It’s 2022, a whole 40 years after the first marketing email went out, and guess what, much against the email naysayers, email is going stronger than ever and raring to go! Don’t believe us? Email marketers netted an average of 25% of their overall store revenue from email marketing alone last year, and just for some context, this number was 22% the year before. So email marketing for eCommerce is going nowhere but up, but like any marketing channel, email has evolved, and what works well stays, and other things get evolved and come back better. So, from the combined email wisdom of our email marketing strategists, here are the top email marketing strategies in 2022 that your eCommerce store should start looking into following.
Build the Right eCommerce Email Marketing Strategy 2022
Assuming that your eCommerce store or another online business has a basic email marketing setup in place and all your essential flows are set up, it’s time to amp up your marketing funnel and try more advanced email marketing strategies and hacks to get the most out of your marketing dollar.
1. Build on your existing email flows
Email flows are at the heart of eCommerce email marketing automation. Like clockwork, customized and targeted emails blast out to your list based on certain triggers and actions. As we’ve mentioned in many previous blog posts, having a few basic emails flows like the welcome flow, the abandoned cart flow, the thank you, and the re-engagement flow is absolutely crucial for any eCommerce store. But it doesn’t stop there. You can play around with your flows in numerous ways and improvise them endlessly. Even one basic flow like a welcome flow can be optimized to do better, have more complex rules and formulae, and have many more email sequences added to it. For example, for users that abandoned a lower value but high repeat purchase item, you could offer a “quantity discount”, but for a high-value item, you could offer a bigger discount number. When it comes to flows, the sky’s the limit.
2. Offer value-based marketing
It’s not brand new information, but it has to be reiterated. Now more than ever, e-commerce emails have to do more than just posture around selling. Yes, the ultimate goal of all marketing is to sell more. But it’s 2022, and your customers have probably seen it all and already become immune to the hard sales all around. Content is still the king, and what will differentiate good marketing from average marketing is how well you can offer non-marketing content to perform the role of marketing. Which is to say: can you sell more without even trying to?
3. Focus on customer lifecycle rather than just the top funnel
Traditional marketing wisdom says “sell more.” And which is true for all intents and purposes. But here’s the thing: The sale doesn’t just happen on one platform or at one time typically when you first gain your first web visit. The customer journey is complex and can span over a long time from the time they come to your website until the time they…will die. Once a customer, always a customer. This is the hypothetical life cycle of a customer from an email marketing point of view. Your email strategy should reflect this.
4. Extend email to SMS
Just like the customer lifecycle, the customer tech stack goes beyond just one platform — email. A mobile phone is one device that’s always with the client, and even if an email goes unopened, SMS is still the undisputed king of high open rates. You definitely need SMS to be part of your email marketing strategy in 2022 While SMS alone isn’t the best marketing channel given the restrictions with length and format of messaging when supported with email marketing, the additional push of an SMS at the right time with the right message can get the best out of your email marketing too. This is why for an integrated retention marketing funnel, it’s important to have both Email and SMS marketing flows and campaigns set up for a store.
5. Tech it to the next level
Did you know your email can do a lot more now than just present an interplay of text and images in a great way? Like with any design-led channel, the opportunities with email design are endless. We focussed on how to integrate video in an email on the earliest post. But throw in a bit of technology, and your emails take a life of their own. Thanks to some serious back-end work by our R&D team, we’re now able to offer Interactive emails to our clients. This means we can do emails with surveys, forms, and even shopping functions built-in within the email instead of linking it and taking the user to a landing page.
6. Advanced Segmentation and personalization in emails
For an established store, having a basic segmentation of your customer list may be second nature but just like email flows, even email list segmentation can vary from basic to advanced. In 2022, the name of the (email) game is going to be hyper-personalized marketing communication based on your customer segments, and the more you can drill them down and make neat segments based on behavior, demographics, and purchase data, the more laser focussed your marketing can get.
7. How to optimize emails for mobile
Well, it’s 2022 and it doesn’t need to be said anymore. But it’s incredible how many big brands are still so bad at this. Please, optimize your emails for mobile! In 2021, more than half the emails were opened on email. It’s a no-brainer that an email has to look and work well on a mobile screen. Luckily most email marketing platforms like Klaviyo, Omnisend, Mailchimp, and others provide the option to adapt your emails for mobile. However, default mobile optimization doesn’t always work well, and given the sheer number of mobile phones and screen sizes/resolutions involved, the results vary. This means that a few rules of thumb should be followed when working on how to optimize emails for Mobile phones:
8. Optimize emails for Dark Mode
Just like for mobile, it’s also not uncommon to see many eCommerce stores otherwise still not optimizing their emails for dark mode. Sure, not optimizing for dark mode isn’t going to be the difference between a million-dollar and 0 dollar campaign, and it’s more of an aesthetic than a functional flaw, but still, given the rising popularity of dark mode, (some surveys say that upto 80% of the mobile users prefer dark mode), it’s a no-brainer that your emails have to be optimized for dark mode. What this essentially means is that the email has to blend on a dark background of the mobile screen, not stick out like a sore thumb. Since most email screens are by default white, they do tend to look odd on a dark mode screen.
9. Rely on unconventional metrics to measure email performance
With the loss of cookie tracking on Google and open rates on iOS, reliance on non-vanity metrics like click-through rates, purchase rates, and UTM tracking will become more common. Open Rates used to be the holy grail of email marketing, but now with that data getting skewed thanks to Apple doing away with it, the success rate of your email will eventually need to reflect in its performance as a whole. Of course, clicks to your landing page from the email in GA will be a solid metric. But other unconventional metrics like heat maps, link clicks on different links in the emails, UTM Parameters, and eventually, conversions from an email campaign on a whole will define whether your email marketing worked or not.
Final Thoughts
Email marketing is an incredibly rewarding and ROI-friendly medium and when done professionally and strategically, it can be one of the most fulfilling marketing channels ever. Do your research, follow the top email marketing strategies and test endlessly to see what works best for your store.
Want to hire a professional email marketing agency to not only follow but to figure out your email marketing plan to implement the top strategies for your eCommerce store? Give us a call or get in touch.
