9 Best Tips for eCommerce Email Structure

This article was last updated on October 27, 2022

Every now and again, someone comes and declares the death of email, which, frankly, is ridiculous. First of all, nothing better has come along that can replace it. Second, its ROI is a whopping 4000%, which cannot be said for any other type of marketing. Yes, it even leaves social media marketing in the dust, regardless of how popular it is these days. It is the best way to spend your marketing dollars, without a doubt. The reason why people underestimate email marketing so much is because they haven’t tackled it properly. There is a lot more to it than sending an occasional automated email to your customers and prospects.

Just like any other content, your emails need to be top-notch in order for your campaign to be effective, which is why we have put together a list of 9 essential tips on how you should put together your e-commerce emails, along with some examples. Keep on reading.

1. Your Subject Line and Preview Text Are Crucial

Don’t rush through these, because they are the first thing a potential customer sees. If your subject line and preview text are bland and generic, it will get lost in the crowd of dozens of emails an average person receives each day. It’s the equivalent of having a nice window for your shop. In order to come up with an effective subject line, distill your message into those few words, and tell your customers exactly what they will be getting. For instance, Essays.ScholarAdvisor writing service notifies its customers every time there is a discount, and they make sure that their subject line mentions a specific discount.

2. Make Use of the Holidays Email

There are plenty of holidays during the year, but you should especially focus on those which can help you make the most money. For instance, e-commerce sales during winter months make up close to 25% of total sales, and email accounts for a huge chunk of that. Now, you can give special offers, discounts, or give extra cash back, as done by iBotta for Thanksgiving:

3. Engage Your Customers Email

Engaging your customers, especially in an era where they are constantly being pitched to, is an art in itself. Now, while most users respond to free stuff or discounts, you’re not always going to be in a position to do that, unless you want to go bankrupt. However, you can still engage them with free shipping, which is exactly what Brooklinen have done:

4. Offer a Discount Email

Discounts are probably the most effective way to get customers to come back to their abandoned shopping cart or to purchase a product once they have passed on it. However, you need to strike a perfect balance between offering them often enough, so that your customers don’t go somewhere else, and not too often, not just to save money, but also to be able to create an illusion of scarcity. This is why limited-time offers, such as the one by GrubHub, work so well:

5. Remind Them about Their Abandoned Cart Email

These days, people get distracted very easily online. They might be surfing dozens of tabs, watching YouTube videos, or posting to their social media accounts. Whatever the case, you still have a chance to get them back by sending them an email regarding their abandoned shopping cart, and even throw in some humor like Dote has done:

6. Send a Curation Email

Plenty of people don’t bother too much with their shopping. They either go for what’s currently trending, cheap, or they go with the best-selling items, which they see as a sign of quality. So, why not put together an email which highlights your most popular products, or only those which are currently being sold at discount price?

7. The Cross-Sell Email

Once you have managed to score another customer, you shouldn’t stop there. Send them a follow-up email contain information about products which are complementary to the product they have purchased from you. For instance, if you have sold them a DSLR camera, send them a cross-sell email offering lenses which are on sale at your store, similar to what the Dollar Shave Club has done:

8. The Confirmation Email

You can use this type of email for several different things. You can use it to provide additional explanations for your customer after the purchase (explaining the delivery process, for example). Also, they have been shown to add little value to your overall income. Finally, you can use it as a means of boosting some of the things we have talked about above, such as engagement. For example, Chipotle also includes links to its menu and map of locations inside its confirmation email:

9. The Reactivation Email

Inevitably, you will lose some of the customers from your email list, since they will become inactive or unsubscribe. From a financial point of view, those inactive users are still costing you money, so before you remove them from your list, send them a reactivation email, and remind them about what you have to offer. This won’t always work, but at least you will know which customers to focus on. This is an example of Airnbnb’s reactivation email:

Conclusion

As you can see, email is still as effective as ever. However, in order to make the most of it, you will have to put in the effort and engage your customers during different stages of the purchase process. We hope this article helped.

About the author:

Jack White always wanted to be a writer, which is why he has worked so hard to become good at it. He knew all that his hard work would pay off one day, he just had to keep trying and not let anything or anyone get in his way. He’s a professional now and is proud of it.