5 must-have emails for online stores

Email marketing for online stores is an essential tool to keep your customers informed and engaged with your brand. Whether it’s announcing new products, special discounts, promotions, campaigns, or other important business events, email marketing allows you to reach your customers and subscribers with personalized messages directly in their inbox. In this article, we’ll be exploring 5 must-have emails that every online store should be sending to ensure a successful email marketing strategy. So, get ready to learn how to level up your email game and keep your customers coming back for more!

Here are the emails we will talk about in the following lines:

• Welcome email
• Emails to engage users
• Referral email
• Discounts and promotions
• Forgotten cart email

Before we get started, though, it’s good to make a clear distinction between transactional and promotional emails.

Promotional emails (or so-called newsletter emails) are campaign emails that you send to people who have signed up for them. You can use them to share the launch of new products and product lines, campaign products, promotional offers, share interesting information about your business and build more serious and deep relationships with your customers.

Transactional emails, on the other hand, are a bit stricter due to their informative nature. In most situations, they are sent automatically after a purchase is made, regardless of whether the user is subscribed to the newsletter or not. They are extremely important in building a strong relationship between customers and the brand, and their high open rates allow you to unleash the potential of your brand and collect as much information as possible about your customers.

Why are transactional emails important?

Email marketing is a vital component of any successful online store. It allows you to build strong relationships with your customers, keep them informed about new products and promotions, and increase sales. By leveraging the power of email marketing, you can create personalized and engaging messages that resonate with your audience, and drive long-term loyalty and engagement.

Imagine a situation where you browse a store, select products, add them to your cart, fill in the information needed to complete the order, press the “Buy” button… and nothing.

You do not receive a confirmation email or any indication that you have placed your order. Did they take your money? Did they receive your order? What follows next?

This is where the power of transactional emails comes in. They inform consumers at every step of their shopping and the period between purchase and delivery. Thus, they eliminate the concerns of customers.

And now we get to the heart of our article and why each email listed above is important, as well as ideas for them.

Welcome email

The adage “First impressions matter” is as true in life as it is in online commerce. If your pitch after signing up for an email newsletter or registration is not memorable, your subsequent campaigns are quite likely to be missed.

The role of a welcome email is to thank your customers and newsletter sign-ups for being on your list, and if you do it right, you can lead them to an order.

You can provide a discount code as done in the given example:

Or to provide more information about your products and services:

The most important elements here are:

• The Quest for Originality – If you want to get a Wow! effect, you should certainly bet on originality. And that means doing something your customers don’t expect by speaking a different language.
• Beautiful Design – Be it minimalistic, simple or vibrant and colorful, design is important.
• The feeling that the person is in the right place – The overall vision and message should lead precisely to the thought “Yes, this is my place!”

User engagement email

Think about the key places where your users cancel their order and try to guide them to come back and complete the action you want.

Offer free shipping, a free test period, an exchange option, or simply ask them to leave you a comment on the products they’ve purchased.

Campaigns like these not only encourage engagement, but also build a two-way relationship between business and customers.

Referral email

It’s no longer a secret that inviting customers to refer their family and friends to order from a brand is an ideal source of new leads. We wouldn’t say free, because in most cases these initiatives are associated with discounts.

Don’t forget the conditions under which the referral happens and make them clear to your customers, otherwise there’s a chance you’ll turn away both new and existing customers.

Discounts and promotions

Discounts are one of the most effective tools of online commerce.

Studies show that over 54% of shoppers are more likely to order items from their forgotten cart if they are backed by a percentage discount. However, we will talk more about the forgotten strollers further down in the article.

Here you can let your mind run wild or just bet on the promotional discounts you are doing and let your customer base know about them.

It is important to maintain a balance as well. If you run promotions too often, there’s a chance you’ll teach your customers to always wait to buy from the promotions (which they do anyway). Also, too frequent markdowns directly hit your bottom line.

Abandoned cart email

The truth is, we all do.

We open a site, browse it, select products and exit. Even more often it happens that we don’t like something in the completion process and give up.

And the most common case is that something else takes our attention.

Therefore, as merchants we cannot afford to abandon our customers when they have already liked and added something to their cart. This is where the Forgotten Cart Emails come to the rescue.

An email like that would finish a lot of the started orders, don’t you think?

Still, not all customers can be converted into buyers. But you can still make an effort to ask them why they haven’t completed their purchase. Thus, you can find both numerous problem areas in the design of your site, as well as problem units such as – delivery price, delivery time, inconvenient payment methods, etc.

In addition to soliciting feedback, it’s important to learn from it.

And here we stop with email recommendations for today. Expect the next useful e-mails in our next article, which you will soon find out about both in e-mail and on our social networks. If you haven’t signed up for our email newsletter yet, do it now (you can find the form below on the site), because there you get every article we write, as well as many useful tips for developing online businesses.

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