Welcome back to the podcast! Before I dive into the episode I want to go over some announcements to get you up to speed.
The last episode I did was about branding and I had every intention of continuing to produce episodes but then we went right into the holiday season and I decided to take some time to focus on the holidays.
Plus we had a member of our family pass away during the holiday season and that took us into the New Year which was a challenge. I also had other family commitments that came up so that pretty much covered my entire absence well into the New Year.
Honestly with all the things going on it was a blur just navigating through everything. If you’ve lost anyone, especially over the last couple of years my heart goes out to you and I’m sending you a large virtual hug because it’s not easy.
With all that going on and to kind of take my mind off things I did create something exciting which is my first digital mini-course for eCommerce business owners. This ties in with this episode actually and the course walks you through setting up your email marketing funnel. So that you can generate revenue from your email list on autopilot.
I’ll talk more about this a bit later in the episode but if you are on my email list you got the introductory rate for the mini-course. That is one of the pros of being an insider: you get first dibs on exclusives before anyone else. To not miss out next time you can join the list using the link in the show notes of this episode so you can get the first notification of exclusives. Plus be able to add your input into future offerings. Join today!
Ok, I think that is all for announcements and updates let’s dive into the episode.
Why Email Marketing Is Important
First, let’s touch on the importance of email marketing for eCommerce businesses or product-based brands.
Email marketing is an owned marketing channel meaning that you own your list versus using other forms of marketing like social media. With social media, you have to consider algorithms and unexpected changes that may reduce the chances of your audience seeing your content.
For example, Facebook business pages used to get a lot of organic traffic before Facebook decided they wanted to monetize access to your audience. They could restrict access because they owned the platform but it also meant that all the effort you put into building likes to your Facebook business page was now useless.
This could actually happen with any social media platform which is why I think it’s important to help transition people who follow you on social platforms to join your email list as well.
That way you have direct access to them without worrying about some technology stepping in putting a virtual door in place to block access to your content. You’ve simply worked too hard to have it go down like that.
With email marketing, you also tend to have a higher conversion rate. On average eCommerce businesses can generate about 30% of their sales from their emails.
Why? For product-based businesses, people happen to open your emails more. They want to know about the latest arrivals and launches. People like to buy things. Especially if you have quality products, people will have their credit cards saved and ready to click and buy.
Don’t ask me how I know lol
Now that you have an understanding of why email marketing is important for your eCommerce business let’s talk about some of your needs when choosing an email marketing platform for your Shopify store.
How to Choose The Best Email Marketing Platform For Your Shopify Store?
Assess what stage of business you are in… are you in one of the following stages?
- Emerging – where you are still focusing on building consistency with your sales and transitioning the traffic to your website into sales.
- Growing – you have consistent sales and now you’re evaluating your tools and sales cycles for improvement so you can uncover and maximize sales opportunities.
- Scaling – you’re looking to expand whether that is by growing your team, expanding into larger chains, and wanting to have better automations that free up administrative time.
Depending on what stage of business you are currently in will help decide what type of needs you have for the phase of business you are in. But we don’t want to just think of what is happening right now. We’ll still need to consider your future needs as your business expands.
This will help alleviate the potential growing pains of changing systems during critical business times such as highly anticipated launches and business seasons.
Emerging Phase
If you’re in the emerging phase you are most likely thinking about what will be the easiest and fastest email marketing platform to get started on building your email list. Years ago this used to be Mailchimp as it had better integration with Shopify but now that isn’t the case anymore.
Currently, I would say people are using Omnisend or Flodesk. Now Flodesk is not designed for eCommerce, it’s great for creative businesses who don’t sell products or service-based entrepreneurs.
The reason why product-based entrepreneurs like Flodesk is because of its simple marketing and beautiful editorial style layouts that can make your emails stand out.
There is a Shopify integration that is very simple, meaning that you can use Flodesk forms to capture emails from visitors who sign up on your website and they will go into a special segment for your Shopify store.
This works well if you are just getting started and don’t plan on sending out more intricate email funnels such as abandoned cart emails, etc.
If you want to get started with Flodesk you can use my link in the show notes to get 50% off your first year.
Now if you are in either of the next phases…
Growing & Scaling
Then you’ll most likely want to be focused on maximizing the traffic you get and increasing a few KPIs such as your average order value, your customer lifetime value, and reducing your cart abandonment rate.
Under these circumstances, you’ll want a more robust system that can handle each of those effortlessly and grow with your business.
This leads me to my recommended tool for eCommerce businesses, Klaviyo.
Klaviyo is one of the best email marketing platforms for Shopify in my opinion as it focuses exclusively on eCommerce and is backed by data science. Meaning they really help you personalize your email marketing experience so that your customers are getting information that is unique to them.
Plus they support amazing workflows that help empower you as a business owner to maximize the sales potential from your email list.
Once you have an engaged email list you can use its SMS (or text messaging features) to notify your VIP customers of early shopping hours, special releases, etc.
During my retail days, we would use SMS to help push sales.
For example, if I wanted to move or sell new markdowns faster I would send out a notification about new markdowns so we could maximize our profit.
If you’re a brick and mortar this is especially important to maximize your profits per square inch. You don’t want the profitable areas of your store costing you more money.
Another example of when I would use SMS is when a new release was available and I knew it would sell out quickly so a notification would go out to our best customers.
Best customers are those who are repeat customers and are your raving fans. The ones you usually know by name and who spread the word about your business.
Doing this allowed us to have quick cash injections to the business.
When you use email marketing and/or SMS marketing strategies you can increase your revenue in smart and sustainable ways.
Key Features Your eCommerce Email Marketing Platform Should Have
I think these are really essential and I covered some of them already. But definitely your eCommerce email marketing platform should have a way for you to easily segment your customers based on their interests.
This will help you have a more engaged list who gets information they are interested in.
As your business grows and you look at maximizing sales you’ll want to have an abandoned cart email sequence feature.
Abandoned carts happen when a website visitor fills their cart with products but never completes their transaction. This could occur for several reasons:
- They got distracted by life and left before finishing checking out.
- It was unclear to them what the shipping cost would be so they are seeing what it adds up to.
- They had an issue checking out – maybe a technical error.
By having an abandoned cart sequence option you can help them continue the transaction by reminding them of what they forgot. Just recovering a small percentage of your abandoned carts can add a good chunk of revenue back to your business.
Next up is so sort of stock notification. Let people sign up to be notified when things are back in stock and the great thing about this option is that you’ll have a higher chance of quickly selling the item when it’s back in stock because people don’t want to miss out.
There is something about the human physique and limited quantities. You just want it more when less is available.
Those are just some essentials you can listen to in episode 30 where I discuss some important Klavviyo flows you should have in place.
Knowing that all these things can be beneficial to your business is nice but if you don’t understand how to put it together then it’s not going to help you.
It’s one of the reasons why I came up with the Bankable Email Marketing™ mini-course to teach you to set up and structure a profitable email marketing funnel that helps you generate sales on autopilot.
Inside the mini-course, I walk you through how to set up a simple funnel, craft subject lines that don’t land your emails in the SPAM folder, design a newsletter that positions your products as a juicy buy, and gives you an easy-to-fill in email marketing template plus more.
The cool part is that you get through the course in 5 days or less and be on your way to generating sales from your email list. Right now you’ll get the course at a limited time investment that is less than 2 gourmet burgers during inflation. Get all the details by clicking the link in the show notes of this episode.My final thoughts on how to choose the best email marketing platform for your Shopify store is to not just focus on pretty but to think about the ROI of the platform you’ll choose. While there may not be a system that checks off 100% of the items on your list, pick the one that gives you the happy medium and can add more revenue back to your business.
Check the show notes for all the resources mentioned and also don’t forget to hit follow so you don’t miss my next episode where I’m going to be discussing how to get people on your email list.
