In retail, we’re always hunting for new ways to make the purchase process more appealing for consumers. But let’s be honest: It’s nice to find tools and strategies that make our jobs as marketers a little easier, too!
One strategy that does the trick: integrating your email marketing with your e-commerce solutions. Whether you operate a bricks-and-mortar storefront or focus on e-commerce, a high-performing email list is one of the best weapons in your sales arsenal. Integrating with Shopify, Magento, CoreCommerce or other solutions helps retailers get better results from their email marketing by making it easier to target the right customers with the right message (which, you know, helps you sell more stuff).
Email plus e-commerce integration has many benefits, but here are three of our favorites that really help move the profit needle.
1. Smarter consumer targeting
For email marketing to deliver the best results for your brand, it needs to be targeted, relevant and timely. And to do that, you have to have access to the right data.
Building email campaigns that are integrated with e-commerce allows retailers to deliver a more personal sales experience by automatically segmenting audiences into groups based on purchase history. In other words, brands can easily find and reach high-value or recent customers without going cross-eyed from digging through all the data.
Plus, all existing Shopify or Magento customer lists seamlessly update as the customer data changes. This saves you a ton of time from manually updating your email list and makes tailoring your message for different customers a snap.
2. Better ROI tracking
As marketers, we know how important it is to be able to show real results from your email campaigns. That’s another reason why using email marketing and ecommerce together is so useful: It allows you to track purchase activity that comes directly from your emails.
For example, women’s boutique Mabel & Zora tracks the ROI of every email they send, so they can do more of what’s working and less of what’s not. The integration allows the boutique to see exactly how much revenue each email is generating and target customers with the best message based on their purchase history.
The sales data generated from each email displays right alongside the rest of Mabel & Zora’s response data—such as Mailing Score, opens and clicks—so the boutique can see the full picture of how each email performed at a glance, and in real time.
3. Easy automation of thank you and reward emails
When retailers integrate their email with e-commerce solutions they can automate the post-purchase process by setting up emails that send automatically based on a change in customer data, like number of purchases or spend.
It’s a great way to reward your most loyal customers with a special offer and keep them coming back to your store. And since it’s automated, it keeps building customer loyalty for you while you focus on other projects (or maybe just grab a snack).
Take peach purveyor The Peach Truck, for example. When the mobile produce vendor connected its email marketing to Shopify, it allowed The Peach Truck team to track purchases that result from each email. This helps them identify which customers are ordering a lot (so they can send a nice thank-you email), and which ones they haven’t heard from in awhile (so they can send a special offer) to keep them coming back for more tasty peaches.
Automated thank-you emails are great for rewarding existing customers, but the same approach works for new buyers, too. One Experian study found a “thanks for joining us” email series has a 15 times higher response rate and 21 times higher revenue per email than standard promotional emails.
And by identifying first-time purchasers through an e-commerce platform integration, you can nurture them properly with an automated welcome series that keeps them engaged and gives them the best brand experience possible.
These are just a handful of ways retailers are using email and their e-commerce software to boost engagement, traffic and sales. If you have an e-commerce platform and do email marketing, then integrating the two is a no-brainer. So give it a shot this spring, and watch the results roll in!
Emma provides email marketing software and services.