Email marketing for e-commerce

I open a lot of email just to click that link

1. Channel is extremely crowded. Everyone has read the same best-practices and optimization techniques. So emails from most companies (each one of them thinking that they are ‘differentiated) regress in quality and content to a mean.

2. Because it is so measurable (a marketer’s dream), this channel becomes less about what the emails say, but more about tricks to get one to open and click.

3. Excessive click optimization might erode “brand” (my conjecture). Since “brand” falls under the “soft stuff” in marketing, it gets attention as a second class citizen after one has taken care of the measurable stuff. (Defining brand as the ‘impression a word creates in your mind when you hear that word’)

4. Once a startup gives up on the ‘crutch’ of email - may be the team will think anew and innovate. Due to its measurability, my personal opinion is that companies don’t explore other channels - meaning, there isn’t a lot of invention going on.

If one visited a random saas startup and saw a day in the life of their “email marketing team”, I bet they are all roughly doing the same thing and have the same goals. I fear that no one wants to lose out on the 1% out of 1 million attention that emails are able to get - consistently and repeatably - and are thus like a drug that one can’t get off of :-) and thus companies don’t risk inventing new channels.

This is probably an ignorant rant (Eg a good counter argument would simply be - “email is popular because it works!”).

Given the number of emails I get, I do wish more companies tried more creative techniques to grab attention. (The Snapchat vending machine for spectacles comes to mind as a good attempt at innovation. I must confess I have zero knowledge of how the numbers on that approach worked)

In ecommerce, companies like brandless are doing well at getting attention without playing the standard email game (standard email game = ‘buy lists—>optimize—>$’ -> repeat).

Having said this, the advice in this article is very sensible - if someone comes to your site and didn’t complete the purchase, it doesn’t hurt to ask again. I am just raising a caution against taking email marketing for granted - esp if an entrepreneur is just starting out - presumably she can take some risk and try innovative ways of grabbing attention, than just email.

> Hey {{ first_name }},

"Hey" isn't a salutation I want as a customer. We aren't friends.

> We miss you.

Bullshit. This is an auto-generated email. Computers don't "miss" people.

> It's been a while since we've seen you. We know you get busy ...

Yes, and now you're interrupting my busy day

> ... but we'd love to see you again soon. In fact, come back and visit us in the next 5 days and take 15% off your order.

If you did a good job with my last purchase, I'll come back when I need something.

50/50 chance at this point that I hit the spam flag.

But not marketing email.

Three years ago (before I started an ecommerce store with my girlfriend) I'd have vehemently agreed with you. It took a lot of convincing for me to even consider sending emails to our customers in the early days.

But now I realise that, like with most things in life, aftersales emails aren't inherently bad - most companies just do them poorly. With generic marketing/promotional emails or shudder the dreaded weekly/monthly newsletter...

I would now go as far as to say it's my duty to reach out to customers via email after purchase and ask them whether they are satisfied with the product and if they need any help. The way I see it, if someone has entrusted me with their money, it's my duty to make sure I fulfilled my end of the deal.

In that email, I'll also give my customers a choice of different opt-in options. From "please keep me up to date with any interesting news", through "only email me if there's an amazing deal I really need to know about for {{PRODUCT_CATEGORY}}, to the extreme "I don't wish to receive any further communication via email".

Very, very few people choose the latter - and they are almost exclusively customers who are buying a gift for someone else.

EDIT: If you're downvoting to disagree, please explain why...

100% of this customer wants to hear from 0% of the companies with whom he does business.

Then there's this common unsubscribe strategy: "Okay, we've unsubscribed you from all messages pertaining to (some narrowly-defined topic)."

Web 2.0 killed popups and unders and overs for the most part, but these sprung back to life once Mom and Pop were told they could make money blogging and pimping other peoples' products (the new Amway or Avon).

[1] https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/chart/how-customers-...

As a marketer, I really wish people behaved logically. If they want to get emails, they opt-in, and they don't want to, they don't opt-in. That's the pervasive belief here based on the comments I've seen so far, and that's really clean right?

However, the truth in my experience is that people don't. This black-and-white segmentation IMHO ignores a middle segment of customers who don't care that much one way or another. They are the ones who don't even see the checkbox, whether it's checked or not, they're just trying to move through a form.

If you don't have opt-in, and when you email them later, some of them do convert. When you move to opt-in, you lose your connection to those customers and your overall re-capture rates go down. You throw the baby out with the bathwater. And the increased engagement from those that are left isn't nearly enough, especially if you have a hard limit on the number of purchases at a time like I did (online financial product).

This is what I know based on the data I've seen in one business. Now if I conjecture, I think opt-in works best for businesses email is your lifeline. Think knowledge-based businesses like I will Teach You to Be Rich - if that guy didn't have email, he'd be screwed. He needs to build trust and he does that through sending you relevant, useful content. So they use opt-in to really make sure their deliverability is top-notch. Other companies have many channels of acquisition, and send so many emails, that if a few customers click spam, it sucks but it's OK.

So I don't have a great solution. I think the one that works OK is providing prominent unsubscribe options and making it really easy for customers who don't want to receive any more messages to do so. But it's not perfect - we still get spam complaints and people swearing they unsub'd 5 times and still get messages. I don't want to message people who don't want to hear from us, but you need a signal to do so.

That said, I'm definitely more inclined to engage with properly-personalized emails, even knowing the tactics they employ, because they're usually helpful, or at least have had more forethought put into them.

Heck, even Amazon catches me with a review request from time to time, when I'm keen on venting my spleen.

It works, and in the general case, I definitely prefer it to "no email", because I'd prefer not to miss out on those useful interactions. Even at the cost of having to hit the "unsubscribe" button a few times.

That is, what does it take to make a person happy to receive an email from a business? Answer: only the opportunity to spend less money with that business.

It's extremely misleading to try to hijack that statistic into a generic "customers want to hear from companies" claim. Most of this article is about how to get people to spend more money, which is exactly the opposite of what people in this survey indicated.

Email marketing is just one tool that's used in a specific way depending on your industry, product, and customer base.

Always focus on improving the product, but don't do this in a vacuum. You need to ask customers and potential customers and customers of competitors about their problems.

A marketing automation tool allows you to centralize marketing emails as well as transactional emails in one thing, decoupled. Your product emits events with some attributes, and the tool react to it.

Examples with "user_registered" and "user_ordered" events:

- confirmation of order (at "user_ordered")

- ask for a review (at "user_ordered" + 3 days)

- welcome process (drip emails starting at "user_registered")

- wake up campaigns (no "user_ordered" events since 1 month)

- sending a notice for a new product Z to users having bought product X or product Y (segment on users having "user_ordered" for product_id IN (product X id or product Y id))

- ... there is no limit to imagination, I love that!

Shameless plug if I may, I'd like to know your interests in such a tool: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc5J5BuP_dEfXPEtXV0...

If no to any of the above, then I would just do manual outreach. Get a feel for the customers. Iterate the product. Find product-market fit. At some point you'll naturally wonder if you can scale the successful emails you're sending, and that's when email automation comes into play.

Improving your product's important, but you have keep in mind that the product is not the business, and a 10% improvement to your product likely won't have anywhere near the effect that a 10% improvement in your marketing will.

2) Sending a single welcome email with first steps that can be used as a reference, sending "trial ending" emails to remind people that their trial as running out (and offering an extension, usually), and 30-90 days after expiry emails offering a trial extension in case they got busy (happens very frequently) or asking for info why they didn't decide to go with your product. Anything above that, you want to start getting into tracking user lifecycle events and customizing your onboarding to that, and in fact, once you start doing that, you can start improving those low-hanging fruit emails as well.

3) You can use something as simple as Mailchimp to something as powerful as Salesforce. It really depends on what part of your funnel you want to focus on.

One thing people don't tend to get about email marketing before diving in is that there's no "one thing" that's email marketing. There's newsletter marketing, where you capture prospects, there's onboarding, there's "regular update" emails, there's winback emails, there's retention emails. Email's just a tool, really, and it's applicable and nearly all levels of marketing.

I've really gotten into this kind of stuff over the past few years, and if you still have questions, I'd be happy to chat with you about it. Email's in my profile.

It's a tedious task that needs regular attention and skills to ensure you're not underperforming, or identify low hanging fruits like old blog posts that are performing well and can be leveraged to get more sales or signups.

I also get many emails from legacy airlines for long haul deals and I end up getting one of them a year, I'd say it's a successful campaign, they don't expect a large amount of customers to jump on every deal, eventually one that's closer to your profile pops up

A really good re-engagement email would hone in on the relationship between you and this company, and offer help in some way. Did you buy a consumable good? Well, maybe you're running out and would like to restock. Did you sign up for a SaaS trial and the trial's nearly over? Here's a step it looks like you had difficulty with, our support number, and maybe a trial extension, so you can really evaluate.

But because the author is trying to write a super general-case email, it actually turns into something you don't want to see in your inbox.

But I think I'm the exception, not the rule, in this case.

But the HN crowd is a pretty interesting self-selected group of people. "You're not the target audience," as a fellow website builder used to say. And I think it's true that people who build digital products themselves might not have the same mindset about digital communications as the general public.

And email is funny in my experience... people seem to forget the emails they like to get, and preferentially remember the ones they're annoyed by.

So just out of curiosity I'd ask: do you really receive NO promo emails at all? Absolutely zero? No sales notices from Newegg or other gear sellers? Nothing from any conference you liked or are planning to attend? No airfare sales notices? No "new release" notices for software you like and use? Nothing you've intentionally opted into?

I'll give an example of a good email promo experience--I was looking to fly to New Zealand, but couldn't find a good price. A friend forwarded an sale email from Air Tahiti that had a price about half what I'd seen so far. I bought immediately.

That was a classic good promo email experience--a truly good deal, available to me before it sold out.

The amount of profit some companies throw away because of some half-assed split-testing experiment is unbelievable.