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4 eCommerce Email Mistakes You Might be Making

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Email eCommerce strategies

Email strategy plays a pivotal role for just about every eCommerce company. But what happens when customers have actually given you their email address? A lot of the time, they’re bombarded on a weekly or daily basis with deals. Otherwise, they’ll never hear from the brand.

This is an easy mistake to make. Many eCommerce email strategies are based on getting as many sales as possible, but that overlooks a bigger opportunity when it comes to using email marketing for loyalty and relationship-building.

If you want to improve your email marketing program, first carefully review the kinds of mistakes so many eCommerce companies are making today:

1. Untargeted Emails

A lot of eCommerce companies encourage customers to sign up for the email list and leave it at that. The problem is that, without any other data, it’s hard to create relevant offers that won’t end up getting moved to the spam folder or, at the very least, unopened in Gmail’s “Promotions” tab.

All it takes is one untargeted email for you to lose your chance to contact the customer ever again. While you might not want to add more fields for email sign-ups on the website, you can match customer purchase data with their email address to ensure that the next email campaign at least offers relevant products.

Or, better yet, send a survey to any new subscribers that ask for product preferences, gender, location, and other relevant data points that can help inform marketing campaigns.

2. Making Emails All about Sales

If you’re in the eCommerce industry, the odds are good that you aren’t the only one that provides your product. In a lot of ways, brand is all that really matters – in a world of online purchases, companies are only distinguished by the customer experience.

It’s hard to provide a different customer experience if your emails are all about sales. This is where eCommerce businesses like Harry’s excel. While Harry’s supplies razor blades and shaving creams, the company has created the aptly named “Five’O’Clock Magazine” to set the brand apart in the inbox.

Harry's sends out an email that includes a digital magazine.

3. Keeping Email Marketing in a Silo

Your email list is your big chance to get in touch with customers directly. It’s also a big chance to unite all of your different marketing channels. Rather than displaying social media channels as tiny icons that most customers will ignore, experiment with campaigns that push social engagement front and center.

Saks Fifth Avenue did this by using Movable Ink’s contextual marketing technology to include a real-time Instagram stream at the bottom of the email while promoting a contest to email recipients. This encouraged customers to start following Saks on social media and helped bridge two very distinct channels for one central campaign.

Saks Fifth Avenue ran a social media campaign that was integrated in real-time

4. Not Sending Shopping Cart Abandonment Emails

Customers abandon shopping carts. A lot. The average shopping cart abandonment rate sits at about 68%, which means that most people who visit your site and take the time to shop around are going to leave before actually fulfilling the purchase.

It’s critical to stay in touch with the people who abandon their carts. Almost half of cart abandonment emails are opened and a third of the clicks go back to the site – which means that one simple email can prompt customers to finish the sale.

Email eCommerce: Beyond the Transaction

To create a memorable experience for your customers, eCommerce brands have to go beyond the transaction email. Harry’s does it by offering unique and unexpected content, while Saks Fifth Avenue does it by creating a social conversation around products – with a great incentive to participate.

What can your brand do to stand out? It all starts with context. Find out more by downloading our eBook, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Contextual Marketing, or take a look at five great contextual emails from the Inkredible 5: Winter Edition 2015.

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