When it comes to online shopping, the holiday season reigns supreme. Between Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and general Christmas shopping, more people are going online to buy gifts for their friends and family. In fact, last holiday season, online shopping generated a record-setting $108.2 billion in revenue—almost a 15% increase from the 2016 holiday season.

Due to the overwhelming popularity of online shopping, you’d think running an eCommerce site was pretty easy, right? After all, nobody wants to deal with crowded malls and holiday traffic when they can order from the comfort of their own home.

But as the store owner, your job extends beyond helping the customer during their shopping journey. A large portion of your work should be spent not just attracting new customers, but also creating marketing and engagement campaigns that strengthen relationships with existing ones. And one of the best ways to boost retention rates is through post-purchase email marketing.

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The sound that notifies that a customer has placed an order at your online store, is the sound that every store owner wishes to hear more and more. And with the holiday season already in, this is nonetheless most profitable (and busiest) quarter of the year for everyone who dabbles in online retail and eCommerce.

Be it the store owners or marketers dabbling in eCommerce, the preparations for holiday season begins early. Right from stocking the inventory to updating the products in store to setting lucrative offers to lure newcomers; and appreciating existing customers to making sure they are reaching out to the correct audience. This is done almost a month early to accommodate the huge inflow of visitors and shoppers.

With email marketing boasting of 81% customer acquisition capability compared to other marketing channels, it is undeniably the best way to harness this holiday season – to reach your audience while taking care to boost your overall ROI. Yet holiday email marketing is altogether a different ball game compared to email marketing rest of the year.

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You’re spending a lot of time and money to drive quality traffic to your website. Your product pages look great, and customers love your products. WooCommerce’s stability and performance provide a frictionless shopping experience as visitors navigate your website, adding products to their shopping cart.

And then more than 70% of those shoppers exit your website, leaving those products in their cart.

This is not a new phenomenon. eCommerce merchants have been battling abandoned carts since the first online store opened.

One of the best and most popular ways to encourage people to recover their abandoned shopping carts is with a well-crafted email re-marketing sequence. There’s a problem, though: most other merchants are using the same tried-and-tested re-marketing methods and tools to try and bring down their cart abandonment rates. And there hasn’t been much innovation in this space recently, creating two major stumbling blocks:

• When your competition uses similar strategies and tactics, it’s much harder for you to stand out and clinch that sale.
• Consumers have become conditioned to expect a post-abandonment email that includes a discount.

Can you stick to what you’re already doing? Sure. But by not tweaking and improving the way you are recover abandoned carts, you’re leaving money on the table — to giving it away to your competitors.

At Conversio, we’re focused on helping eCommerce merchants with email marketing and having worked with more than 20,000 customers, we’ve noticed a few emerging ideas that have helped them improve their abandoned cart recovery rate. Here are five of our favorites.

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We hope you’ve enjoyed this four part series on email marketing! To wrap it up, we want to leave you with some inspiration. Here are some emails that stand out from the crowd, from across every stage of the email lifecycle.

Onboarding

Welcome Emails: Paul Smith’s welcome email thanks their new subscribers and highlights core features of their online shop. They also include clear links to their social media profiles, so people can connect with them across the web.

Getting Started / User Guide emails: If you sell a one-of-a-kind product that customers may have trouble using, a “getting started” email gives you a chance to set them up for success by explaining its features and sharing basic how-tos. In this helpful email, Google highlights the unique selling propositions of its product, Chromecast:

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Email marketing is all about building a relationship with your customers by sending the right communication at the right time. This gets harder as your customer base grows. You probably don’t have time to send one-on-one messages to each one of your subscribers, so how do you scale relationship-building? Email automation.

Now that you have a sense of the email lifecycle and recommended tools, let’s look at five best practices for building customer relationships with email automations.

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This week we’re putting the spotlight on email marketing for WooCommerce: understanding the email lifecycle, emails best practices, and helpful tools and integrations.

WooCommerce has robust email tools built right into core. To send a greater range of messages, you can integrate your store with leading email services like MailChimp, and add email marketing extensions.

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The Sequoia Data Corporation introduced Compumarket, the first internet-based system for eCommerce, in 1989. Barely 20 years later, eCommerce sales are predicted to reach $2.84 billion.

But unless you pull customers towards your business, you won’t generate sales — and that’s where email comes in. According to a joint survey by DMA and eConsultancy, 80% of marketers think email is the best marketing channel for customer acquisition, and 81% consider it best for customer retention.

For the next few days we’re putting the spotlight on email marketing to look at four key topics, starting with understanding the email marketing lifecycle.

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At this very moment, your store is loaded with data, and that data is fuel just waiting to grow your business.

It provides invaluable information about your customers: what they enjoy buying from you, how often they make a purchase, and when they last made a purchase. Once you integrate your WooCommerce store with MailChimp, our powerful marketing tools – including automations and reporting – put that data to work to personalize your marketing and sell more stuff.

Here are 6 tools that’ll help you on your quest to build your brand:

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Email marketing has long been — and remains — a popular method for acquiring customers and boosting sales. And it’s no small wonder, with 91% of consumers in the United States checking their email every single day.

Finding the right strategies to use in your emails is a tricky thing. You need to think about what messages your customers will respond to, what calls to action they’ll click, and what will even make them open an email in the first place. You also need to review and improve upon your strategies so you keep making money.

Here at WooCommerce, email is a big part of what we do — it’s how we communicate with our customers, not to mention the community. Over the last few years, we’ve spent a lot of time experimenting with and learning from email. Now we’re ready to pass those learnings along to you.

Today we’re going to share some of the best things we’ve learned about email subject lines, graphics, and length so you can use our experiments to grow your own store and improve your customer communication.

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Question: how are your store’s emails improving the experience of your customers?

If it’s difficult for you to answer this question, that’s okay. We tend to think of the emails we send to customers as final steps in a sales process, or necessary interactions that keep new orders coming in. But these messages can — and should be — much more than that.

With the right features, every email you send to your customers can lead to a happier, stress-free experience. Order receipts can increase trust, shipping notifications can solve problems, and even marketing messages can add a sense of delight.

Let’s take a look at some of the features you should have in your store’s emails, and how they can make your customers feel great about buying from you.

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Getting started with email marketing can be challenging, but experienced store owners agree: email is one of the best opportunities you have for connecting with your customers long-term.

To avoid spending too much time on email right out of the gate, it’s wise to look into automation. Post-purchase email automation allows you to write, schedule, and automatically send relevant messages to your customers. Write your emails once, and they’ll do the work for you forever.

Let’s explore how you can get started with automated post-purchase emails that will turn your first-time customers into devoted superfans. Ready to learn? Read on for all the details.

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Email marketing is a tactic that’s recommended for stores of all ages and sizes. The reason for this is clear: it’s typically rated by businesses themselves as the strategy with the best ROI, and the cost of creating and sending to a list is relatively low.

The advantages of email are clear: it’s inexpensive, it’s effective, and it opens a direct line of communication with your customers. However, what’s not always clear is how to get started with this tactic so you can reap its many benefits.

Instead of diving in and creating dozens of campaigns right away, your first foray into email marketing should consist of a few select strategies that have proven benefits for your store. This approach will keep you focused, lower your costs, and make things easier overall.

Let’s take a look at the first five email strategies you should try for your online store, from basic recurring “what’s new” messages to targeted requests sent to specific customers.

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When you start an online store, there are hundreds of things that demand your attention. Along with the basics — order fulfillment, customer service, restocking and producing products — there are also tactics designed to grow and improve your business.

Marketing is something that new store owners usually know they need to invest their time and energy in, but struggle to start with. Finding marketing tactics that work is tricky, as is making the time to apply said tactics to your store.

To lend you a helping hand, we’ve collected a few of the most ideal ways that you can spread the word about your new store, along with the WooCommerce extensions that make these methods possible. We’ve also included some info on how to tell if this is a good fit for you, plus additional reading on each tactic.

Keen to kick off your marketing? Have a look at the strategies we’re recommending for you.

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Not everyone who looks at your site will buy something the first time. In fact, 98.5% won’t. However, most people who visit your site without a reason to come back probably won’t do that either.

How do you remind them, then? Well, you could get them to like your Facebook page, but the chances they’ll see any particular status update are negligibly small. You could use an RSS feed, but they’re not that effective, either. Yes, even after twenty years of development in technology, the most effective way is still good old email.

That’s why, in order to retain a significant number of customers, you need to get their email addresses. The form that viewers input their email into is called, straightforwardly enough, the opt-in form.

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So, you probably already know by now that having an email list is an essential part of marketing your business online. And you likely know that what you put in those email blasts matters. People subscribe to your list and trust you’ll deliver to them quality. If you fail to meet this expectation, they’ll hit unsubscribe in a nanosecond.

But there’s a missing component here. Have you guessed? Your subject line!

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If you already have an e-commerce business or you’re thinking about setting one up, it’s likely that you have at least a cursory familiarity with email lists. A well-built email list gives you access to your most loyal potential and current customers at any time. And so long as you respect that level of access, you’ll be rewarded with increased conversions.

There are several analogies for referring to the sales cycle but I like the “funnel” best. At the top is anyone person that makes it to your site. The middle is reserved for those who’ve interacted with your site or brand in a direct way. They’ve read your blog or input their email address in an opt-in form. At the very bottom of the funnel – the narrowest part – is those who decide to put their money on the line and buy your product or service.

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