Email Automation for eCommerce Businesses: Building Sequences that Drive Sales

Creating a successful email automation strategy is crucial for eCommerce businesses. For most brands, email flows mark the start of a customer’s journey, so it’s important to start off on the right foot. 

A solid email journey can revolutionise your email marketing by nurturing the relationship between your business and your customers, or potential customers. If you’re unsure where to start, we’ve broken down some surefire ways to keep your audience engaged and drive sales and revenue.

Why Do We Need Email Automation?

Email automation enables businesses to send personalised messages to customers based on their actions or certain time-based triggers. For a lot of eCommerce brands, sending the right automation at the right time can be a make or break for encouraging conversions and driving repeat purchases. 

In 2023, automated emails generated 42% of email orders, and they’re a significant way to keep your email list engaged with your brand. 

The key benefits include:

• Time Efficiency: Automating email sequences saves time and ensures that customers receive timely and relevant messages.
  
  
• Personalisation: Personalising segments, whether it be through the copy or by featuring previously viewed products, is key to higher engagement and conversion rates.
  
  
• Improved Sales: Nurturing leads within your email list is crucial in pushing your audience closer to purchasing.
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• Customer Loyalty: Incorporating a well-timed post-purchase email can assist with retaining customers and encourage brand loyalty. 

Key Automated Email Sequences to Implement

To really make the most of your email automation, it’s ideal to set up different sequences that will cater to each stage of your customer’s journey. For a subscriber, automated email sequences are there to directly impact sales, retention and maintain brand loyalty. So if you don’t nail the right strategy, you could risk missing out on valuable revenue.

Welcome Series: The welcome email is the most important stage of a new subscriber’s journey. To maximise its impact, a welcome series should consist of multiple emails with staggered send times.

For example, the first email should thank the customer for joining, provide a brief introduction to your brand, and potentially offer a welcome discount or special incentive. A follow-up email can include more information about your company, such as your brand story or customer testimonials, and the final automated welcome email should promote your top products or drive urgency to purchase.

Abandoned Cart: We’ve all ghosted our carts at one point or another. In fact, almost 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned, making an abandoned cart email sequence super important for recovering a potential revenue loss.

The first of these email sequences should be sent within the first hour of being abandoned to encourage the customer to complete their purchase. If a customer is unresponsive to the first reminder, a second email automation should be sent out, preferably at least a day later, and include an incentive, such as free shipping or a promotional code. Finally, it helps to send a reminder email to use their code before it expires and create a sense of urgency.

Post-Purchase Follow-Up: Once a customer purchases from your brand, their journey doesn’t stop there. Keeping your audience engaged is key to brand loyalty. A well-crafted post-purchase email sequence can turn one-time buyers into repeat customers!

It’s important to send a confirmation and a thank-you email straight after a purchase. To keep up the momentum, a second email should be sent encouraging the customer to leave a review. To follow this, send a personalised email that features upsell items relevant to the customer. 

Personalisation and Segmentation

‍To really make the most of your email strategy, segmentation and personalisation should be at the forefront of your marketing. We’ve highlighted some tactics to maximise your email sequences: 

Personalisation

• Use Dynamic Content: Personalise emails with product recommendations based on browsing history or unique promotions based on users' favourite categories.
  
  
• Behaviour-Based Triggers: Focus on trigger-based emails, such as those that encourage visitors to visit certain product pages or add items to a cart. 

Segmentation

• Segment by Purchase History: It’s a good idea to segment your audience by purchase history. Repeat purchases and subscribers who have yet to make a purchase will not react to the same content, so it’s important to segment and tailor your creative.
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• Use Demographics and Preferences: Within your email list, you should segment your audience based on their similarities and demographics, such as gender, age, location or the preferences they’ve selected upon signing up to your mailing list.
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• Re-engage Customers: Cold audiences who haven’t reacted to your brand’s content for a while often need a nudge or an incentive to re-engage. One way to do this is to send out targeted special offers with the intention of enticing them to purchase. 

Strategies to Action in Email Sequences 

• Focus on Subject Lines: Subject lines are the very first thing your subscribers will see. If they’re not engaging enough, they’ll end up straight in the ‘trash’ folder. To make your email automation stand out, consider using urgency and personalisation (such as the recipient's name) and keeping it short and sweet to boost open rates.
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• Include a Clear Call to Action: The more cluttered and complicated the email automation, the less likely the recipient is to click through. To combat this, it’s a good idea to have concise CTAs, such as ‘Shop Now’ or ‘Claim Your 10% Off’, to make it clear for the recipient.
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• Test and Optimise: When in doubt, test and test again. By continuously monitoring the performance of your email sequences, you can adjust your approach based on open rates, click-through rates, and conversions to find out what resonates with your audience the most.
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• ‍Include Social Proofing: Before purchasing from brands, the majority of consumers will take social proofing into consideration. By including things like customer reviews, testimonials, and user-generated content, you can significantly boost engagement and build a level of trust.
  
  

Overall, the trick to a successful email automation strategy and building sequences that drive sales is to find the balance between spamming your audience with irrelevant information and simply being forgotten about. 

By keeping your brand or business at the forefront of your customers' minds, you can nurture leads, encourage purchases, and increase brand awareness. ‍

If your email marketing strategy seems to be lacking, why not get in touch to find out what our team could do for you? Our experts are well-versed in each of the global email marketing platforms (and did we mention we’re award-winning, too 😏?).

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Featured photo by orva studio on Unsplash

Banner photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash