Utilizing emails for marketing activities is highly effective, mainly since emails are still one of the most popular means of digital communication.
You can use email marketing to spread the word about your brand, build your online shop’s credibility, and establish and strengthen relationships with your customers.
This is also the perfect way to Generate Leads, Boost Conversion Rates, and, of course, Drive Traffic.
Best Email Marketing Ideas for WooCommerce Shops
In 2022, Email Marketing is still a key and effective way to introduce businesses to their target customers.
It also happens to be the way to build a trustworthy relationship with this group. However, it has changed a lot since its early days and to run successful email campaigns, you not only need to do many things right, but you must also have some good email marketing ideas.
Let’s look at some practical examples to help you increase sales, attract new customers, and re-engage existing ones.
1) The Welcome Campaign
The welcome email is a vital email strategy for almost any online business. Usually, it is a series of emails with specific goals geared towards winning over any new subscriber to your mailing list.
It will enable you to start a real conversation with the new subscriber, to turn strangers into loyal fans of your brand and your products.
Moreover, you can make an excellent first impression through welcome email campaigns and reassure your subscribers that they made the right decision signing up for your newsletter.
Generally, you can use the welcome email campaigns to improve your branding and boost your marketing and sales.
Welcome email series typically include five emails, each having a defined objective. The following steps are how you can build an excellent welcome email campaign for your online shop.
🔸Welcome (1st email)
Be sure to welcome the new customer or the person who has provided you with their email address in exchange for something with your first email.
🔸Company introduction (2nd email)
Tell about your company and your team to provide some background information about your company.
In addition, you can present your best products or services, making the most of your chance to increase brand awareness.
🔸Vision for the future (3rd email)
In the third email, you can clarify what the user can expect from your online store and what you can provide in the future. If you plan to introduce a new line of products soon, this can be an excellent opportunity to discuss them.
🔸Getting important information (4th email)
For example, this is where you can include a form in the shape of a CTA, which, when filled out by the customer, will get them some benefit, such as a discount on your product or free shipping. In return, you get a list of what your potential customer wants and can match a future offer to that.
🔸Request for Review (5th email)
You should send this email when the prospect has turned into a real customer. Ask them to review the product they purchased from you.
You can subsequently use such user-generated content on your other email campaigns.
2) Include User-Generated Content in Your Emails
Using user-generated content in emails is one of the easiest ways to generate more leads and sales. People will trust you more if they see positive customer feedback. You should include the following in your emails:
🔸Customer reviews
When selling or recommending products/services on your website, customer reviews are an excellent opportunity to add more user-generated content to your website.
Not only do reviews help you engage users, but they also assist other users in making purchase decisions on your website.
That’s why you see many niche review sites which rely heavily on user-submitted reviews to make money online.
Search engines also love reviews and frequently mark them differently in search results. This increases the visibility of the reviews in the search results and takes more traffic to your site.
🔸Survey results
Many companies and online shops utilize satisfaction surveys to determine what customers think about their experience. Also, they use them as user-generated content, which will be published as quotes from those surveys on the company website or social media.
While Social Media has become an integral part of our daily lives, many companies use them to collect customers’ feedback. There are many ways to do this; some examples include:
- Ask your Facebook page followers to leave feedback or a review
- Launch a survey on your Facebook page,
- Take screenshots of comments on Instagram,
- Include a link to a short survey in the email to gather more user-generated content for your next email marketing campaign.
3) Lifecycle Trigger: Focus on the Lifecycle of Products
As an online shop manager, you know the average lifespan of a product and when particular personas purchase a more recent model. Therefore, you can perfectly use this information to set up a lifecycle trigger campaign.
Imagine an online shop specializing in digital cameras; a professional photographer purchased a camera three years ago. With professional use, the average lifespan of this camera is roughly four years. Therefore, there is a good chance that the professional photographer in question will be buying a new one in a year.
You can efficiently utilize your email marketing campaigns to encourage this user to make his purchase sooner rather than waiting for another year. For example, you can do this by offering a special discount on the new camera of the same brand or providing an offer to trade in his current camera.
This means that your email marketing campaign aims to make the purchase as attractive as possible at an earlier point in the product’s lifecycle.
This is all about getting to the right moment with the right actions to maximize a customer’s return
4) Convert Online Visitors Into Sales
Sometimes, visitors who were active in your online shop but did not make a purchase require a reminder or a push to go ahead and make the purchase.
Like remarketing on Google Ads, email marketing is a powerful tool to get visitors back to your online shop.
For example, you can email visitors who have abandoned their shopping cart as a reminder. There have likely been doubts about the (possible) purchase, which led to shopping cart abandonment.
You can resolve these doubts as much as possible by clearly presenting all the product’s advantages again in the email.
In the following, we will talk about when you should send those reminder emails and provide you with some ideas for converting online visitors to sales.
🔸The timing of reminder emails
Ideally, you need to send this email as soon as possible. One good example of the timing of the reminder email is as follows:
- You should send the first email within 30 minutes of abandoning the cart.
- After 48 hours, you can send them another reminder.
- Finally, you can send the last reminder after a week.
It is advisable to keep a close eye on the stats of these emails. For example, test with different interval times to see if and when the visitor returns.
🔶 Advantages and discount codes
Suppose you can track which pages a user has visited (linked to the visitor’s email address to log in). In that case, you can create an inspiring email based on those visited pages. Include the benefits of the products in the email to increase the chances of purchasing. You may want to add a discount code that is only valid for a few days.
5) Reactivate Your Inactive Contacts
Over time, there will be some newsletter subscribers who will stop opening your emails at some point. There will be no point in sending them emails anymore, and you can save yourself time and effort. But you should not completely ignore these inactive contacts.
You can instead start a particular reactivation campaign for them!
Send them a reminder, for example, about the products you offer and, more importantly, how they can take advantage of them! This is an excellent opportunity to include a discount code or other special offers.
Be sure to include the option to unsubscribe from your newsletter at any time as well. After all, contacts who have no further interest in your online shop are not going to do you any good whatsoever, so feel free just to let them go.
For WooCommerce online shops, a great option to reactivate inactive contacts is OptinMonster. You can easily generate leads, boost sales and manage your newsletters with the help of this software.
6) Notify Buyers When Stock is Available
There are certain digital marketing tricks that help online shops boost sales. Among them, one can help you collect emails for your online shop’s newsletter very simply. So what exactly is this trick? It’s pretty simple: when there is no stock of a product, offer the user the opportunity to enter an email address so that you can inform them when the product is back in stock. This tactic is perfect for two purposes:
- You will get emails from users interested in the product (there is a strong chance they will buy it when you tell them you have it back in stock).
- It gives you a much better idea of what products your customers are most interested in.
🔸YITH WooCommerce Waiting List: A Perfect Option
When any of your products are sold out, and you don’t have them in stock, there is a risk of losing potential sales and even prospective customers. As we mentioned, one excellent email marketing idea to help prevent this is sending your customers notifying emails about the availability of the product they were looking for.
With the help of the YITH WooCommerce Waiting List plugin, you can implement this email marketing idea in your WooCommerce shop and thus increase your sales with a few clicks.
When you have this plugin installed on your WooCommerce shop, an “Add to Waiting List” button will automatically appear on the product page as soon as it is out of stock. After collecting emails from interested prospect customers, the system automatically sends them a notification email regarding the product’s availability.
In doing so, not only can you increase sales, but also you will have a list of interested customers in buying certain products, which you can use in your marketing activities.
7) Automation: Savings Discount with a Surprise Credit
Some online shops offer a savings discount to the customer with every order. The customer can redeem this discount with a future order. Implementing this email marketing idea can encourage repeat purchases from your current customer base.
Are you thinking about using this email marketing idea in your online shop but don’t know how? In the following, we will share some examples.
🔸Classic savings discount technique
- Customer orders one or more products in the online shop
- With every product the customer orders, he gets a savings discount
- Link this saving discount to the email address of the customer in your contacts database
- Set up an automatic email:
- Send this every month
- Inform the customer of the discount in the email
- Specify how the user should redeem the discount
🔸Alternative: Saving discount based on order value
- The customer orders one or more products from the online shop
- In this instance, link the order value to the email address of this customer in your contacts’ database.
- Calculate how much of a savings discount you can give away. For example, 3 percent of the order value
- In an additional field, add the virtual savings discount for each email address
- Make a dynamic discount code per email address
- Create an automatic email:
- Send it every month
- Inform the customer of the savings discount in the email
- Include the dynamic discount code
- Explain in which way the user can cash the savings discount in
🔸Surprise credit for the slow deciders
Not everybody immediately decides to make a repeat purchase. You can use an email reminder with a surprise credit to provide an extra push.
Give, for example, a $5 additional discount on top of the savings discount only when the customer buys within 24 hours. This time pressure will increase the sense of scarcity and encourage repeat purchases.
8) The Buyer Campaign
In marketing, the focus is on gaining new customers most of the time, and existing customers are often neglected in the process. This is regularly the case with mobile phone subscriptions, where the best offers are constantly available for new customers.
In the end, old customers have already bought something from you. So why shouldn’t they buy again? That is where the buyer campaign comes into play.
This is something you can do right after the purchase, either by sending additional information about the products purchased or by answering essential questions. Furthermore, show some examples of what you can exactly do with the product (e.g., via video tutorials) and offer your customers a bit of inspiration. Moreover, part of a buyer campaign is fitting upsells or cross-sells, as there is a great potential to increase sales here.
🔸Upselling and Cross-Selling to Increase Sales
Upselling refers to a sales strategy to generate more sales and revenue with the same number of customers without necessarily offering more expensive products or services.
Here, the relationship to the original product plays a role: during the sales pitch, a product is offered to the customer that serves the same purpose but is more expensive.
The idea is that the customer will buy the more expensive product in place of or after the less expensive one.
With cross-selling, retailers try to convince their customers to buy additional products besides the initially planned purchase of the main product.
These may be complementary products/services or goods from a different product category.
If the customer is interested in a product or has already purchased it, this marketing strategy offers additional products in a targeted manner.
The aim is to take full advantage of existing customer relationships and increase the company’s sales.
If you sell products that will eventually be consumed, such as cosmetics, you can quickly expand the buyer campaign: your customers will eventually need new products after all! So, on average, if your products will run out after three months, then you can offer a replenishment in a tailored email.
9) Create a Countdown for Your Offers
Countdown timers are very popular amongst online stores and boost the sales of products or services. You can use this email marketing idea to help promote your products or services within a given time frame, to advertise your upcoming events and other promotions. In this way, you create a sense of urgency amongst your customers with your interactive email marketing campaigns.
While creating countdown timers to use in emails and linking them to the shop could be a challenging task for many online shop owners, for lucky WooCommerce users, there are some excellent plugins that can help you with that. In the following, we will introduce one of the best WooCommerce plugins to use countdown timers as an email marketing idea.
🔸Finale Lite: A handy tool
According to its developer, Finale Lite – Sales Countdown Timer & Discount for WooCommerce is a plugin for WooCommerce which can help you create urgency and scarcity campaigns. Such campaigns will encourage customers to act quickly with their purchases and avoid missing out on your offers.
With the help of this plugin, you can run many scheduled campaigns on your WooCommerce shop. As its name suggests, one of the main features is creating countdown timers to push customers to make purchases.
After creating the timer, you can generate a dynamic image of the countdown timer, synced with your WooCommerce campaigns created by this plugin, and you can easily add it to emails or blog posts.
10) Segmentation: Identify the Brand Preference of Customers
Many people are faithful to specific brands and repeatedly buy from them. One famous example is the Apple fan base. In general, iPhone users do not easily switch to a smartphone of another brand. Nearly all products sold through online shops are brand-related. Therefore, creating brand segments is an absolute necessity for you. You can put this together like the following.
🔸Brand segmentation according to purchase history
When someone buys a Canon brand digital camera from your online shop, this person will naturally fall under the Canon segment. However, if someone purchases cameras from different brands in your shop, they might also be classified under several segments. In that case, you can use the last camera brand purchased as the main segment.
🔸Brand segmentation by compatible accessories
Even if someone has not bought a camera from you, you can easily find out which camera they might have, judging by the accessories they are buying from you. For example, if a customer buys a battery that is only compatible with a Canon EOS 50D, they likely own this camera. So this customer can again fit into the segment of Canon, or even more specifically, the segment of Canon EOS 50D.
11) Create Sale Notifications
You probably know someone who purchases products only because they are on sale. Do they really need what they are buying? Possibly not, but they are on sale. It’s as simple as that. The following are some examples of such deals that can boost your sales:
- Cross-country skis at 50% off? You will probably buy it even if you’ve never gone skiing in your life.
- Is your favorite WooCommerce theme 90% off on ThemeForest? You will surely buy it although you have no intention of changing themes soon!
- A flight to another side of the continent for just $20? You will buy it, although you are unsure if you will have free time on those dates!
- Four Dolce & Gabanna bags at 80% off? You’ll buy it. However, your closet is full of handbags!
There are lots of such examples.
This is why creating emails to notify your potential customers of what products are on sale will undoubtedly boost sales of your online shop.
Online shop owners usually use this email marketing idea at the end of the season to empty their inventory and get ready for the new season.
Conclusion: Email Campaigns for WooCommerce Shops
As you have seen, email marketing is more than just a boring newsletter. And it also applies to online shops! Naturally, the right strategy is crucial since not every campaign is appropriate for every customer. The most important keyword here is Segmentation! You can always send precisely the right thing with its help of it.
The potential of email marketing for online shops is enormous. You can utilize the best email marketing ideas noted above to attract new customers, retain existing customers and increase sales.
As we mentioned before, OptInMonster is one of the best WooCommerce plugins out there to help you manage all your email marketing campaigns, offering lots of features.
Sendinblue is another option and one of the most popular email marketing services that you can use in your WooComemrce online shop. It has become a great alternative to MailChimp. It is the only plugin that can manage your newsletter sending, transactional emails, and SMS with a completely new interface. Generate recurring traffic, keep in touch with your visitors, promote your different content, and so on. You can try the free plan that allows you to send up to 9,000 emails per month.
If you know any other email marketing ideas which work best for online shops, let us know in the comments section below.
