7 tips to create a successful email campaign for your e-commerce store

Like any other marketing activity, creating a successful email campaign for an e-commerce store requires a combination of strategy, tactics, and execution. Sending a random one off email ‘newsletter’ to your entire audience every now and then is not a good plan, and can do more harm than good.  

Not to worry.  Help is at hand.  

Here are 7 key steps you need to take to create successful email campaign that drives sales and customer engagement:

Define the goals for your email marketing campaign (what does success look like) 

Before you start sending emails, it’s essential to know what you want to achieve. Are you looking to drive sales, increase customer engagement, or promote a specific product or service? Clearly defining your goals will help you create a more focused and successful email campaign.

Build your email list (although we prefer to use the term ‘audience’) 

Your email list (email audience) is the foundation of your campaign. To build a strong list (audience), you’ll need to focus on acquiring new subscribers, segmenting your list to target specific groups of customers, and keeping your list clean and up-to-date.

Clean and up-to-date means removing people that no longer engage. Don’t feat it. Cut them out. Failure to do so will reduce the chances of creating a successful email campaign.

Create compelling content (people will want to read)

The content of your emails is crucial to their success. To create compelling content, you’ll need to focus on providing value to your customers, using a clear and consistent brand voice, and making it easy for customers to take action.

As a rule, we find that email content is often too long. Remember unless you are using email to publish content, emails tend to be directional in nature.

Hi (your name),

We think you’ll like this.

Here’s why.

Here’s how you can buy it.

And this is how much we love you (an offer).

Successful email campaigns don’t over complicate things. Don’t make your content too long, make your point, tell the reader what they need to do and that’s it.

Optimise your subject lines and preheaders (think mobile first) 

Your subject line and preheader are the first thing your customers will see when they receive your email. 

To increase the chances that they’ll open your email, you’ll need to optimise these elements to be compelling, relevant, and actionable.

Remember – most email marketing is now viewed on mobile so you need to keep your subject line short and your preheader line succinct. 

What is a preheader?

A preheader is the text that you see after the sender information and the subject line in your inbox. It’s the preview line and the first thing your user will see before they open the email.

Test, measure, and optimise (against your past performance) 

Successful email campaigns are the result of continuous testing, measurement, and optimisation. Use the data you collect to make informed decisions about how to improve your campaign.

It’s worth considering testing different styles of subject lines, sending times, and content to see what works best for your audience.  

However, test with a note of caution.  We see people get stuck in a constant loop of testing rather than learning.  

So make sure you don’t disappear down a rabbit hole on this, each email campaign you send is unique.  Unique in terms of the context of the email campaign, timing, the audience and situation (external factors) in which it was sent.  A successful email campaign sent 2 weeks ago might not result in the same performance if you send it now. 

We always recommend setting a success benchmark for engagement from your email marketing campaigns.  That gives you a target to measure campaign performance, and a basepoint to learn from. 

Integrate with Social Media (kind of)

Integrating your email campaigns with social media can help to increase the visibility and impact of your campaigns. 

For example, you can use social media to drive traffic to your website, where visitors can sign up for your email list.

Just remember to give your social media audience a compelling reason to sign up for your email marketing.  Your email marketing audience is an audience that you can control and manage, whereas your social media marketing can be cut off at any time.

Don’t fear personalisation (or segmentation)

Personalised emails are more likely to be opened and acted upon than generic emails. Personalization can be as simple as using the recipient’s name in the subject line or body of the email, or as complex as tailoring the content to the recipient’s interests and purchase history.

Although this is last in the list, don’t underestimate the power of personalisation. Finding the best way to personalise your email marketing can significantly boost your email marketing campaign performance.   

Use segmentation to manage your audience based on their behaviour with your business and marketing, and use this as the basis for the context of your campaigns.  This method of personalisation is a guaranteed route to email marketing success.

Why you need to follow these tips to create a successful email campaign

Overall, creating a successful email campaign for an ecommerce store requires a combination of strategy, tactics, and execution. By following these steps, you can create a campaign that drives sales and customer engagement, while also building a stronger relationship with your customers.

Let us know how you get on, or any tips you’d like to add to this post. 

Need help boosting your email marketing success

If you need any help to boost the success of your email marketing campaigns, book some time on the calendar below. We’ve been running email campaigns for over 10 years and sent billions of emails so we can help you boost your engagement.