the most popular ecommerce platform. It’s loved by startups and store owners doing dropshipping in particular because of its ease of use – they can get a storefront up and running in a couple of hours. 

Shopify is essentially an ecommerce store in a box. It is an ecommerce website builder in the form of a SaaS. It may not necessarily be the cheapest but is among the best ecommerce platform for small business because it’s really user-friendly. 

When you sign up, you have everything you need at your fingertips to create a beautiful store with thousands of premade templates, optimize your product pages for search engines, and manage the day-to-day activities of running an online business. 

They offer Shopify POS, an app that lets you accept payments in your physical store and processes them in your Shopify admin.

Drink Uproot hosts their ecommerce store on Shopify. 

Shopify’s different paid plans offer a range of marketing tools to help you with optimization and improve your online store’s performance on key ecommerce metrics. It’s a scalable ecommerce platform that can meet your needs as your business grows. Shopify Lite is a special plan for very small businesses that want to just accept credit card payments on their site or blog. It’s $9 a month. On the other end of the spectrum is Shopify Plus, an enterprise ecommerce solution for bigger brands and retailers. 

Shopify’s app store is also popular. It’s a place to find third-party apps to help you with specific tasks like customizable shipping rates or adding live chat to your marketing. 

Price: Try it free for 14 days. After that, Shopify Lite starts at $9 and the cheapest Basic plan is $29 per month.

3. BigCommerce

BigCommerce is the third one of the best ecommerce platforms for small business. With it, you can build out your ecommerce store in less than a day with intuitive drag and drop elements. 

BicCommerce is SaaS ecommerce software. It lets you sell across channels like social media, ebay, Amazon, and even offline. It boasts flexibility and the ability to design the shopping experience you provide down to the tiniest details. 

Ethel’s Baking Co. uses BigCommerce to sell their products online. 

Again, you can make it as complex or as simple as you like. Set up a basic one-pager to sell digital products, or create a multi-page store filled with content-rich experiences. BigCommerce Essentials is excellent for small businesses creating their first online store. 

As you grow, you’ll be be able to scale the ecommerce functionality with BigCommerce’s APIs for building custom ecommerce solutions and B2B selling. 

Price: Try it free for 15 days. After that, the cheapest plan is $29.95 per month. And they don’t charge additional transaction fees!

4. PrestaShop

If you’re looking for a super simple ecommerce platform for small business that doesn’t require you to know a lot about web design, integrations, and all that jazz, PrestaShop is a great option.

Poupadou created their ecommerce store using PrestaShop.

The platform is free to use and doesn’t charge transaction fees. They partner up with Google, ebay, PayPal, etc. to make the platform available for free. You still have to pay for hosting, and advanced features, but it’s affordable to start as a small store owner. 

This said, it works for taking reservations, selling digital products, or running a marketplace in addition to the regular selling of goods online. You can easily translate your store into different languages and currencies to reach a wider audience. 

Lastly, PrestaShop is based in Paris, France if that’s important to you.

Price: Free to use

5. nopCommerce 

nopCommerce is an effective ecommerce solution for small businesses. The platform is among the cheapest ecommerce platforms, being free to use, yet it provides sellers with a whole host of tools and functions to get set up quickly. 

Decks.com uses nopCommerce for their online store. 

Unlimited products, inventory management, SEO tools, and shipping options are just some of the in-built features provided by nopCommerce. It’s a top choice for developers building ecommerce sites because it’s open-source and they can get technical with it.

Price: Free to use; fees for premium support

6. Magento 

Magento is an all-in-one solution for businesses of all sizes that want to succeed online. While ecommerce is a huge part of its offering, it also provides big businesses with enterprise solutions.

If you’re hoping to expand and grow, it might be worth starting out with a bells and whistles platform like Magento if you don’t fancy switching over later down the line.

Oddbins powers their ecommerce site with Magento. 

Core ecommerce features like premade templates, in-built payments solutions, and shipping options are integrated in Magento. It also offers a suite of features geared towards growth. These include business support, business intelligence, and sales enablement tools. 

Price: Magento Opensource is free to download and you can configure the platform as you please. The paid version is a lot more expensive and targets Enterprise customers.

7. Weebly 

Weebly was created as a website builder, but after it got acquired by Square, a payment processor, it has turned into an ecommerce website builder. It allows small businesses to quickly create an online store out of their site.

Little Choc Apothecary uses Weebly to sell their products online. 

Like many of the other options listed here, Weebly comes equipped with a collection of professional store templates to choose from as well as a fully integrated shopping cart. 

This provides a secure and seamless checkout experience for your customers and means you can start selling online straight away – you don’t need any complicated technical know-how to get started.

Price: No free plan. The Pro ($9 per month) is the cheapest option for customized shopping cart and accepting Square payments. The Business plan ($16 per month) adds ecommerce functionality such as coupon codes and third party payment providers.

8. Wix

Like Weebly, Wix is a website builder at its core. However, it has the option to attach an ecommerce store to your website for an affordable amount each month. The free plan even gives you hosting.

The tools available mean you can choose from hundreds of professional store templates, brand your ecommerce store, add as many products as you like, accept secure online payments, and manage end-to-end fulfillment. There’s also the option to sell subscriptions and digital goods. 

Cuts & Bruises barbers hosts their ecommerce site on Wix. 

As well as features to make the ecommerce side of things a breeze, Wix also has a number of advanced marketing tools that help you optimize your site and get it in front of the right people. These include live chat, email marketing and some basic CRM functionality.

Price: The cheapest ecommerce plan (Business Basic) starts at $30 per month

9. Opencart

Opencart lets you create an ecommerce store for free with the help of key integrations, tools, and features. 

Garden on a Roll uses Opencart to sell their products online. 

As well as the usual suspects, like the ability to implement a secure payment provider at checkout, inventory management, and professional templates to choose from, small business owners can also tap into the built-in SEO tools, manage customer data, and apply coupon codes to increase sales. 

Price: Free to use 

10. Squarespace

Squarespace is another website builder with an ecommerce add-on. The platform boasts beautiful looking customized templates and provides a really simple way for you to showcase your products at their best.

Artips Studio hosts their online store on SquareSpace. 

SquareSpace was built for simplicity. Visitors can easily browse your goods, add them to a cart, and go through a secure checkout process. The best part is you can have your store set up in no time at all with the intuitive drag and drop builder.

Price: SquareSpace’s Business plan lets you add a fully integrated ecommerce store to your website for $26 per month + 3% transaction fees.

11. Selz

Selz is an all-in-one solution that comes with all the usual features of an ecommerce platform, as well as tools that help you scale and manage your online store. 

Tommy’s Used Cars hosts their online store on Selz. 

It integrates with a range of powerful software, including Sendinblue (via Zapier) that lets you stay in touch with your customers via email.

This means you can manage everything from one central place. The in-built marketing features help you promote your store to the right people and create successful ad campaigns on Google and Facebook.

Price: Try it free for 14 days. After that, plans start at $29 per month + payment processing fees. 

Other Cheap Ecommerce Platforms

Listed here are the best ecommerce platforms in the world. They also meet the requirement of being the cheapest ecommerce platforms because it’s a competitive space and they need to be affordable to win you. Of course, there are plenty more platforms out there that might be better suited to your needs.

The platform you choose will depend entirely on the products you’re selling, your technical know-how, and the elements you need the most help with.

Fortunately, the majority of small business ecommerce platforms provide hundreds of free, professional templates to choose from, let you brand your store so it reflects the look of your brick-and-mortar shop, and help you integrate secure checkout processes and payment options. 

Other totally free options that aren’t listed here include BigCartel, which is dedicated to artists and makers who sell physical products, BranchBob, Mozello, and Tilda. 

Compare Ecommerce Platforms and Choose the Right One For You

While a lot of these ecommerce platforms offer similar features and services, it’s worth digging deeper into the ones that interest you the most to see if they have everything you need.

Once you’ve got a shortlist, you’ll be much better positioned to get started and succeed with your new online store. Then you’ll be able to grow sales by connecting it with an email marketing service like Sendinblue.

The post The 11 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Small Businesses appeared first on Sendinblue.

Sounds good, right? 

This is where automated ecommerce emails are your friend. These simple but powerful little messages are a fundamental part of ecommerce email marketing. They keep your customers informed about their orders, send visitors to your ecommerce website, and encourage return buyers. 

Ecommerce emails go one step further than the emails you might send as part of a marketing campaign and they provide a personal level of communication with your buyers. They also provide a great opportunity for you to encourage more future sales. 

Here are the types of ecommerce emails you need along with some ecommerce email examples to show them in action. 

1. Welcome Emails 

Welcome emails are instantly sent to a customer when they buy something from you, make an account, or sign up for your email list. They create an instant connection with buyers and welcome them to your brand, and they have great stats: on average, their open rates are 4x higher than general emails and their click through rates are 5x higher (source).  

Use your welcome emails to set the precedent for future communications with your buyers or new subscribers. Explain to them what they can expect from you and your brand. Welcome emails don’t have to be promotional emails, but you can sweeten the deal by offering an introductory discount on their first purchase. 

This and most other emails you’d want to sent can be automated as triggered emails to save you time and not miss sales.

A perfect example of a welcome email by McIntosh, made with Sendinblue.

Wool brand McIntosh uses their welcome email to do several things:

• Welcome new customers
• Offer a discount code and free shipping for their first purchase
• Showcase customer reviews, press coverage, and awards
• Encourages customers to check out the online shop and browse the brand’s products
• Deliver extra value with a free downloadable guide
• Invite people to become affiliates

2. Abandoned Cart Emails 

The average abandonment rate for online shopping carts is 69.57%. This means that the vast majority of shoppers fill up their cart and then leave it to gather dust. As a result, you could be missing out on a lot of sales if you don’t do anything about it. 

There are many reasons shoppers leave their carts without a backwards glance; maybe an unexpected fee was added to the cart; perhaps they were just browsing; or maybe they found a better deal elsewhere. 

Whatever the reason, it doesn’t have to be the end of the customer’s journey with you. Instead, sending one or two abandoned cart emails can recapture their attention and position you as the brand they want to buy from.

For online retailer Smileycookie.com, an abandoned cart sequence recaptured 29% of their abandoned shopping carts and turned them into sales.

Leverage your abandoned cart emails even more by recommending other similar items and sharing reviews to persuade buyers that you’re the brand they need. 

Perch & Parrow’s abandoned cart email, made with Sendinblue

Perch & Parrow’s abandoned cart emails are a great example. Not only the customer’s shopping basket is saved and they can go back to it with one click. There’s also a direct line of communication with the team to ask any questions. That’s perfect for hesitant shoppers, especially when shopping for custom-made sofas and mirrors.

Last but not least, the abandoned cart email offers more options to choose from — the new collection, if the customer left because they didn’t like the old products enough to go through checkout.

Want to learn more about abandoned carts? Check out these resources:

• Getting started with abandoned cart emails
• Abandoned cart email examples & best practices to recover lost sales
• How to Send the Best Shopify Abandoned Cart Email Possible

3. Personalized Promotions Emails

Consumers crave personalized interactions with the brands they buy from (source).

In fact, they expect it. 

And this can go a lot deeper than recommending products they might like. For example, you can use customer data and segmentation to share product inspiration with them at key points in their life – like birthdays. 

This not only makes customers feel special (which in turn is more likely to ensure they buy from you in the future), but it also deepens your connection and brings in more sales. 

Source

PUMA sends vibrant birthday emails to its customers with a 20% discount for their next purchase. 

Source

Outdoor Voices goes one step further and sends a personalized email on customers’ half birthdays. This unique tactic is quirky and memorable, and encourages shoppers to snap up their half-birthday discount. 

4. Recommended Product Suggestions Emails

Customers love to feel like you know them and “get” them, and product recommendation emails are a great way to show this. 

Simply send out product suggestions based on previous purchases. It’s normal for ecommerce marketing to use order history for future campaigns.

For example, if a customer buys a pair of trainers from you once a year, remind them that their next purchase is coming up. You can also use these ecommerce emails to highlight products other customers have bought and to showcase your best-sellers.

La Rochere North America’s recommended products email, made with Sendinblue

La Rochere targeted tea lovers with a special offer. This email is right on spot for its intended audience, showcasing various tea infusers and cup collections. A subtle call to follow the brand’s social media at the end provides more opportunities for engaging those customers in the future.

5. Order Confirmation Emails

Order confirmation emails give customers peace of mind. As soon as the confirmation lands in their inbox, they know that their money is in your hands and you’re going to sort everything out for them.

This type of email is what you can call a transactional email. It’s sent automatically following a transaction. 

As well as making customers feel comfortable when they buy from you, order confirmation emails can serve other purposes too. They can provide similar product suggestions to encourage another sale. 

For example, if a customer bought two packets of organic tea bags from you, you might suggest they buy your signature teapot in the order confirmation email. 

Source

Fleet Farm shares a selection of other products in their confirmation emails. 

6. Upsell Emails

Upsell emails give you the chance to highlight products that your buyers might need based on their previous purchases. For example, if they’ve just bought a pair of shoes from you, why not suggest some socks to go with them? 

Upselling customers increases your average order value and generates repeat custom. You can also tap into FOMO with the old “other customers who bought X also bought Y” tactic. 

For more ideas how to drive loyalty, check out or guide to post-purchase emails.

Source

7. Thank You Emails

Manners go a long way, and this is true in ecommerce too. 

Thanking your customers for making a purchase shows you value them and also provides a more human way of connecting with them.

A beautiful thank you email by SendNod, made with Sendinblue

As a very small business, SendNod builds truly personal relationship with its customers. This sincere thank you email shows appreciation and humbleness, something people would love.

8. Survey or Review Emails

Customer feedback is crucial for growth. It provides incentive and ideas for improving your products and offers an insight into what your customers do and don’t like about shopping with you.

Feedback emails invite customers to share their thoughts and opinions. You can do this by sending out a survey or simply encourage customers to leave reviews that you can then share on future product recommendations. 

Sjaak’s Organic Chocolates’ feedback request email, made with Sendinblue

Sjaak’s Organic Chocolates is an ecommerce business that really motivates its customers to give feedback. They not only offer 10% off the next order, but also a chance to win $50 in product (and it being craft chocolates, who can resist?).

9. Product Catalog and Latest Lines Emails

Keep your store front-of-mind by sending regular emails that showcase your latest product lines or a selection of items from your catalog. 

Loyal customers will be eager to see your latest releases, and you can always personalize the products you share based on their past purchasing behavior. 

A new category highlighted in a Chelsea Dogs email, made with Sendinblue

Chelsea Dogs sends out regular emails to its customers that spotlight their new products and lines. Here, they take advantage of season changes to showcase a new collection. Just in time!

10. Referral Emails 

Referrals are still one of the best ways to get new customers. After all, consumers are more likely to listen to a recommendation from their friends and family than buy into polished marketing campaigns (source). 

Referral emails encourage customers to share your store and products with their network and get themselves a discount in the process.

A refer-a-friend campaign by Short Story, created with Sendinblue.

Short Story taps into their most loyal customers and encourages them to refer a friend for a $25 bonus.

11. Order Dispatch Emails

Customers are keen to keep track of their orders, and letting them know when their items have been dispatched will keep their comfort levels high. This is a common courtesy for ecommerce brands and doing it continues to build on an already established relationship. 

You can dress up your order dispatch emails by sprinkling in some upsell offers, like future product recommendations and add-on items. 

Source

Nike sends really simple order dispatch emails to their customers that have a good quality image of the product that’s been shipped and the option to track the package status. 

12. Re-Engagement Emails

Customers will come and go – it’s a fact of life in the ecommerce world. But you can increase your chances of getting them to come back with a winback email. 

Make your message that much sweeter by offering a discount for their first returning purchase and sharing reviews and user-generated content to tap into FOMO and encourage them to want to be a part of your community.

Your re-engagement emails can also highlight your latest products or provide suggestions based on a customers’ past purchases. For example, if they buy a cheese wheel from you every year at Easter, send them a reminder to buy their next one.

A sleek and beautiful reactivation email by Lily & Roo, made with Sendinblue

Lily & Roo offers a great discount to old customers who haven’t shopped for a long time. They highlight their nest-selling categories in the hope people will be curious to see what’s new.

13. New Launch Emails

Customers want to see your new stuff. If they’ve bought from you before, there’s a very high chance they’ll buy from you again, and emails that launch your new products are a great way to generate an influx of sales.

Make the most of your launch emails by offering a limited time sale on your latest products and regularly check in with customers to keep them informed about new lines. 

New product launch announced by Elum Designs in an email, made with Sendinblue.

Elum Designs communicated the launch of products on their ecommerce store to interested customers in an email. The copy and huge product image certainly help get people clicking on the CTA button. The social call at the bottom is a nice touch for those who don’t want to buy now, but might be interested in more news from the brand.

Optimize Your Ecommerce Strategy With Automated Emails 

Populating your ecommerce email marketing strategy with automated emails at each stage of the buying cycle will create a smooth shopping experience for your customers. When your email marketing campaigns are timely and relevant, people feel valued and you start to deepen the customer relationship.

As a result, you’ll start to grow a loyal following of customers that come back time and time again. What’s more, if you optimize each email with product suggestions and recommendations, you’ll increase your average order value and your customer lifetime value, both of which will lead to growth and success.

If you don’t already have these ecommerce email examples as part of your strategy, now’s the time to do so. 

The post 13 Ecommerce Email Examples You Need to Grow Your Brand appeared first on Sendinblue.

However, whether you’re dropshipping or making your own products, your Shopify store’s success depends on the shopping experience you provide. So we picked a few of the best Shopify apps that will add value, make customers happier, and boost sales. 

These apps made our list because of their score on the Shopify marketplace, the number of reviews they’ve received, their user friendliness, and features.

Want to create the best possible visitor experience and maximize your chances of conversion? These are the Shopify apps you need to make it happen. 

25 Best Shopify Apps to Improve Your Store

• Sendinblue (automation, SMS, inbox, CRM on top of complete ecommerce email marketing functionality)
• GDPR and Cookie Management (gathering legal consent)
• Instant Search and Filters (smart on-site search options)
• PushOwl (web push notifications)
• SEO Booster (automated SEO marketing)
• Transcy (translation & currency switcher)
• Kiwi (size chart & sizing recommender)
• Nitro (creating lookbooks and shoppable galleries)
• Instagram Shop by SNPT (turning Instagram content into social proof)
• Quizify (quiz builder)
• Variants Option Product Option (offer product customization)
• Bulk Discounts Now (quantity discount tables)
• Recipe Kit (shoppable recipe cards)
• Wishlist Plus (let shoppers save items)
• Chatra Live Chat (direct communication with customers on any site page)
• DataFeedWatch (manage product data feeds)
• Experiences App (event bookings and management)
• Prisync (dynamic pricing and competitor monitoring)
• Loox (product reviews & UGC photos)
• HoneyApps (cross-sells, upsells, bundles)
• Yotpo (loyalty programs and rewards)
• Bold Subscriptions (manage recurring payments)
• Metrilo Retention Insights (understand returning customers and repeat orders)
• Returnly (manager order returns)
• Katana (manufacturing ERP for makers and SMBs)
• Trunk (realtime stock sync & bundling)

Email Marketing & Communication

1. Sendinblue Email Marketing for Shopify

Sendinblue is an all-in-one Shopify app, providing a full range of tools for communication with customers. Email marketing (Shopify newsletter, Shopify abandoned cart emails, transactional, etc.) and automation, SMS marketing, chat, inbox, signup forms, and CRM all work together so you can take good care of your clients and sell more.

For other options see our picks for the best email marketing apps for Shopify.

Driving Traffic and Website Engagement

2. GDPR and Cookie Management

This Shopify app enables you to collect cookie consent through a customizable popup or bar, and manage it in accordance with GDPR. Visitors also have access to their data and the right to be forgotten. It makes you GDPR-compliant, a necessity if you sell in the EU. 

3. Instant Search and Filter

This app helps people find what they need faster and easier on your website. That’s essential if you don’t want frustrated visitors going to the competition. The app’s functionality includes smart search, visual search, filters, autocomplete, product recommendations, as well as upsells and cross-sells.

4. PushOwl Web Push Notifications

PushOwl gives you push notifications to re-engage site visitors even without email. Recover abandoned carts, alert for back in stock or new products. You can also give instant updates about shipping or run flash sales. The messages are sent to the browser on desktop or mobile devices.

5. SEO Booster ‑ SEO Marketing

A SEO Shopify app will help you improve ranking, visibility and clicks in search engines. With search engine optimization, your organic traffic will increase so you can optimize your ad spend. SEO Booster helps with product descriptions, image alt texts, broken links, page speed, and more. It also offers bulk edits and automations to save you time and effort.

6. Transcy Translation & Currency Switcher

If you sell in more than one country, customers would enjoy accessing your shop in their preferred language. Seeing prices in a currency of choice also helps them compare and make a buying decision easier. Transcy helps by translating your website content (including reviews, banners, and images with text) based on the visitor’s location. There’s also a switch available for your home page from where people can actively choose how to see the site. 

Merchandising

Merchandising in ecommerce marketing is about displaying your products in the best possible way. That means giving customers more and more options to see the product in detail and make up for the missing touch and feel.

7. Kiwi Size Chart & Recommender

The Kiwi Shopify app specializes in size charts that recommend the best fit for a custom’s measurements. This makes choosing easier, increasing conversions and decreasing returns. You can fully customize the size charts displayed to your shoppers in line with your products and brand.

8. Nitro Lookbook 

Lookbooks let you feature your products in lifestyle shots or setups so customers see how to wear or use them. This would increase conversion rates because it makes the benefits of the products more visible. Nitro is a Shopify app that lets you create lookbooks on product or blog pages, and tag shoppable products.

9. Instagram Shop by SNPT

This Shopify app turns your Instagram content — both owned and user-generated — into shoppable galleries on your site. This adds visual appeal and converts customers as social proof. You can also track sales from influencers with this app.

10. Quizify ‑ Quiz Builder 

Quizzes are a great way to engage casual browsers and turn them into customers. An app like Quizify lets you ask questions and recommend products based on the customer’s needs. It’s fun and helps people overcome doubts about the products, if any. You also get to know your site visitors better and can fine-tune your marketing.

11. Variants Option Product Option

If you want to offer customizable products, this Shopify app will help you. It has many options for customization like price add-ons, multiple choice, file uploads, color swatches, and more. From prescription glasses to personalized gifts, and from tailored clothing to pizza, you can get more orders if you make it easy for people to order customized products.

12. Bulk Discounts Now

Bulk discounts, tiered pricing (different percentage off depending on quantity), and cart upsells (buy 1 more to get a better price per item) drive higher average order value. The Bulk Discount Now app lets you apply quantity breaks to specific items or across your store. It also displays a discount table on your product pages so customers see the benefit clearly.

13. Recipe Kit

If you sell food items on Shopify, recipes are a must-have content. They inspire various uses of the products and help convert more hesitant customers. The Recipe Kit app creates SEO-friendly, shoppable, and shareable recipe cards to put on your product pages or blog. You’ll get more traffic, more brand awareness, and more sales. 

Conversion

How can you increase conversion even more? Ecommerce optimization is done by adding functionalities and options that will make shopping more convenient for your customers.

14. Wishlist Plus

Wishlist Plus is a Shopify app that adds a wishlist functionality to your ecommerce store. People can save items they like even without registering, which is a great convenience. The app integrates with your CRM so you can retarget visitors later via email marketing or Facebook ads.

15. Chatra Live Chat

Chatra lets you assist your website visitors live and boost sales. You can engage customers hesitating to checkout or by any other trigger. It integrates with Facebook messenger and has chatbots for when you’re unavailable. 

16. DataFeedWatch

DataFeedWatch is a leading feed marketing solution combining data transformation with help and advice that empowers merchants, agencies, and enterprises to succeed on ecommerce channels. Businesses can use this tool to transform their product data and meet the requirements of over 2,000 shopping channels with high-quality integrations.

Intuitive and easy to use, DataFeedWatch gives merchants the tools needed to achieve greater visibility and ROAS from their eCommerce campaigns on Google, Facebook, Amazon, and various other shopping platforms. It’s a simple solution for anyone looking to cut back on the time spent maintaining their data feeds while surpassing their competition.

17. Experiences App

If you want to add events, classes, workshops, or bookings to your Shopify store, consider using an event booking app like Experiences. It gives you a customizable booking widget and event management dashboard, and sends reminders to participants. It makes it easy to diversify your product offering and build audience engagement.

18. Prisync ‑ Dynamic Pricing

To stay competitive, you probably monitor competitor prices. The Prisync Shopify app does that for you and even automates price adjustments by rules you set, i.e. runs dynamic pricing. It also tracks price changes and informs your pricing strategy while keeping an eye on profitability.

19. Loox Product Reviews & Photos

Loox automatically asks for feedback, and displays user-generated content and customer reviews on your site. It also integrates with Google Shopping, rich snippets, and Facebook to drive you more traffic. And you can reward referrers with store credit.

20. Cart+Upsell+Bundle Cross Sell by HoneyApps

This Shopify app enables upsells and cross-sells on product pages, checkout, etc. It recommends products frequently bought together and offers price deals. It can help you increase your average order value without increasing your traffic.

Loyalty

Customer retention and loyalty are important for any Shopify online store that wants to stay in business longer and be profitable. The apps below aim to bring you returning customers and repeat sales without denting your marketing budget for new customer acquisition.

21. Yotpo Loyalty & Rewards

Yotpo makes creating a referral program easy. Set up refer-a-friend incentive or VIP rewards tiers to engage your biggest fans. Yotpo also makes it possible to redeem discount codes from your loyalty program. This way, you earn new customers and drive sales while making the old ones happy. 

22. Bold Subscriptions 

Subscriptions are great for ecommerce businesses. They keep customers for long, and drive stable revenue. If your products are suitable for recurring order, Bold Subscriptions will help you bill those recurring payments. It offers many control options to fit customer’s needs and the ability to checkout both subscription and one-off purchases together.

23. Metrilo Retention Insights

Metrilo tracks and analyzes customer behavior on your Shopify store to give you insights about retention and how you can influence it. It shows what products, campaigns, and mediums drive customer loyalty so you can gear your marketing efforts for more repeat sales. You’ll also see when people place their next order and time your email marketing better.

Returns and inventory

What happens after a sale is important for your overall success. Inventory management and handling returns can be unnecessary bottlenecks that bring down an otherwise great brand.

24. Returnly: Returns Manager

A smooth and accessible return process adds a lot to customer experience. Even if they have to return an item, it shouldn’t be such a trouble that it drives people away for good. The Returnly Shopify app automates much of it and helps you manage returned orders. It also helps you set up a self-service returns center and provides return labels.

25. Katana ‑ Manufacturing ERP

Katana offers inventory management, production planning, raw material allocation and more for makers selling on Shopify. If you make your own products, this app can streamline your production process and keep you in control of raw materials, ready inventory and orders. 

26. Realtime Stock Sync & Bundling by Trunk

Using sales channels like Amazon, eBay, etsy, Shopify, and more? The Trunk app syncs your inventory across them all so you don’t oversell. It’s real-time and supports bundles. This way you can grow on many platforms without making a mess of your stock.

Maximize Sales Potential with the Best Shopify Apps

The apps listed mostly have free and paid plans, and all have ready plugins for Shopify for easy integration. 

But what about ecommerce marketing? 

The post 26 Best Shopify Apps to Power up Your Online Store in 2022 appeared first on Sendinblue.

Between choosing an ecommerce platform, building your ecommerce website, and trying to keep sales coming, it can be hard to take on one more strategic task. But that’s where ecommerce marketing comes in. This guide will introduce you to the concept, along with the best strategies to turn your business into a successful ecommerce.

You’ll find answers to:

• What is ecommerce marketing?
• What different types of ecommerce marketing are there?
• What are the best ecommerce marketing strategies to use?
• How to get started with your ecommerce marketing plan

But first, do you run an ecommerce store? What is an example of ecommerce? 

Ecommerce is a business that sells products through a website. It’s synonymous with an online store. These products can be physical like shoes, cosmetics, books, groceries, etc. Or they can be online courses, training programs and memberships, ready meal subscriptions, renting fashion items, and so on.

If you sell only your own products through a website, you’re a direct-to-consumer business. If you have both a brick-and-mortar and online shop, your model is a hybrid. Ecommerce retailers can also sell other brands’ products that they don’t produce themselves. 

Now you know where you stand in the world of selling online, let’s dive into marketing your ecommerce business.

What is Ecommerce Marketing?

If you as an ecommerce business owner need to do ecommerce marketing, we’d better define what it is exactly, right?

Ecommerce marketing does the following:

• Drives traffic to your ecommerce website
• Puts your company in front of your target audience
• Makes it easy for people looking for the kind of products you sell to discover your website
• Converts website visitors into new customers
• Reengages people who’ve visited your website before in order to make them buy again
• Enhances the post-purchase experience to increase customer satisfaction and drive loyalty
• Reactivates current customers with well-timed, relevant offers and information so they enjoy shopping from you
• Stimulates more regular and bigger orders

Without ecommerce marketing, you wouldn’t make any sales. Launching your ecommerce site is not enough — people need to discover you before they spend money with you. 

More than this, you need to constantly remind them of your brand so they come back again and again, generating revenue. 

What Are the Types of Ecommerce Marketing?

Ecommerce marketing spans virtually all digital marketing channels as well as some offline, traditional ones:

• Search engines
• Social media
• Email marketing
• SMS
• On-site
• Owned media like blogs
• Non-owned online publications and podcasts
• Offline marketing e.g. print, TV spots

Let’s look at the ecommerce marketing strategies most popular among ecommerce marketers. You’ll get a full picture of the many possibilities to help you decide which best fit your brand. 

Ecommerce SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is making your website more visible and easily discoverable on search engines (Google, Bing, etc.). It’s mostly about adding keywords to your site copy that potential customers would use when searching for products like yours. Then, the search engine recognizes you have what they want and shows you high in the results.

This way, you capture people with high purchase intent — like someone searching for “men’s white linen shirt”. It’s also a chance to convert people who don’t know your brand. Finally, SEO is a free way of marketing your ecommerce business. 

Source

Ecommerce SEO should be done on product page copy, your home page (meta description too), and FAQ page. Starting a blog will also help boost your SEO. There, you can answer potential buyers’ questions such as, “How to wash a linen shirt?”

Email marketing

Email marketing is a key strategy for promoting your ecommerce. It’s a channel you own as it’s not controlled by a big company like Facebook, Google or Amazon. This makes it cheaper and very reliable. 

All you have to do is choose an email marketing service. Then, you can start building your email list and sending them email campaigns. The main features to look for are:

• Transactional emails — order confirmations, tracking updates, logins and password resets
• Automated emails — triggered automatically by a certain condition being met or a customer’s action
• Segmented emails — tailored to specific customer segments with relevant offers based on their purchase history and behavior on site

Looking for a platform to manage all your ecommerce emails in one place?

Check out Sendinblue’s ecommerce email marketing software. From transactional messages to automated journeys and list segmentation, it’s all on our free plan. Plus you’ll get unlimited contacts and up to 300 free email sends a day. 

The more you know about your subscribers, the more relevant email campaigns you can send. A CRM added to your email tool will enable you to reach everyone at the right time with the right offer.

There are many types of emails you can send to engage and convert your subscribers:

1. Welcome email — like onboarding to your website and brand
2. Drip nurture email — a series of emails with content informing and educating about the product until the person is ready to buy
3. Abandoned cart email — reminds the customer they’ve added something to their shopping cart but haven’t purchased, a gentle nudge to complete the checkout
4. Post-purchase email — continue building a relationship with the customer to stimulate more orders
5. Upsells and cross-sells — email offers with products related to past purchases
6. Win back email — reactivating an idle customer who hasn’t ordered anything in a long time
7. Loyalty reward email — thank your loyal customers with an extra perk, a next-level discount, or a freebie
8. VIP offer email — engage VIP customers with a special offer just for them to make them feel appreciated
9. Ecommerce newsletter — a regular update on your brand and products so you stay top-of-mind

If you’re unsure where to start, here’s our email marketing checklist and tips on how to build your ecommerce email strategy.

An example of a post-purchase email with the simple goal of making the buyer feel even better. Source

Conversion rate optimization

The measures you take to convert as many site visitors as possible is called conversion rate optimization. You’ve worked hard and/or paid for your traffic so you want it to result in sales. Traffic without revenue is nothing.

There are various tactics you can use on your website to drive sales:

• Push notifications
• Live chat
• User reviews & user-generated content (UGC)
• Choosing guides
• VR fitting and placement tools e.g. for fashion or furniture

To dive deeper, check out our guide to ecommerce optimization.

Live chat helps convert site visitors just like a sales assistant in a physical store

SMS marketing

SMS marketing is sending text messages for promotional purposes. It’s best for alerts, updates, and time-limited offers that need to be read immediately. 

An example would be an automated SMS with a special discount going out on the morning of a customer’s birthday. Shipping updates are another key ecommerce communication that works well for SMS.

Just keep in mind that you need the contact’s permission to send them SMS. Also, some countries regulate this kind of marketing heavily so check before you send.

SMS marketing is great for limited-time offers

Organic social media marketing

This is your unpaid presence on social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok and wherever else your audience hangs out. Today it’s an absolute must to be discoverable on such sites. It’s a way for people to know you’re in business and often determines if they will visit your website at all.

When marketing for ecommerce, you can share company updates, educate about your products, and promote causes aligned with your brand values. Essentially any topic relevant to your target audience that’s likely to engage them! 

Source

In addition, you can set up social commerce, which is selling on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest directly. It’s an extra online sales channel for people who don’t want to go to your website to browse and buy products.

Paid social media marketing

Often organic social reach is not enough for ecommerce businesses and you might need to pay to play. This means two things in general — ads and influencer marketing campaigns on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok, etc.

Ad formats vary depending on the social media platform. You’ll have to test them to find what works best for your ecommerce store. 

Source

Find out more about how to create a Facebook ad that drives conversions.

Then, there’s influencer marketing — paying popular people on social media to promote your products. They can help you reach difficult audiences like eco-conscious moms or hardcore perfume fans. They also represent the product as part of a lifestyle so it enhances the brand image.

Some influencers charge a hard fee but others work on commission. You pay for the sales made through them, not for the exposure. Try working with different ones with followings of various sizes. You might find that the micro influencers convert better because they’re more focused and better fit your niche.

Search advertising

Apart from social media, you can pay for more exposure on search engines as well. The most popular options are:

• Pay-per-click (PPC, Google AdWords) — appear on top of search results for chosen keywords, e.g. “recycled shoes”
• Google shopping — a free service where you can list your entire product range with images and prices, and directly capture high-intent shoppers
• Display campaigns (banner ads on sites) — based on searches and browsing behavior so the potential customer sees your ad for “cat tree” on a news site, for example, after browsing for one

An example of an AdWords campaign, Source

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is an interesting part of ecommerce marketing. It relies on a network of affiliates, or referrers, who drive traffic to your online store and get paid for each sale they help make.

It’s usually done through blog posts where they talk about your products or simply list their picks in a certain category. Influencers posting directly on social media and thus replacing affiliate marketing has been one of the ongoing ecommerce trends lately. Affiliate marketing is, however, still alive and thriving for Amazon sellers.

Partnerships

You can join forces with other companies in the form of a partnership to extend your reach to their audience as well. It’s an effective marketing strategy for lifestyle ecommerce brands with overlapping target customers. 

For example, you can agree to swap email lists so each brand connects with more potential customers. Just label the email campaign properly so subscribers understand their details have not been sold. Another option is to create a special cross-brand offer for both brands’ clients. 

PR and brand awareness

PR sounds outdated in ecommerce marketing but it’s not. Especially at launch, you’ll benefit from getting featured in media publications both offline and online. 

It can be a founder interview, a mention in a listicle (X gift ideas for Y), or getting your headliner featured in a photoshoot. Whatever fits your product, the goal is to increase brand awareness and create demand.

An example of being included in a gift guide on Good Housekeeping.

And let’s not forget events and sponsorship opportunities. Going offline and meeting your customers in real life is a great exercise for ecommerce businesses. Local fairs, pop-up stores, and themed expos are not to be overlooked in ecommerce marketing.

The best practice here is to choose the events you support carefully to get closer to your target and not alienate them.

Ecommerce content marketing

Content is another marketing tactic that can bring long-term results to ecommerce businesses. It comes in many formats:

• Blog articles
• Video
• Podcasts
• Guides and help content
• User-generated content — photos, video, forum entries, testimonials

Example of ecommerce content — the whole blog helps convert visitors to customers, Source

The goal of content marketing is to answer questions, educate, expand the company narrative, help people choose a product, and even entertain. 

It’s your chance to tell your story, share your expertise and values, overcome potential objections, and reassure potential or current customers you’re a good business to shop from. 

The best thing about content is that, once created, it’s out there working for you. When optimized for search and easily found on site, it can boost your conversion rate. It can also be reused for other ecommerce marketing campaigns such as newsletters, organic social, and partnerships.

10 of the Best Ecommerce Marketing Strategies

Ask yourself:

• What are your sales expectations?
• How big is your market?
• What target group do you want to reach? 
• Where are they? — both geographically and online?
• How do you want your product to be perceived?
• What are your competitors doing?

The answers to these questions will help you pick your “battle weapons” from the ones outlined above, a.k.a. marketing tactics that best fit your needs and abilities.

As for the best ecommerce marketing strategies, there’s no right answer. 

Ecommerce is a huge industry, with countless products, business models, and target groups, making it impossible to pinpoint just one best practice. What works for one seller with a specific product won’t necessarily work for another selling something else to another audience in a different market. 

Here are just some universal marketing tips that will help you create and enhance your ecommerce marketing strategy.

1. Define your target audience and market

To be able to find the right voice, messaging, channels and offers, you need to understand your audience first. 

2. See what your competitors are doing

Some of it is probably working — there’s no point reinventing the wheel. But look for what can be done better too. This can become your competitive advantage.

3. Set targets based on benchmarks

Before you have data of your own, base your projections on industry benchmarks. This will give you a direction to work in.

4. Research marketing tools that can help you

As you’ve seen, there’s so much to ecommerce marketing that it can be overwhelming. Luckily, there are tools to help you get started with many of the tactics mentioned at an affordable price. 

5. Add more marketing channels as you find your ground

Once you feel your initial marketing setup is working, expand to other channels and tactics. For example, you can add a live chat when you have a dedicated customer service person.

6. Automate as much as possible

To be able to scale, small businesses need sales coming in on autopilot. The more you can run hands-off, the better. This is where marketing automation tactics like bulk emails, automated workflows, notifications, and lead scoring come in handy.

7. Personalize your communication

Ads, emails, SMS, and live chat bring in much better results when personalized and relevant. Customers like the experience of being understood and not getting just another generic message.

8. Measure your ecommerce marketing results, refine and reuse what works

The only way to know if an ecommerce marketing strategy is working is to track the return on investment (ROI). The campaigns that don’t bring results are not worth wasting money on. For the ones that do work, try to use them for a bigger audience, rinse and repeat.

9. Build loyalty into your strategy

Customer loyalty is good news: it boosts profits, improves your brand image, attracts new customers who‘ve heard about you from fans. And it has a long-term impact so start working on it as early as possible. Loyalty tiers, automations, and behavior insights from CRM will help you.

10. Focus on profitability, not just sales

If you pay to get new customers all the time, that might shave off your profit. One-off sales come out more expensive for you because of ad prices, as well as more returns and exchanges (new customers don’t know their size, etc.). It’s cheaper to drive repeat sales to current customers. 

How to Write an Ecommerce Marketing Plan

An ecommerce marketing plan is your schedule for the activities included in your strategy. It’s a road map for how you’ll achieve your ecommerce marketing goals. 

When starting out, keep it simple. Choose a few marketing tactics that fit your brand and that you can set up easily. 

What does a marketing plan for ecommerce look like?

Here’s a breakdown of your first year’s marketing activities that will create brand awareness, attract customers, and keep them buying.

1. Run a brand awareness campaign on Facebook to drive traffic
2. Do retargeting Facebook ads to convert site visitors
3. Set up lead generation e.g. email signup forms or website registration 
4. Create an automated email sequence — welcome, information about the brand and products, nurturing to purchase
5. Work with social media influencers to popularize your brand
6. Improve SEO on site
7. Add paid search activities — Google Shopping, PPC to catch people who might go to the competition
8. Engage existing customers through email to keep them interested with content and offers
9. Target lookalike audiences based on your best clients on Facebook
10. Prepare for important ecommerce events when your target market expects promotions — Black Friday, the holiday marketing season, Mother’s/ Father’s/ Valentine’s Day, back to school, summer vacation, spring break, national holidays, etc.
11. Test various marketing campaigns to see what works for your product and ideal customers. Reuse what works and don’t waste money on what doesn’t.

What is Ecommerce Marketing? Essential to Ecommerce Success.

You see that without ecommerce marketing, your online store pretty much doesn’t exist. The only way to get the word out, to attract customers, and to generate (repeat) sales is through intentional marketing activities.

Ready to get started? Check out Sendinblue for all the tools to kickstart your ecommerce marketing strategy. Try transactional and promotional email campaigns, SMS, automation, and live chat — all on our free plan. Plus plugins for major ecommerce platforms make it easy to link Sendinblue to your online store. 

To make sure your ecommerce marketing stays top-notch year-round, download our 2022 holiday marketing calendar! It’s full of important dates and helpful marketing advice for every month of the year

The post What is Ecommerce Marketing? 10 Strategies to Get Started in 2022 appeared first on Sendinblue.

An ecommerce content marketing strategy is a long-term commitment, but it improves brand image and organic traffic, and will eventually help conversion rates soar.

We’ve selected some of the best content marketing examples from ecommerce stores to get you in a creative mood.

Many of them offer niche products so you’ll see how ecommerce sites selling any product can use content marketing. And we’ll share tips for building your own content marketing strategy.

What is Ecommerce Content Marketing?

Ecommerce content marketing is part of digital marketing.

Before we get into ecommerce content marketing examples, let’s first talk about how ecommerce companies benefit from it.

Effective content attracts traffic to your online store for free. What’s more, it’s qualified traffic, meaning only people genuinely interested in your products and related topics.

The customer journey is usually the following. People look up topics of interest on search engines. They stumble upon your blog article, video, or other format, and interact with it. They start following what you do or come back later when they need similar information.

Eventually, they discover your products. Thanks to your content marketing efforts, they transfer this positive attitude to your brand. 

Ecommerce content marketing is an alternative way to promote your online store. It’s cheaper than running ads or working with influencers since it usually relies on SEO and organic social media presence.

Building Your Content Marketing Strategy

1. Decide how you want to give value to your potential customers. What are they interested in? What are the demographics you want to reach? Can you give them important information about your niche? Or can you help them with pain points? Your content should focus on that.
2. Choose your channels. Where do you want your content to be? On your blog or on a YouTube channel? A separate domain? A podcast platform? Go where your audience is.
3. Think about how you can execute on your content marketing plan. Will you do it in-house or work with an agency? If you’re an expert on your product’s niche, can you dedicate time to content creation?

Content marketing formats

You can choose the type of content format to best present your brand. Of course, it depends on the products and the niche. You probably wouldn’t use white papers if you sell sneakers, but they might work well for medicinal cosmetics. 

You can have a dedicated blog with different formats, or you can spread them out on your various pages. You can also repurpose old content for new channels and in new formats. For example, sharing blog articles in your newsletter, just like we do at Sendinblue:

Start off with just a few that you’re sure you can keep up in terms of content creation, time and people, and expand when you feel you’re ready.

Ecommerce Content Ideas and Strategies

Here are some of the most inspiring content marketing examples.

1. Quizzes

Everybody finds guilty pleasure in talking about themselves. A fun, well-executed quiz could get you tons of traffic. They’re easily shareable too so you’ll get referrals and social shares as well.

What’s more, once they submit their answers, you can use them to tailor your offers and communication to their needs. For example, you can ask about their skin type in order to recommend suitable products and give relevant advice. 

Even if you don’t want to add another tool to your ecommerce site, you can still learn more about your customers’ preferences. Just link to a form in your newsletter! 

Here’s how to do it and create segmented email lists to send relevant information with Sendinblue.

2. Share values on your YouTube channel

REI, the outdoor gear company, is a perfect example of giving value to their target audience for free. They do video marketing on shared topics of interest with their customers.

They use their YouTube channel (over 500 ultra-focused and practical videos) to answer all types of subscriber questions about outdoor adventure. The special short films REI Presents get over a million of views each, spreading the stories of inspiring people, environmental stewardship, and the outdoor lifestyle.

There are series about all their target sports and travel activities, destinations, camp recipes, how-tos, repairs, and so on.

It’s a place for the community to find inspiration and info for their next adventure. And most importantly, the brand values are all over the videos. There’s no hard sell, it’s about a shared passion for the outdoors.

3. Talk about your local community

If being a local brand is your highlight, your ecommerce content strategy should reflect it. Talk about your community and how you’re involved in it.

Mitten Crate is a subscription box for artisan Michigan food. They’re deeply connected with the state of Michigan, its traditions, and land. On their blog, they promote local artisans, making their blog a go-to source for foodies in Michigan. 

4. Turn events into ecommerce content

Taking part in trade shows, concerts, fairs, or exhibitions offline is a great way to meet your customers in person. It brings your brand closer to the people and shows its human face. You can also collect customer stories easier.

Segafredo Zanetti Australia regularly tells their blog readers where they’re going to park their coffee van next.

Tip: Share behind the scenes images to add a real-life touch.

5. Connect your products and what they’re used for

An example of great content comes from DTC darling Warby Parker.

Their To Read blog section is a geeky paradise. The connection is clear — people who read a lot often need glasses, or that’s what pop culture leads us to believe. Since Warby’s glasses help people see better, they want to give them back the pleasure of reading.

Any topic or activity related to your products can make content material. Just think about what your customers like to do and what their interests are.

6. Share DIY inspiration

Ecommerce content marketing creates demand for your product. You can show people alternative uses so they have more reasons to buy it. 

All recipes, tutorials, and repurpose ideas work this way. Sometimes these are even more exciting so people buy just to try them. And if you occasionally run a user-generated content campaign, you’ll get lots of new content to feature and reuse!

Credit: Rockin’ Wellness

7. Be part of your audience’s lifestyle

Barney Cools have over 6000 followers on Soundcloud. But they’re not artists — they’re a fashion brand!

The best ecommerce content marketing blends with the target group’s interests and lifestyle. 

8. Add a twist to influencer content

Almost all beauty brands work with YouTubers because it’s the best way to show the products in action. But Glossier’s #GetReadyWithMe influencer collaboration stands out.

The YouTube videos are a great example because it shows everyday looks for ordinary people. This is completely in line with their slogan “beauty products for real life”. Most brands will go for looks that are way too fancy for the normal working woman, but Glossier stays close to their target market.

Also, with this approach they retain ownership of the videos, accumulating them on their official channel. Brands usually send products to vloggers. The results are not on-brand videos and viewers have to jump from channel to channel.

9. Create a glossary

Whatever you sell, don’t assume your customers know all the fancy terms. Ecommerce content marketing gives you more space to explain and educate apart from product pages. 

This way, people will get to know your product category better so they can shop with confidence. Plus, when they know what they need and buy, they’re more likely to be happy with the purchase. 

A glossary is great for SEO (search engine optimization) too because people will discover your ecommerce website with a keyword search. Your website will rank better for related terms and start showing to more people looking for the same things. You’ll probably get backlinks too.

For example, Third Love has a dedicated Bra Style Guide where all related questions are answered openly and professionally. Helping people even before they become customers helps build trust.

10. Go into details about your product

Such pieces of content can work miracles for products like cosmetics or online workouts. They’re the kind of things people need to know more about before buying – it’s not as simple as deciding on a scarf.

The Ordinary’s site has guides to key ingredients and product comparisons. This way the products get extra exposure in addition to the product pages. Plus, the customers can choose easier and find the right product to enjoy.

11. Answer the questions people are ashamed to ask

Sometimes your target clients might have intimate or otherwise unusual questions. Be proactive and provide answers so they come back to your site as a trusted source of information on their pain points. 

For example, men often want to find info about clothing quickly and discreetly. Mezoura’s blog has styling tips lined up and ready – how to wear a shirt and a sweater, how long the shirt over the pants should be, and so on. It feels good to get answers to such “silly” questions you didn’t want to ask your friends.

12. Reuse press coverage

You can feature your earned media on your blog because articles and TV reports are easy to understand by the average public. Magazine features also count.

Boden rode the wave of fame when Kate Middleton wore a blouse of theirs on no other but International Women’s Day. Yes, it’s a bit of a brag but can do wonders for your brand’s PR. 

Even if you don’t have something this big, you can do guest posts for partner websites and share them on your social media to build authority in your niche.

13. Tips on product maintenance

Content about how to take care of products, how to prolong their lifespan, etc. makes a good impression. First, it helps people enjoy their purchases more. And second, it shows your dedication and craftsmanship, that your brand isn’t just about selling more but about quality as well.

Credit: Monsieur Chaussure

14. FAQ pages

Ecommerce content marketing can be anything that’s not placed on regular sales pages (product pages, cart, checkout). Sometimes, it’s a resource that helps people choose easily from your products. And FAQ pages are just that! They help people decide to buy. 

Paint brand Annie Sloan makes buying paint online easy with its extensive FAQ page, covering its complete range of products. This way, people feel at ease when buying.

Why are these good examples of ecommerce content marketing ?

They don’t hard-push their products on the reader, viewer, or user. Good content is enjoyable on its own, even if the visitors aren’t interested in buying anything yet. It gives you real estate to present and position your ecommerce brand.

The goal of a content marketing strategy for ecommerce is to nurture and build trust. Conversions only come as a result of that. The pieces of content provide information, feed curiosity, inspire, educate, entertain. 

Get Started with Ecommerce Content Marketing

All those ideas are pretty cool right? You can start with your own content easily too — just write about your mission, values, and products in your newsletter. 

The post 14 Ecommerce Content Marketing Strategies for 2022 appeared first on Sendinblue.

To save contacts from completely disengaging with a brand, we use winback emails. Let’s explore the best practices when setting up a re-engagement campaign.

What is a Winback Email?

A win-back email, as the name suggests, is an ecommerce email or series of emails sent to inactive (idle) customers. In ecommerce, inactive usually means people who haven’t purchased anything long enough to be considered very likely to churn for good. 

The goal of the winback email is to activate those customers, to bring them back to your ecommerce store, and persuade them to place another order. 

Why send a winback email?

Those customers have already bought from you in the past. It’s a waste to just let them slip away. New customer acquisition is expensive and competitive. So any ecommerce business would benefit from customer retention. Getting existing customers to place repeat orders is 5 times easier, especially when you have shopping behavior insights.

You already have insights about what they like and how they shop. Post-purchase email marketing based on these insights is easier to execute than converting brand new customers.

Winning Back Lost Customers

People can have all sorts of reasons for disengagement with your brand. And it’s not always a negative experience with something they bought. Sometimes they just don’t need your products that often. Not everyone has the habit of regularly checking online shops. Maybe inactive subscribers haven’t lost interest completely, just life got in the way.

So how do we re-engage those customers? A winback campaign is different from your usual promotional emails sent to the entire email list. In fact, many people stop opening emails from brands precisely because they’re all the same.

How to make а winback campaign stand out from the crowd

For a converting winback email, you need to make it interesting, relevant, and stimulate action. Here are some possible directions you can take in your re-engagement email campaign:

• Fun. Reach out as if to an old friend and try to reconnect.
• FOMO. Play on the fear of missing out with limited-time offers (free shipping or special edition products).
• Incentives. Invite them into your rewards program or give them a coupon for the next order.
• Feedback. Ask about their last order in the hope they’ll want more of the same. 
• What’s new? Announce new products or share important company updates.
• Best sellers. Feature the products everyone loves.
• Values. Remind people of your values or causes to revive their liking of you.
• Occasions. Use a birthday email as an excuse to reconnect.

But to even get people to read your message, you need them to open it first. That’s where the email subject line can make or break the campaign.

Winback email subject lines ideas

Here are some ideas to inspire you. Remember to fit them to your brand voice so they don’t sound out of line with your brand identity.

• Have you been seeing other [product]?
• Hey [name], what have you been up to? 
• Did you forget about your [brand name] account?
• We TOTALLY need to catch up
• Psst…how are you doing, friend?
• Do you still have too many [product]?
• Free shipping ends tomorrow
• The [product they bought] limited edition
• You’ve missed over X different [product]! 
• You’re invited to the all-new [brand name] rewards club
• The same [brand name] products you love, at a VIP price for you
• It’s been a while since you got [product]. What do you think?
• The all-new [Brand Name] 
• What we’ve been working on
• Wanna see our new creations?
• A lot has changed! New Special Offer Inside.
• Our new menu is perfect for you! 
• Due to popular demand, [product] is back
• Did you see [product]?
• X years of [doing your cause] and counting
• We still care about the [values]. Join us!

Just as a quick note here, use all caps in subject lines sparingly. It’s ok to stand out in an inbox, but overdoing it feels like shouting in someone’s face.

Winback Email Best Practices

A winback email is quite simple. There’s your message, maybe a featured product, and a CTA to visit the shop. But the campaign has to be done right to have the desired effect. 

As with email marketing in general, balance is key. Any campaign should be well-timed and relevant to the recipient. 

Check out our guides on other essential email marketing parts of the customer journey:

• Welcome emails
• Transactional emails
• Triggered emails
• Abandoned cart emails

1. Define what “lapsed customers” means for your own business

Depending on your products, your sales cycle can vary a lot. Coffee and dog food get ordered more often than evening wear and appliances. If you sell staple products, don’t wait too long to try and win customers slipping away. But if people generally buy from you once or twice a year, there’s no reason to worry they’re inactive after just 3 months. 

2. Automate list cleanup

If your winback email campaign still doesn’t convert someone, you can use automation to remove this contact from your mailing list. This way, you’ll continue emailing only people who actually want to hear from you and your email deliverability will be better.

3. Hit the inbox at the perfect time

A winback email, especially one with a limited-time offer, needs to be opened as soon as it’s delivered. You don’t want to sit and wait more when the customer’s drifting away. So your email campaign software should be able to schedule any email to deliver at the perfect time for each recipient, based on past data.

4. Reactivate email unsubscribers

What about email subscribers who decide to unsubscribe when they receive a winback email? Give them a chance to reconsider. Display an incentivizing opt-in form on site, ask for consent to marketing emails at checkout, and in order confirmation emails. Check out other email list building tactics.

5. Send it from a brand account, not a person

If people have disengaged from the brand, they need to remember it. It’s not the time for relationship building with names of people they never knew. 

6. Make it personalized

People often stop paying attention to marketing emails because they’re all too generic. If you want them to spring to action now, after all this time, another mass email won’t work. They need to feel as if you personally reached out to them and tailored your message to their needs. Check out our tips on personalized emails for more information!

7. Don’t run winback all the time

If it’s just another recurring “promotion”, it loses its appeal and exclusivity. Winback emails should be sent only when the customer has been truly inactive — hasn’t visited the site or opened emails in quite some time. 

8. A/B test everything

Testing will show you what kind of winback emails your audience likes. Before you try different subject lines, offers and sequences, you can’t know what’ll get the best click through rate and conversions.

Winback Email Examples

Let’s see what other ecommerce businesses (and not only) do for their win-back email campaigns. Maybe they’ll inspire you to create your own winback customer email template.

# Reactivation offer

Source for this and all other examples 

# Next order discount

An email offering a discount on the customer’s next order and promoting new currencies available to shop in by Bomberg, created with Sendinblue

# Product feature

Email by Origami Good Karma, created with Sendinblue

# Values

# Updated version

# Survey

Set Up Winback Email Campaigns with Sendinblue

Sendinblue is an ecommerce email marketing software that lets you run any tailored campaign your strategy requires. With its customer and event tracking capabilities, it enables you to segment your customer list and tailor re-engagement emails down to tiniest details.

So the process of setting up a winback email campaign with Sendinblue looks like this:

1. Connect Sendinblue to your ecommerce store and activate the tracking.
2. Create an automated workflow that will send an email when a customer hasn’t ordered or interacted with your emails in a period of your choice. You can also follow up with progressive incentive emails or whatever else you want to use to attract people back in.
3. Sendinblue checks for the condition every day and triggers the winback email or campaign to anyone who fits it. There’s also the Send Time Optimization feature that will deliver the email at the best possible time for the recipient to guarantee better open and click rates. 
4. You can personalize this campaign with products bought, customer’s name, etc.
5. You can also add another step to it — unsubscribing those who don’t engage even with this winback campaign. 

And you want to know what’s the best thing? Sendinblue doesn’t charge for contact list size so there’s no need to purge your list from inactive users all the time. Just set up your winback email series for when it makes sense for your business so the customer experience is pleasant and not too rushed. 

The post Winback Email Tactics for Ecommerce Success appeared first on Sendinblue.

One of the many impacts of COVID-19 was the acceleration of ecommerce growth. According to McKinsey, 10 years of development happened in just three months. Even now, 46 percent of consumers remain uncomfortable in bricks and mortar stores. 

With the boom in online shoppers came a boom in online businesses. To continue to stand out in the ecommerce industry, you need to deliver seamless customer journeys and unique experiences. Staying on top of new ecommerce trends is more important than ever.

Hear from small business owners, marketers, and trend forecasters on the most important ecommerce trends emerging right now. Discover practical ways to use these trends to deliver standout service to your customers and expand your business.

1. Mobile

We’ve been talking about the rise of mobile in online purchasing trends for years. Now, Statista says mobile devices account for nearly 31 percent of all ecommerce sales. The future of ecommerce is mobile. 

Top tip

“To prepare for the growth of mobile shopping, make sure your ecommerce website is responsive. Menus, text, images, elements, and widgets should display properly across all screen sizes, “ says Sam Stein, search engine marketing professional at eSafetyFirst. 

Martin Orefice, founder of Rent To Own Labs, says a good place to start is to test your site’s mobile readiness on Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool.

Continue the good work by always checking mobile view before hitting send on your newsletters.

2. Augmented reality

One of the big drawbacks of online stores used to be that customers couldn’t see or size up the product. But with augmented reality, that’s no longer true. All your customers need to beam your products into their home is a mobile device. 

“Using their smartphone camera, customers can walk around [your product], watch a moving demo, and see its features up close as though it were on their kitchen counter,” says Shivvy Jervis, trend forecaster and founder of the FutureScape 248 Lab.

Top tip

Use AR to recreate the in-store buying journey or enable users to have a personalized experience of your product in their home. Like Gantri, walk subscribers through the features in your newsletter to drum up interest and boost sales. 

Source

3. Personalization

Personalization is all about making sure your customers feel special, not spammed.

Address your customer by their name. Improve your customer experience with product recommendations based on their location or previous purchases. Focus on being as helpful as possible with information, special offers, and exclusive discounts curated for them.

Top tip

Personalize your ecommerce email marketing using field insertion. Automatically add the customer’s name in the subject line and as an opening greeting. It’s simple but can increase open rate metrics by around 20 percent and sales by 31 percent.

To tap into the full potential of this marketing tool, personalize your special offers and the timing of your emails. 

Ella, founder of the low sugar cake store FitBakes, explains: “We divide our clients into segments by preference and purchase history. The ones that like chocolate receive an email whenever there’s a promotion on chocolate. The ones that prefer citrus flavors get emails when it’s sunny. The ones that usually buy on payday get an email between the 29th and the 1st of the month.”

FitBakes recently sent an email promoting their jaffa cakes to customers who viewed, bought, or added the product to their cart in the last three months. The team excluded those who had placed an order in the previous week. The email generated $2,200 in sales. 

Ella sums up, “If you make them feel special, they come back over and over.”

For more about personalization related to your Shopify store, check out our article on the best email marketing for Shopify.

4. The new influencer

Influencer marketing, many retailers’ secret weapon, is expected to grow by 12% to over $4 billion next year. But as anyone who has seen yet another reality TV star pushing diet tea on Instagram will know, it can sometimes feel a little inauthentic. And you’re always at the mercy of the platform’s algorithms. 

Now a more organic and community-oriented approach to the influencer is on the rise. This takes two guises.

1. Employee as influencer 

Connect with your clients by introducing your ecommerce store through omnichannel behind-the-scenes content. Customers feel they’re getting exclusive access which amplifies your product’s value and generates sales.

2. Micro-influencers

Scope out micro-influencers in  your niche. They have a smaller following but because they are less expensive to hire and their audience is more specific you have a better chance of getting a good return on your investment.

Top tip

A quick way to action this in your email marketing is to find a more authentic voice in your copy. Write emails from your founder, include a photo, and sign off as yourself as Beardbrand does in this example. It helps your reader feel special and build an affinity with your brand.

Source

Video is a fantastic tool for this more personal approach to influencer marketing. Harriet, co-founder of CocoFinder, made videos of team members using CocoFinder products. “Our customers found this video exciting. We noticed an 89 percent improvement in click rate.” 

Play with building newsletters and social campaigns around editorial content, day-in-the-life features, and brand challenges involving your community.

5. Sustainability

In 2019, 73 percent of shoppers would change their consumption habits to reduce their environmental impact. Since the coronavirus pandemic last year, it’s estimated this figure will be even higher.

Make your business more sustainable to build a strong brand reputation, regenerate the planet and make cost savings.

It can be daunting if it’s your first time reviewing your sustainability policy. Start small with just one or two changes. Be transparent about your wins, how far you’ve come, and where you hope to go. 

Top tip

There are three options to consider when making ethical or sustainable changes to your business.

1. Your materials

Switch to eco-friendly packaging for ecommerce. It’s a consumer-facing way to reduce your environmental impact and save money. 

Clean up your supply chain. Where could you reduce your carbon footprint within your raw materials, manufacturers, and service providers? 

Think about your product’s afterlife. Offer repair services or buy-back schemes to keep materials in circulation rather than landfills.

2. Your resources

Donate resources to tackle inequality. Shoe brand Toms built their brand on a policy to donate one pair of shoes for every pair purchased.

3. Give time and skills

Give your time or skills to supporting a cause that feels relevant.

Whichever route you choose, your sustainable policies become a talking point for your marketing strategy.

Source

6. Virtual events

Virtual events have boomed since the Covid-19 pandemic. 55 percent of virtual event organizers plan to invest more in virtual events in 2022 than ever before.

Virtual events help you connect with people offline and boost your ecommerce sales. You can also reach people beyond your local area and create strong global ties to your brand and your products.

Top tip

Think about who your ecommerce brand is for and what they might need. If you’re targeting stressed-out parents, put on a virtual yoga class. If your audience is students, support them with virtual study sessions or CV workshops.

Use your newsletter to promote the event as it approaches and document it once it’s finished.

Source

7. Video 

Video is becoming an essential tool for ecommerce platforms. Anything interactive which tells a story is a hit with customers. Laura Fuentes, operator of Infinity Dish, says, “We started creating video content for our social media platforms and saw a significant increase in shares and likes.”

Top tip

Get creative with your video content.

• Show your new products in action
• Share the process behind how you make your bestselling item
• Introduce a specific aspect of your service 

Source

With Sendinblue, you can insert an image or still into your email with a link to your video. This avoids any issues with deliverability and ensures your readers have no trouble viewing your content regardless of the email client they use. You can then conveniently link to the relevant products from the video. 

8. Free shipping

73 percent of customers want it. And thanks to the Amazon effect, more and more ecommerce businesses offer it. Free shipping. 

We’ve seen this perk explode as the online shopping trend boomed and people remained stuck at home. For new and growing businesses, it’s a great way to turn abandoned carts into checkouts.

Top tip

Set a minimum spend to protect your business from making a loss on small orders and you’re ready to go. 

Shout about your new free shipping policy in your email strategy. Boost your conversions with an automated abandoned cart email reminding your customers they don’t have to pay shipping on their left items. 

To set up your own abandoned cart emails and more, check out Sendinblue’s ecommerce email marketing software.

Source

9. Subscriptions

When it comes to payment options, subscriptions are an emerging trend. 

“The subscription model offers what consumers today are craving: value for money, convenience, and exclusive perks,” says Eden, marketing director and founder of WeInvoice. And for you, the brand, it means regular guaranteed income and predictable stock flow.

Source

Top tip

“The most popular subscriptions hook us on one or even two of the three ‘S’s: security, savings, surprise,” says Tim Lewis for the Guardian. Think about how your subscription model could make your customer’s life easier, save them money, or give them a moment of joy in their day. 

James Crawford, co-founder of DealDrop, recommends starting a subscriber newsletter to deliver updates and offers that keep customers involved. 

10. Voice search

Jon Buchan, CEO of Charm Offensive, says, “Nearly 5.5 million online shoppers in the US make voice-based purchases regularly. And according to a forecast, nearly 75 percent of American households will buy a smart speaker by 2025.”

Top tip

Adapt your existing search engine optimization (SEO) strategy for voice search. “Include conversational-style search terms,” says Daniel Foley, SEO manager at Halcyon School.

11. Chat

According to Shopify’s Future of Commerce report, Conversational Commerce is a powerful tool to smash sales targets. 

And if keeping up with your millennial consumers on your ecommerce site’s live chat is proving a challenge, there’s AI. Advances in artificial intelligence mean chatbots are now more capable of dealing with a wider range of queries. 

Top tip

Back up your live chat function with a chatbot to handle basic queries and give response times. Promote this service by dropping a link into your email marketing.

12. Shopify trends

According to Shopify, 50 percent of consumers want to move away from big retailers and marketplaces. They are ready to support smaller ecommerce brands and D2C retailers. 

Top tip

Seize this golden opportunity to help customers feel good about their spending. Match the big hitters on convenient perks like free delivery and returns and speedy shipping. Check out our selection of the best Shopify apps that will help you level up your store.

Final tips on ecommerce trends

There’s a lot to gain in the ecommerce space right now. As we emerge from the pandemic, leverage ecommerce trends to 

• Appeal to consumers looking for a new way to shop
• Make new and returning customers feel valued 
• Improve the ease and convenience of their buying experience 

As you develop your offering, use your newsletter to promote new products and services and build relationships with your customer community.

For more content like this, sign up for our monthly marketing tips newsletter and follow us on Twitter.

The post 12 Ecommerce Trends You Should Know About in 2022 appeared first on Sendinblue.

But for most ecommerce businesses, customer loyalty is key to stable revenue. And one of the most cost-effective ways to drive repeat orders from existing customers is through continuous post-purchase engagement. 

What is a Post-Purchase Email?

Post-purchase emails are an extension of ecommerce marketing. They’re follow-ups, sent after the customer’s received their order (so they’re not transactional emails).

Their purpose is to keep people thinking about the brand through ecommerce content marketing and new offers. The best thing is that after the customer has bought something from you, you have data. You can use their buying behavior, product interest, etc. to tailor your emails and make them more relevant. 

This is a very different approach from simply sending just one massive promotion to all contacts on your email list. 

Most of the best customer retention strategies rely on targeted and customized post-purchase emails. And although the open rate is not as high as that of order confirmation emails, adding value helps build a mutually beneficial relationship with the customer. 

But if they’re just promotional and pushy, people will stop opening and you’ll lose repeat customers.

Examples of Post-Purchase Email Campaigns

You can send different post-purchase campaigns depending on your products, customer lifecycle, and buying habits. Here are 12 ideas for you:

1. Product usage and maintenance tips
2. Coupon for a discount on next order
3. Offer to fight browse abandonment 
4. Reorder reminders for complementary products
5. Save the churners
6. VIP offers for long-term customers
7. Repeat successful campaigns
8. Post-purchase engagement through content
9. Ask for product review 
10. Promote an updated product
11. Tailored offers
12. Timely push

Let’s take a look at each type of email driving retention.

1. Usage and maintenance tips

The post-purchase experience is just as important as the conversion. 

If we want repeat purchases, the customers should enjoy their new items. Content-heavy post-purchase emails are great to explain more about the product, how to best use it and how to take care of it.

This will make people use your product more and will increase customer satisfaction in the long run. So when they need something else, they’ll come to you for a second purchase.

You can easily tailor this kind of email campaign by product ordered and take engagement on a more personalized level. 

Lily & Roo use Sendinblue to send this fabulous post-purchase email with tips about caring for your newly purchased jewelry.

2. Next order discount

Upsells are proven post-purchase emails that drive repeat orders. Offering specific items in an upsell email can get very inaccurate and presumptuous, though.

Instead, give customers a discount code for their next purchase with the call-to-action to add an accessory to the clothing item they just bought, for example.

You can make the coupon category-specific if you want to emphasize the connection between the products. It’s also a good way of pushing a category that doesn’t get enough attention on its own.

Source for this all other unidentified otherwise examples to follow: Really Good Emails

3. An offer to fight browse abandonment 

You can fight browse abandonment — this is when people browse your site but don’t buy anything. Reach out to them via an email and give them an incentive to go through with an order.

The beauty of this winback email is that the viewed product(s) would be included in the email so the customer remembers easily.

Also, since this is still a post-purchase email, with a CRM like Sendinblue you have a track record of the customer’s behavior on site for all their visits.

To weed out casual browsers, only send a special offer to those who have looked at the products and left a few times.

4. Reorder reminder for complementary products

Replenishment reminders are the post-purchase emails every ecommerce brand should use if the products make sense to be reordered (sorry, baby strollers and bridal gowns!).

Identify how often people shop in your store to time your emails for when they’ll be ready to buy again. This tactic can work with anything from pet food and personal care to socks and home supplies.

However, if you sell something like shoes or plants, you can still do it with a mix between cross-selling and reorder campaigns. Your main product may be a one-time order, but the accessories are not.

It’s a golden opportunity to use post-purchase emails to keep customers coming back.

Think of complementary products you can offer:

• Shoe cleaning products
• Garment care (storage bags, special hangers, etc.)
• Coffee/tea/water filters 
• Spice mixes
• Cleaning materials
• Plant care products

5. Save the churners

There’ll always be customers ready to churn. To avoid it, look at others who are buying a lot and often. Their customer journey is worth replicating. What products do they buy? This is a huge part of why they’re happy repeat customers.

This post-purchase tactic aims to create more customer loyalty. It exposes more people to the products in your store that stimulate the most repeat orders. This increases the likelihood that more buyers will become loyal.

Chef Market sends this re-engagement email with Sendinblue in order to hook people back with best-selling products.

6. VIP offers for long-term customers

Even without an official loyalty program, you can reward your repeat customers. Simply use post-purchase emails to give them better and better deals, special promotions and VIP perks. Make them see the benefits of sticking with your brand.

For example:

• When a VIP customer leaves your website because their size is out of stock (you know what size they usually shop), find it for them and email them.
• Give tiered discounts, growing proportionally with their customer lifetime value (more about lead scoring here).
• Send limited-time free shipping offers.
• Give them an exciting unboxing experience with freebies and branded merch.

GAIAS sent a special offer to loyal customers: early access to a great deal. Email created with Sendinblue.

7. Repeat successful campaigns

If you’re unsure what kind of email campaign to send out, look in your email reports – which type of campaign performed very well? Was it a clearance at 70% off or the curated selection by an influencer?

Then, recreate the same campaign for those who converted in it the first time, only with different products. If they like this type of campaign, send more of the same.

8. Post-purchase engagement through content

Your customers might get weary of too many promotional emails. Change things up a bit with a pure content email sequence without any sales CTAs. Branded content emails help connect with your customers over shared values.

Share any company updates that might be interesting like working on new materials or starting a new partnership. These customer engagement efforts are perfect for when you want to stay top-of-mind but have to wait a bit for the next order.

NO GUNK sends styling tips to its subscribers for engagement and to drive additional demand for its products. Via Sendinblue

9. Ask for product review

The most logical post-purchase email to send is a review request email. Any ecommerce business can benefit from improving its product based on customer feedback.

The more involved with something people are, the more loyal they are to it. Feedback is a wonderful customer engagement tactic to build trust. You can involve your brand’s following in the product creation process so they see it as their own – and shop it more.

Ask your customers what new variants and colors they want to see. Ask them for new product ideas, even. Their suggestions might surprise you but it’s an honest look into what they need and want your products to be.

Personalised Chopping Boards uses Sendinblue to ask its customers for feedback as soon as their order arrives.

Emails that don’t sell directly are the best at driving long-term loyalty.

And if you go ahead and actually realize those ideas….

10. Promote an updated product

Maybe your product changes from season to season, or you keep adding functionality or new add-ons. These are great for follow-up engagement and driving repeat sales.

You know what type of products people already bought, you can easily offer the new version in post-purchase email campaigns. For example, if someone bought winter gear, reach out to them for the new season and offer them the summer collection.

Or maybe you simply run limited editions. It’s important to keep your customers up-to-date about it with emails that stimulate reorders.

11. Tailored offers

If you have a wide range of products, it’s a good idea to tailor post-purchase email campaigns by product preferences. This would mean looking at what people buy and only sending them emails with relevant products.

Even better if you use an email signup form to record their preferences. You can ask about their body shape, fashion style, type of hair or skin — whatever’s relevant to your products.

Such emails will keep customers loyal because people feel your brand gets them and all offers are spot on.

For example, people who buy wooden toys probably don’t want to get offers for plastic toys. People who buy books in Italian don’t need to get emails about books in French. People shopping your petite section will be happy to get a curated selection in their email instead of plus-size items.

12. Timely push

If you don’t want your emails to be left unread or worse, marked as spam, you can reevaluate how often you email existing customers. Post-purchase engagement is effective only when people actually open your emails.

It’s one thing to use email automation that triggers on specific customer actions and another to just blast emails every Monday because “this is the best day for emails”.

Read more: 12 Triggered Email Campaigns That Drive Sales

The best day for emails is when your customers are ready to shop again. It’s closely tied to the type of product and its lifecycle. Look at your ecommerce metrics to see how often people actually shop.

This is how much time you should leave between pushy sales emails for an optimal customer experience. People need a breather and your thoughtfulness will be appreciated. 

Credit: Cloudways

Send Post-Purchase Emails with Sendinblue

Whether you’re on Shopify or another ecommerce platform, Sendinblue offers all the digital marketing tools needed to drive repeat sales. Whatever your customers do, there’s a way to make them come back with post-purchase emails.

The post Post-Purchase Emails: 12 Ways to Drive Customer Loyalty in Ecommerce appeared first on Sendinblue.

Let’s explore what information an order confirmation email should provide and what the best practices are. 

What is an Order Confirmation Email?

Order confirmation emails are transactional emails sent as soon as an order is placed. They deliver the digital receipt to the customer to verify that the order went through. This means they’re strictly individual, sent in response to each customer’s order. 

Confirming an order is a basic customer service step every ecommerce business should take if it wants to be seen as serious and legitimate. If they don’t get a confirmation email, people would wonder if everything went right. And most likely, they’d keep your phone lines busy all the time. 

Luckily, it can easily be automated with a transactional email service like Sendinblue so you don’t have to worry about it.

What information order confirmation emails contain

The primary purpose of confirmation emails is to make sure the order is just as the customer wanted it to be. That’s why they usually contain order details such as:

• the products ordered;
• the sum paid (or to be paid on delivery);
• the order number;
• package tracking information;
• expected delivery date;
• customer service contacts.

Some optional elements are the shipping method, shipping address, and the payment method just to confirm one more time that they’re correct. A link to an FAQ page or customer support contact is welcome, too.

Why are confirmation emails important?

First, because the order summary shows your system’s working fine and puts the customer at ease. That’s especially important when the payment has already been made. People wouldn’t care if they didn’t get a promotional email, but care very much to see that their transaction went through correctly. 

Second, order confirmation emails can provide shipping information. That improves the customer experience because the customer knows what to expect and when. Being in the dark is frustrating so they’d appreciate your proactivity on this one. The smoother and easier the online shopping experience, the more likely people are to repeat it.

And third, those are the ecommerce emails with the highest open rate of around 64%! No promotional email or newsletter will ever get as many eyes. So they’re an excellent real estate to feature related products and try to upsell those customers. 

In short, order confirmation emails boost customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Order Confirmation Best Practices

Now that we covered the basics of receipt emails, let’s see what are the best practices and tactics to get even more results out of them. 

Say thank you

The simplest things sometimes get overlooked. Saying thanks is so logical — you’d do it if you were dealing with the customer in person at a brick-and-mortar store! After all, placing an order is the best thing they can do for you.

Time it right

Send the confirmation email immediately once the order’s completed. This way the customer will know everything worked right away. Keeping them on edge would only make the shopping experience worse.

Aim for loyalty

Confirmation emails are an essential part of a good customer experience. When they see that you do things right, provide all the information on time, and their money is safe, they’ll be more likely to shop from you again.

Work on customer satisfaction

Making the customer happy with a purchase is a long game. The buying process is one thing, but actually using and enjoying the product is even more important. 

It’s a smart idea to use the order confirmation email to get people excited about the product they’re about to receive. Send along usage tips and inspirational ideas. This will help them use the products more and better, which in turn will lead to an increase in satisfaction and repeat orders. 

Highlight a good deal

Including the order total is, of course, a good practice. But it’d be even better if you break it down to show the savings they made with the purchase. This will fight buyer’s remorse, that feeling of regret when we spend money on something we don’t need.

Brand every email

Email design is as important for transactional emails as it is for promotional ones. Order confirmation emails will definitely get opened so don’t miss the chance to reinforce brand awareness. 

Related: How to Customize WooCommerce Emails for Better Brand Recognition

Try cross-selling

Strike the iron while it’s hot, as the saying goes. If the customer’s in the mood for spending, why not try to push something extra? Feature related product recommendations to make them think, “Oh, I need that too.” You can even ship both orders together.

Another loyalty-stimulating tactic is giving a discount code for the next order. Put an expiration date on it and you’ll speed up your repeat orders. 

Promote your community

You’d want to keep customers engaged with your brand even between orders. For this purpose, you can ask them in the order confirmation email to sign up for your mailing list (if they haven’t already). Also, include links to your forum section, social media, or events and encourage them to join the conversation.

Follow up with a shipping confirmation email

You can add one more touch point to peak the customer’s excitement for delivery. Send them an order status update just to show that everything’s on track.

Ideas for Order Confirmation Email Subject Lines

This particular subject line has to be on point because people will be looking for it in their inbox. Leave puns and clickbait for promotional emails. Order confirmations are serious business. 

Some classic subject lines include:

Thanks for your order

Your [brand] receipt

Order confirmed

We received your order

You can also go for something more creative if it fits your brand voice:

We’re happy we can help you with [the problem your products solve]

We’re excited to have you try [brand] and tell us what you think! (best for first-time orders)

Your new [product] arrives in X days.

Top tactics when you’re wondering how to write email subject lines:

• Include the word “receipt”
• Personalize with customer’s name to boost open rates
• Use emojis in email
• Tease with “Forget something?” and a CTA button to keep shopping

Pro tip: Insert your ecommerce store’s name in the subject line to make it stand out. Especially during Black Friday when people shop a lot and get way too many purchase confirmation emails. This little trick will help them find you among the rest. See more Black Friday email subject line ideas. 

Order Confirmation Email Examples

Here are some of the best order confirmation emails to copy.

#Good subject line

It’s impossible to miss this one with the subject line Your Feet Say Thank You.

source: Really Good Emails

#Extra call-to-action

This order confirmation pushes signing up for SMS updates.

Find out more about SMS Marketing here.

source: Really Good Emails

#Good deal

Notice how one extra line highlighting the savings makes the purchase feel good?

source: Really Good Emails

#Referral program

This confirmation serves a triple purpose. It asks customers to refer a friend, i.e. new customer acquisition on top of loyalty and customer service.

source: Really Good Emails

#Brand colors

This order confirmation email is designed in the brand colors to reinforce the brand identity.

Pro tip: Add gifs in the email body to make it more playful and exciting.

source: Really Good Emails

#The playful opening

The top of the email gets the customer excited about their order.

source: Really Good Emails

How to Send Order Confirmation Emails with Sendinblue?

If you choose Sendinblue as your transactional email platform, you’ll be able to send all your order confirmation emails, delivery updates, account registrations, subscription double opt-ins, and so on effectively and securely.

1. Connect your ecommerce store. Sendinblue offers various ways to do that: API, SMTP, plugins. Thus, order confirmations will be sent automatically.
2. Use the order confirmation email templates available or design your own with the drag-and-drop editor. 
3. Customize with order details such as product name, price, quantity, URL, image, category, variant, order value, discount applied, tax, currency, and many more. 
4. Your emails will be made mobile-friendly by default.
5. Hit the customer’s inbox by following email deliverability best practices.
6. A shared inbox by Sendinblue can come in handy if the customer replies to the order confirmation email with an issue and your team needs to follow-up.

The post Order Confirmation Emails: Examples and Best Practices for Ecommerce appeared first on Sendinblue.

Email is still one of the most important marketing channels out there, but it’s doubly important for ecommerce businesses who need to touch base with their customers regularly about shipping information, order confirmations, and other transactional details. 

It’s the glue that holds your business together, creating an enjoyable customer experience and building trust with your buyers. 

Once put in place, your email marketing for ecommerce can help you consistently improve and grow your business over time. 

Related: What is Ecommerce Marketing?

What’s Involved in Ecommerce Email Marketing? 

An ecommerce email strategy is slightly different to a normal email strategy because you not only have the usual promotional emails, you also have your transactional emails – that’s things like order confirmations, delivery notifications, and receipts of payment. Promotional emails are used to let subscribers know about offers, share your latest product lines, and generally keep in touch with them. Neither type of email is more important than the other; instead, they should work together to create a solid strategy that both nurtures sales and meets customer needs.

A solid ecommerce email strategy takes both promotional and transactional emails into account to create a streamlined experience for customers throughout the entire customer journey.
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The difference between promotional and transactional emails 

Promotional emails (sometimes called email newsletters) are pre-planned campaigns that go out to your email subscribers. These are people who have opted in to receive emails from you via a signup form.

There are two integral parts to a promotional email campaign:

1. An opt-in form so you can collect email addresses;
2. The actual email marketing campaigns that you send to your subscribers.

Bobby & Dandy’s antique store invites visitors to their site to sign up to their email list.

Promotional emails are a way for retailers to keep in touch with existing customers outside of their purchases. You can use them to share discounts, launch your latest product lines, and share stories about your business to build deeper customer relationships. 

Transactional emails are a little more rigid. 

They are emails that are automatically sent following a transaction on your ecommerce website, regardless of whether the recipient is an email subscriber or not. These emails are essential for maintaining customer relationships as buyers expect to receive a notification when they’ve purchased online. Transactional emails also enjoy a higher open rate because they contain vital order information.

Why transactional emails are so important

Imagine you’ve just spent a weeks’ worth of wages on a pair of shoes. You’ve handed over your card details and clicked the big “buy now” button, and then… crickets. You don’t get a confirmation email. You don’t even get redirected to a “thanks!” page. 

You’d start to panic, right? Have they taken the money? Did they receive your order? What happens next?

Transactional emails relieve these worries that online buyers inevitably have (after all, it can be scary making a purchase online). They inform new customers about their order at every step of the journey, from confirmation of payment, to dispatch information and delivery details. 

Emails such as these are often sent using a separate sender and email IP address to promotional emails because it’s really important they land in the recipient’s inbox and not their Spam or Promotions folder. Here’s a really in-depth guide to transactional emails that’ll answer your questions about what exactly they include and why they’re so essential.

An example of an order confirmation email sent by Blue Bottle Coffee (source).

Our No.1 Ecommerce Email Marketing Tip: Choose an email marketing service that caters for both promotional and transactional emails.

Trying to manage your promotional and transactional emails separately can be a real headache, especially if you’re using different platforms for each one. You might be forced to use different designs, losing the consistent branding of your emails.

You can make your ecommerce email marketing far more cohesive by choosing an ecommerce email marketing software that lets you set up and manage both your promotional and transactional email campaigns from the same place. 

Sendinblue lets you do exactly this. With a collection of handy ecommerce email plugins that integrate with most ecommerce platforms, you can build a strategy that is easy to manage and better serves your customers. 

How to Create a Promotional Email Strategy

We spoke about the two key parts of an ecommerce email strategy before: your signup form and your emails. These are the elements that will, first of all, get potential customers onto your email list and then, secondly, allow you to interact with them.

Just keep in mind that GDPR is very important for your European clients and if they unsubscribe from your emails, you should respect that and stop emailing them. More info here.

Step 1: Create a signup form 

Start by creating an email signup form – most email marketing services provide this option, which you can customize to reflect your branding and add in specific text boxes. You can even edit the button text so that it doesn’t just say “subscribe” (because that’s not very enticing at all). 

Once you’ve designed your signup form, place it in visible spots around your ecommerce site. Popular locations include:

• Somewhere on your homepage
• In the sidebar
• In the footer of your website
• On product pages 
• On its own dedicated signup page
• At the bottom of blog posts or news articles 
• In a pop-up on any of the pages above

Highland Chocolatier has various forms around their site where visitors can subscribe to the mailing list. 

Step 2: Design email templates

Next, pre-design your email templates so you can quickly send emails as and when you want to. This means you won’t have to design your emails from scratch every time and can instead choose a template to work from.

Design email templates that use your brand logo and colors that can be used for different campaigns as well as your newsletter. 

Most email services like Sendinblue have customizable templates or drag and drop email editors so you don’t have to have any coding skills to get started. You can also download templates from one of the many free email template sources.

Top Tips for a Successful Ecommerce Email Marketing Campaigns

Create a welcome sequence

A welcome email sequence automatically gets sent to new subscribers when they sign up. It’s a series of emails that thank people for signing up, introduces them to your business, and outlines what they can expect from your emails.

You can include links to your social media and a CTA to follow you to encourage click-through and engagement.

Bakerista sends out a welcome email to new subscribers. 

Automate emails at key touchpoints

Email automation is a lifesaver for busy ecommerce businesses. You can use your email service to send triggered emails when a customer takes (or doesn’t take) a specific action. Because it’s so timely and relevant, marketing automation scores the best conversion rate among ecommerce email marketing tactics.

For example, you can set up abandoned cart emails to go out when someone leaves your site without buying. Or you can send an automated winback email after a customer hasn’t ordered anything for a set period of time you’d expect them to. Yet another idea is to send a VIP discount as a thank you when someone goes above a certain lifetime value.

You can do all this by installing the Sendinblue Tracker, which sends automated emails triggered by certain events on your site. 

Choose the right email frequency

How often will you keep in touch with your customers? You ideally want to find the balance between staying fresh in their minds and not showing up too often so that it’s annoying. 

You might choose to send out a weekly newsletter, or you might decide to only email your subscribers when you run promotions or launch new products. A/B testing can help you decide based on the reaction of your recipients. 

These aren’t the only types of email you can send. Try experimenting by sending reviews, customer stories, or sneak peeks behind-the-scenes. Content marketing will spice up your routine emails and get more people to read them.

Plan ahead 

Email marketing for ecommerce that gets results is planned well in advance. Mapping out key emails ahead of time means you won’t end up scrabbling around trying to come up with something to send each week. 

It really helps to jot down any seasonal events and promotions that are coming up, as well as new launches you have on the horizon so you can create campaigns for these in advance. 

Segment your list

Segmenting your list is among email marketing best practices. For example, if your ecommerce store sells wine and cheese, you might have customers that are only interested in cheese and therefore get turned off when you send emails about wine. 

Avoid turning off customers by creating lists of subscribers based on certain actions they’ve taken (like whether they’ve bought multiple products multiple times from you) or who like certain product lines. You can then send personalized emails that cater to their specific interests and needs. Your product recommendations would be much better targeted and you’re likely to get more repeat customers. 

How to Create a Strategy for Transactional Emails 

Your transactional email strategy might take a little longer to set up than your promotional email strategy, but once it’s set up it’s ready to go time and time again. 

Step 1: Use a dedicated service

By trying to run your transactional ecommerce email strategy without the help of a dedicated email service provider you’re giving yourself far more work than you need to. You can always use the features available through the ecommerce platform your online store is hosted on, but the options on these can be very limited. 

Instead, a specialist transactional email service like Sendinblue lets you track real-time analytics to make sure your emails are getting delivered and do optimization as needed. You can also personalize your email templates so they’re on-brand and create a great, consistent customer experience. 

Step 2: Connect an email plugin to your ecommerce platform

Plugins are great tools for non-techies. It’s a way to access the functionalities of an email service directly through your ecommerce platform and synchronize the two systems (particularly handy for managing your ecommerce email contacts).

Sendinblue has an email plugin available for most of the best known ecommerce platforms: WooCommerce, Wix, Shopify, Shopware, Magento, Prestashop, NopCommerce, and more. Check out the full list of Sendinblue email plugins for ecommerce.

To send transactional emails, you’ll need to use Sendinblue’s SMTP service.

From here, you’ll be able to synchronize orders, install the Sendinblue Tracker to trigger touchpoint-sensitive emails, and set up your transactional emails.

Top Tips for a Successful Transactional Email Strategy

Customize your emails 

It’s a nice touch to use your brand colors, logo, and images of your products or brand in your transactional emails to make customers feel comfortable and ensure they remember you. 

Upsell and cross-sell 

Although the main aim of a transactional email is to pass information to your customers, you can still leverage them to increase sales. Upselling and cross-selling are common tactics in order confirmation emails or receipt of delivery emails. 

For example, if someone has just bought a bouquet of flowers from you, they might need a vase to go with it. So why not suggest that to them? 

Or if they’ve just bought a wheel of cheese, why not recommend your signature cheeseboard and cheese knife to go with it? A simple next-order discount coupon might make them come back sooner than expected.

Teespring shows other items customers bought in an attempt to upsell. 

Personalize your email copy

Make it feel like you’re having a one-to-one conversation with customers by using their name in the email and adding in a dash of your businesses’ personality. Even your subject lines can be more customized to match the recipient’s interest, products bought, or just name. This can increase brand trust and help build deeper customer connections. 

To learn more about personalizing your content, take a look at this article on newsletter best practices. (Tip #6 tells you how to offer your readers something unique.)

Offer referral incentives

If someone has just made a purchase with you, there’s a very high chance that they like your store and what you’re selling. Leverage this by encouraging them to share it with their friends and family for a little reward – maybe offer them 10% off their next order, or throw in a small freebie with their purchase. 

ZooShoo gives customers $10 in credit if they refer a friend. 

Consider the opportunities with every email 

Your transactional emails are prime real estate because you know they’re going to end up in your customer’s inbox (unlike your promotional emails, which might accidentally sneak into Spam or Promotions folders). 

Use this opportunity to encourage customer reviews, get feedback from buyers, and remind them of other products you have available. 

Escape Entertainment encourage their customers to leave reviews. 

Start Planning Your Ecommerce Email Marketing Now 

Your email marketing strategy is the key to staying connected with customers and ensuring they have a great experience with your business. If they do, they’re far more likely to come back and become loyal customers that buy again and again.

Get started on your ecommerce email strategy now to creative effective promotional and transactional email campaigns that get more sales and build your business.  

Enjoyed this post? Check out our other ecommerce content:

• 12 Ecommerce Trends You Should Know About in 2021
• What is Ecommerce Marketing? 10 Strategies to Get Started in 2021

The post The Complete Guide to Ecommerce Email Marketing appeared first on Sendinblue.

We know it’s hard to decide what online business metrics to monitor, especially if you’re at the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey. That’s why we compiled this short guide to the most important ecommerce metrics to start with.

Which Ecommerce Metrics to Track?

Revenue and sales, you’d say. That’s right, of course, but those two metrics don’t say much about how your business is actually doing and what its financial health is. 

You can be selling a lot without making any profit. Or you could be getting thousands of new customers a day at an excruciating price. Or maybe those thousands of people never come back to shop for more. In all of these cases, you’d have good revenue and a high number of sales figures, but unstable business. 

That’s why every online store should measure and track the following key performance indicators (KPIs) to make sure all’s running smoothly beneath the surface:

1. Conversion rate
2. Customer acquisition cost
3. Average order value
4. Average profit margin
5. Cart abandonment rate
6. Customer lifetime value
7. Retention rate and share of repeat customers
8. Refund and return rate
9. Best performing products and categories
10. Email performance metrics
11.  A note on vanity metrics: social media engagement, website traffic, and pageviews

Now let’s dive into the details.

Ecommerce Metrics to Start With

The key ecommerce metrics listed below will give you the overall picture of your business performance. Checking them every day or weekly (depending on your order volume) should be enough to catch potential problems.

1. Conversion Rate

Probably the most important among all ecommerce metrics. Conversion rate is calculated by the this formula:

CR = (Total number of customers / Total Unique Visitors) * 100

This is how many visitors convert into customers. One of the most common problems of ecommerce entrepreneurs is getting tons of traffic and no sales at all.

That explains why the average conversion rate for the ecommerce industry tends to be so low (only around 2.27%). 

Driving traffic to your site isn’t everything. Once people land there, they need a lot of persuading to place an order. The product and price, the experience, the payment security, and the return options should all feel right — as well as the brand, of course.

Conversion is basically how successfully you turn visitors into customers.

The process of improving this metric is called conversion rate optimization (CRO). Regularly check your sales funnel, visitor behavior on site, page views, and exit pages to identify where the problem is and hopefully fix it.

Just a few places to look are:

• navigation — use heatmaps to see if visitors find their ways around your site easily;
• buttons — do they click your calls-to-action (Shop New Collection, See deals, Read more, etc.);
• drop-off pages — where do they decide not to buy? Is it a product page or an About Us page?

In case you’re ready to start CRO now, here are 14 ecommerce conversion strategies.

In the meantime, here are a few quick fixes that’ll help you improve your conversion rate:

• Attract more qualified traffic with Facebook ads to lookalike audiences based on your best customers;
• Test out every option in your checkout process yourself;
• Optimize mobile and tablet experience;
• Use remarketing to re-engage people who looked around your site but left without buying;
• Do an SEO audit to see if you’re using the wrong wording on your product pages.

2. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

This ecommerce performance metric measures how much it costs to acquire a new customer. The general formula goes like this:

CAC = Total costs associated with acquisition / Total new customers

If your customers spend $50 on average in your online store and the cost of acquiring each one is $45, that leaves $5. From there, you pay for the goods and all other costs to get to your profit (or more likely, loss).

That’s why keeping CAC under control is vital. Every ecommerce business has a line above which it can’t pay for acquisition. The math simply won’t work out in the end. A general rule of thumb is to keep CAC under 30% of your CLV (more on that later).

When you invest money in website traffic, not all of it converts to customers and sales growth. If you want to ever make a profit, you have to optimize your acquisition channels so you only pay for quality traffic that converts at higher rates.

Sometimes, less traffic with higher conversion rate is more profitable than huge traffic that barely converts.

Make informed spending decisions

Analyze all your acquisition channels – social media, ads, review sites, referrals, etc. – to evaluate which ones really make the difference for your business. Spending your marketing budget in the right places means you’ll be paying only as much as you can afford for acquisition.

Make sure you know what’s the maximum cost for acquisition you can afford. Otherwise, you might actually be losing money in the effort to bring in new customers.

Also, remember to segment costs by location. Prices are different for Europe, North America, and the rest of the world.

3. Average Order Value (AOV)

CAC brings us to this next ecommerce metric. Average order value is what it sounds like: the average amount a customer spends on each order from your store.

You can easily increase your total revenue by increasing the average order value, even with no new traffic. A bigger order costs you only a fraction more for goods, handling, and shipping. But it saves you acquisition and transactional costs. So in the end, higher average order value means more profit.

So why is it one of the most important ecommerce KPIs?

Because it’s an insight into how mad about your products people are. What’s the biggest order you’ve ever got? Imagine if your average order value was that much.

Some ways to increase AOV include:

• offering bundles/ mix & match/ 3-month supply of products;
• selling add-ons or services;
• implementing loyalty programs;
• giving free shipping for orders above the AOV;
• checking which marketing channels bring you higher AOV and double-down on them.

source

4. Average Profit Margin

This is what you earn from each product after deducting what you paid for supplying it. It’s calculated as a percentage of the retail price and shows what portion of it your profit is.

Profit margin = [(Selling price – Cost of goods) / Selling price] * 100

You may be selling tons, but are you making any profit? Try to keep it higher than the average acquisition cost if you want to have a sustainable online business.

It’s completely normal to have high-performing products that earn you a sweet margin and others that barely make you anything. 

What can you do about it? As the formula suggests, the profit margin increases when the price goes up and the cost of goods sold goes down. 

• Create product bundles of one product that attracts many people and another that has a very good margin to balance it out.
• Highlight your most profitable products in all campaigns, visuals, etc. to sell more of them.
• When adding new products, go for high-margin ones.
• Do more referral campaigns and user-generated content instead of discounting so people don’t get used to reduced prices.
• Increase the price but include add-ons, accessories, maintenance, etc. 

A referral campaign that gets you new customers without a big budget, source

5. Cart Abandonment Rate

On average, 70% of people abandon their shopping cart online. That’s scary for any ecommerce business. Your shopping cart abandonment rate is how much sales you’re losing.

The top reasons for visitors leaving are:

• unexpected shipping costs;
• hidden fees that can only be seen at checkout;
• registration needed;
• people are “just browsing” or screen shopping;
• checkout is not safe enough or too complicated;
• no free shipping requirements met;
• estimated delivery not fast enough;
• not many payment options.

All of those can be solved to reduce your cart abandonment rate. And if someone still starts checking out and leaves, here’s a collection of abandoned cart email examples to use and get them back.

See also:

• WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Strategies to Recover More Orders
• How to Send a Shopify Abandoned Cart Email That Actually Works 

6. Customer Lifetime Value

Customer lifetime value (CLTV, CLV, LTV) deserves its place on the list of the most important ecommerce metrics. It measures how much any given customer spends with your online shop throughout their customer lifecycle. There are three ways to calculate it depending on the stage of your business and the data you have so far.

1. Predictive

CLV = Average Order Value x Number of Orders

2. Averaging

CLV = Total Revenue / Total Number of Customers

3. Historical

CLV = Order 1 + Order 2 + …..

Customer lifetime value is important because it shows customer loyalty. The more people shop from you, the better, obviously. 

It also helps you turn a profit. How? 

Well, you’re paying some acquisition cost anyway to get the first order. Every order after that comes on top and makes up for that investment. 

Focusing on driving CLV instead of acquisition can save your marketing budget and make your ecommerce store more financially stable in the long run.

It’s very hard to set a benchmark because it’d vary greatly across categories, currencies, and markets. Still, a global report on ecommerce brands found an average CLTV of 168 U.S. dollars.

To increase CLV, you need to increase the average order value, increase the order frequency, or increase the customer lifecycle. Or better yet, do all three. Here are a few tactics to get there:

• Suggest related products on product pages.
• Create very specific product categories to help people shop by purpose (e.g. Home Office Accessories, Wedding Guest Dresses).
• Give out freebies or samples with larger orders.
• Offer free returns for risk-free shopping.
• Implement back-in-stock alerts.
• Instead of a few big campaigns to your entire email list, segment your customers into smaller subgroups and send them various, well-targeted offers.
• Give full product details to minimize returns.
• Provide quality customer service and learn from feedback.

An email targeting people in a specific location, source

If you want a successful online shop, driving CLV up should be on your to-do list. Identify your high-value customers and examine their customer journey. Then, try to replicate it for other potential customers. Look at how they discovered you, what incentives converted, what products make them come back again.

Pro tip: Treat especially well your highest-CLV customers. First, because you want to keep them. And second, because they can be brand ambassadors and bring you more loyal clients. 

7. Customer Retention Rate

Customer retention rate is the share of repeat customers (with more than one order) out of all your shoppers. A simple formula for calculating it is:

CRR = (Number of customers with more than 1 order / Total Customers ) * 100

Not surprisingly, it’s measured over a longer period of time.

Returning customers are far more profitable than acquiring new ones. The acquisition isn’t cheap but  returning customers will pay off their acquisition cost several times over.

How can you influence it? You’re not done after the first sale.

• Follow up on customer’s satisfaction (consider using Net Promoter Score to measure it).
• Hook them for more repeat purchases with a loyalty program, maintenance, accessories, or personal expert advice.
• Send reactivation emails to one-time shoppers and create a newsletter to keep everyone engaged with your brand. 
• Send reminder emails when the customer is about to run out of the product (if applicable);
• Give discounts for the next order.

A creative reactivation email, source

8. Refund and Return Rates

These are actually very important ecommerce metrics, especially for smaller brands. They’re the percentage of orders refunded or returned respectively, compared to the total number of orders. Keeping them in check helps you see the big picture and catch potential revenue sinkholes. 

Sometimes problems happen and products need to be returned. Not surprisingly, the return rate is highest in fashion ecommerce. 

While accepting returns is a must, a high return rate means problems with product quality, customer satisfaction, or lead quality. Returns are costly because they take up twice the time for processing. 

Refunds are even worse because they usually mean the customer’s unhappy. So in addition to reducing your revenue, they might rant about your brand on social media. You can forget about them referring a friend to you.

How to minimize returns

First, make sure your customers see and understand what they’re buying and what’s the quality. This includes:

• HD photos of the product from different angles, in use, and in perspective (compared to human height, for example);
• materials used described in the product details;
• exact measurements of models and what size of clothing they’re wearing in the picture. 

Second, ship what you market – there’s barely anything more frustrating than receiving a product of worse quality than you paid for. We’ve all seen and laughed at the comic photos of clothes that look nothing like the picture on the site.

Source

Third, follow up on customers who return purchases and try to improve.

Finally, be careful with serial returners. As bad as it sounds, there are people who wear clothing items once and return them for a full refund.

You can even drill down into the common things among all returns and refunds to eliminate the biggest reasons. If they come from one location, maybe your shipping carrier doesn’t deliver the items in good condition. 

Or maybe your site has misleading info in the local language. If one product gets returned or refunded all the time, maybe the quality is very bad and you should just delist it.

9. Best Performing Products and Categories

While this is not one number, conversion rate, return rate, abandoned cart rate, and other ecommerce metrics vary across products and categories.

Some products sell more per view, but maybe you don’t advertise them on your homepage. This means they don’t get enough exposure and sales as a result. You’re losing potential revenue.

Try to look at all of the above-mentioned metrics at least by category, if not by product. Keep your eyes open for the following possibilities:

• items driving repeat sales;
• products that get ordered instead of your traffic-driving ones;
• products that get ordered in bigger quantities;
• products that get abandoned a lot;
• products that get only good/ bad reviews;
• products mostly ordered together.

This way, you can optimize your inventory, product pages, and all merchandising expenses.

Push the products with the best performance, source

10. Email Performance Metrics

Email is a huge part of ecommerce marketing and so it also needs to be measured. There’s no point in sending email campaigns one after another if you don’t improve them. 

The major email marketing metrics are:

• Open rate
• Click-through rate
• Unsubscribe rate
• Bounce rate

Here are current email marketing benchmarks to compare yourself to.

We’d add click heat maps (which links in the email get clicked) and geolocation of the recipients who clicked. These are big insights into how people interact with your email campaigns to use for optimization. 

For example, maybe people from a particular country sign up for your newsletters and click your offers a lot, but you don’t deliver to them? Maybe it’s time you started!

11. The Ecommerce Metrics That Matter

You’re probably wondering why traffic, social media engagement, and pageviews are not among the important ecommerce metrics to measure. After all, the more people visit your site, the more sales you’ll make, right?

Not entirely true.

Those are called vanity metrics. They’re too top-of-funnel to really give you meaningful information. 

Anyone could be visiting your website  — a qualified lead or not. A competitor, someone looking for a job, or a marketer looking for cool websites to feature (we’re definitely guilty of this last one!). Those people won’t buy anything, unfortunately. 

Also, increasing your traffic doesn’t necessarily translate into more sales. It has to be the right traffic, meaning more people from your target audience entering the funnel. Getting anyone who’s not interested in your products to just visit your ecommerce website is a waste of time and money.

Social media engagement is misleading, too. Yes, it does help brand awareness and drives traffic, but likes are not a good measure of real interest. Click-through rate and conversions coming from this specific channel are.

Ecommerce Metrics for Success

Tracking your performance and progress is essential in a dynamic industry like ecommerce. There’s something new every day and you need to know how you’re doing, as well as what your business’ limitations are, in order to compete.

We recommend starting monitoring those ecommerce metrics and adding more detailed analyses as you grow. 

The post 11 Ecommerce Metrics You Need to Track (#6 is Crucial) appeared first on Sendinblue.

The problem is, WooCommerce doesn’t have a built-in feature that lets you send abandoned cart recovery emails right away. Given that 23% of all ecommerce shops worldwide are on WooCommerce, it’s a mystery why the platform doesn’t provide such an option. 

In any case, you’ll need to add an email marketing plugin. Let’s go over your options and the best practices for sending abandoned cart emails on WooCommerce.

Why Recovering Abandoned Carts on WooCommerce is Essential

69.8% of shopping carts end up abandoned. That’s close to 70% of sales that could’ve happened but didn’t. 

So the average online store gets only about a third of the sales that it could’ve had. Can you imagine what your business would look like if you managed to plug the money-leaking hole called cart abandonment?

Even if you don’t do any other kind of ecommerce email marketing, just setting up WooCommerce abandoned cart emails could double or triple your sales. It’s the simplest, most effective campaign you can run.

The Cart Recovery Process

How do you actually recover abandoned carts on WooCommerce? Here’s what should happen.

First, connect your store to an email service that has the capability to track abandoned carts. Again, WooCommerce doesn’t do this for you. Then, enable this plugin to sync with your WooCommerce admin, track carts, and send email.

Then, set up signup forms to gather email addresses. At the checkout page, add a checkbox asking people to agree to marketing emails so you can legally send them promotional emails. 

Add signup forms to other pages as well to get visitors who haven’t purchased anything yet to register. This way, you’ll have their email if they abandon their cart even before placing their first order.

Next comes setting up the abandoned cart recovery. It can be one email, a series of emails, or a multi-channel campaign with both email and SMS. Essentially, it’s a marketing automation sequence that should trigger when a cart gets abandoned. 

You choose the delay (how long to wait) and what to say in order to make people come back. Don’t forget an exit rule — the campaign should stop if the order is completed.

Top Strategies for WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Emails

While shoppers understand and expect abandoned cart emails, there are certain best practices that guarantee a maximum number of orders recovered.

• Stimulate account creation (registration) with exit intent popups or newsletter signups even before the first order. This way, you’ll be able to identify registered users by their email addresses later when they abandon their cart. Unfortunately, you can’t recover the carts of guest users.

• Put signup forms on product pages to get potential customers with higher purchase intent to subscribe even if they don’t buy anything there and then..

• Use live chat to answer questions in real time and convert customers, mimicking brick-and-mortar sales assistants. A chat popup on the cart page might get people talking and buying more.

• Offer a wishlist option. People will be able to save their items of interest for later without having to add to cart anything and skewing your cart abandonment rate.

• Enable WooCommerce guest checkout so it’s easier for customers to complete an order. You’d still get their email address at the end for shipping updates so you can ask for their consent to marketing emails as well (don’t forget GDPR!).

• Combine email and SMS abandoned cart reminders in a marketing automation workflow to change things up.

• Include related product recommendations in cart recovery emails. This way, hesitant shoppers might complete the order with something else that catches their eye.

• Use creative subject lines to get opens because there’s little use for a WooCommerce abandoned cart email that doesn’t get opened.

• Use eye-catching templates so your brand stands out and people trust the links back to the store.

• Spice up your CTA with words other than buy, order, and check out because they might sound too salesy. Try Back to my cart or Take another look.

• Hold off discounts until the follow-up to try and save your profit margins. Only if the customer doesn’t convert after the first abandoned cart reminder, give them coupon codes to motivate them further.

• Don’t overdo it so as not to alienate your customers and make them unsubscribe.

WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Recovery with Sendinblue

Sendinblue offers the full-range of email marketing capabilities: transactional, personalized, automated, newsletter, and one-off emails. It’s more than just a cart recovery plugin, but you can use it as such for your WooCommerce store. There’s a free version available to small ecommerce businesses just getting started. 

Here’s how to set up WooCommerce abandoned cart automation in Sendinblue so you don’t lose sales.

1. Download and install the Sendinblue’s Abandoned Cart Plugin for WooCommerce. 
2. Make sure you turn tracking on from the WooCommerce admin (image above). This will allow Sendinblue to track your customers’ activity and catch the cart abandonment event.
3. Your customer and order data will be synced.
4. Design your abandoned cart email in Sendinblue. Go to Automation >> Email Templates and choose the “New Template” button in the top right. Here’s a more detailed guide to this step. There are also ready email templates available in the Template Gallery for you to use if you wish.
5. Add dynamic personalization to the email template. This is done with special tags that show individual information to each recipient of the automated message. People only see their abandoned cart details and the cart link takes them back directly. You can customize for SKU, variant, price, category, quantity, image, cart value, discount, shipping cost, etc. 
6. Create your WooCommerce abandoned cart automation flow. From the Automation tab in Sendinblue, choose “Create a workflow”. There’s a ready-made workflow template you can use — “Abandoned Cart”. Click “Create” to start customizing it. Here’s more information.
7. Choose how long after the customer abandons the cart the email should trigger. We recommend a first touch within a few hours on the same day. 
8. Then, choose to load the email template you created in step 4-5.
9. The ready-made workflow has the exit and restart conditions in place so just follow the on-screen prompts.
10. When you’re happy with the sequence you created, hit “Activate the workflow”.
11. If you want to add another step to your WooCommerce abandoned cart workflow, click the plus sign. You’ll see this screen:

You can add some or all of these steps to your workflow:

• Add an SMS as a follow-up to the abandoned cart email. Input the text directly into the window.
• Send another email with a different message. Create the template just like the other one, name it so you can find it easily, and load it on this step. This email can offer a discount if the first one doesn’t.
• Or start another workflow. For example, you might want to educate your cart abandoners about your brand values or new products. So if they don’t react to your cart recovery attempts, get them started on another flow with content and new product suggestions to try and convert them. You’ll have to create that workflow separately and load it in the window here.

Timing Your Abandoned Cart Emails

Timing is very important for recovering WooCommerce abandoned carts. If you miss the window of opportunity, the customer would go to a competitor. If you flood them with too many emails too soon, they might get creeped out and unsubscribe from your marketing.

We recommend the following sequence:

1. A quick reminder without discount 2 to 5 hours after abandonment;
2. A follow-up email or a SMS with free shipping 24 hours later;
3. A last try offering related products and a discount on a category, for example (because the specific product might be out of stock already) two days later.

Examples of WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Emails

Recovering abandoned carts is a pretty standard procedure.You might even feel such campaigns are boring and lack imagination. But let’s look at some examples of WooCommerce abandoned cart emails that are anything but!

#Funny

LOFT and Adidas both use humor in their copy to catch the attention of the recipient. 

source

source

#True to brand

Adidas aligns its message with its brand voice perfectly.

source

#Incentivizing

Banana Republic packs its cart reminder emails with free shipping, urgency, and a price drop to make people complete their order.

source

#Adding more options

WORX suggests related products to choose from in case the customer is not interested in the abandoned one anymore.

source: Really Good Emails

#Talking about values

The Sunday Collective tries to convince the cart abandoner by restating their brand values.

source: Really Good Emails

The post WooCommerce Abandoned Cart Email Strategies to Recover More Orders appeared first on Sendinblue.