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The Shopify Email Marketing Guide Part 4: Tips & Tricks to Boost Your Email Marketing ROI

The Shopify Email Marketing Guide Part 4: Tips & Tricks to Boost Your Email Marketing ROI

Welcome to the 4th and final part in this Shopify email marketing guide by Ryan Turner, from The Email Funnels Agency.

Table of Contents:

So far in this series we’ve covered:

  • The foundations and mindset needed for a successful email strategy
  • Key Shopify email automations that every store will benefit from
  • Building a campaign strategy and what to send to your subscribers and customers

In today’s post, we’re going to look at 3 additional strategies you can use to get a higher ROI from the email channel, and further improve sales performance.

Let’s get to it!

#1 – Sync Your Email Marketing Lists & Segments With Facebook Custom Audiences

There are two main ways to use this strategy.

Use case example A

Using an advanced Shopify email software platform such as Klaviyo you’re able to segment your most valuable customers, then use those people to build lookalike audiences in Facebook.

This can be extremely powerful for boosting your cold Facebook prospecting campaigns, as you’re asking Facebook to find people very similar to your absolute best customers, and just show ads to them.

And it is not just Klaviyo that offers this functionality. A number of popular Ecommerce email marketing platforms have the full Facebook custom audience integration.

You might want to choose customers with strong loyalty for these audiences – such as those who have made 3, 5, or more purchases with you over their lifetime. Customers with large lifetime values are also great for building effective Facebook audiences from.

So if your store’s AOV is $50, you might want to segment off customers who have spent $500 or more with you and build Facebook lookalike audiences based on these people.

Below you can see that once an email list or segment is created, you can create a new custom audience in Facebook containing only these customers. This is an excellent group of people to use as a seed for powerful lookalikes.

Definitely try this out!

Klaviyo facebook look alike

Use case example B

Facebook custom audiences can be an excellent way to get maximum exposure for email promotions you send to your list.

For example, if you decide to send a 72 hour special offer to 30,000 of your subscribers, why not build a Facebook custom audience of the recipients and set up a 72 hour ad campaign promoting that same offer, to the same exact group of people?

Now you’ve given yourself the best possible opportunity to ensure the people you really want to see your sales message will be exposed to it multiple times throughout the duration of your campaign – across multiple channels and multiple devices.

#2 – Experiment With The Occasional Use of Plain Text Emails With a More Personalized Feel

One downside of marketing emails sent by brands is that for the most part they look exactly like what they are… promotions. This is not a bad thing as strong and consistent branding is highly important, and email plays a big role in re-enforcing that.

However, from time to time it can be beneficial to take a wildly different approach with your emails and send something to your list that simply looks like a regular email you’d write to a friend in Gmail.

We call this a plain text email.

No logos. No fancy graphics.

Just a couple of brief casual sentences that get the message across in a manner your audience is not used to seeing from you. We like to position these as a ‘quick note from the owner’ or something along those lines. Something that looks as though it was just written off the cuff, last minute on a Friday afternoon, as a reminder that a promotion you’re running is ending today for example.

This can act as a big pattern interrupt, and really get people’s attention. Open rates can be a lot higher than normal for these lightweight messages, and people really stop to take in the message because they aren’t seeing the big fancy graphics they’re so used to from brands. The mail has the look and feel of a message from a friend.

It can be as simple as this…

Hey >>Insert first name<<,

John here from ABCBrand.com

We’ve had a crazy week here this week with the huge 20% promo we’re running. The response has been overwhelming, but as always we’re doing whatever it takes to get every order in the mail within 24 hours for our customers. Today that means a late Friday night at the office!

If you didn’t get a chance to take advantage of the 20% off sale just yet… remember it ends tonight.

So make sure you head over to ABCBrand.com in the next few hours and grab whatever you need before the offer runs out. You don’t need a coupon code, but make sure you purchase before midnight.

Thanks for being a loyal customer, and have a great weekend.

John T, Owner

Something as simple as that can generate an excellent response rate and a good amount of additional sales. Here in our Klaviyo email marketing agency we like to use these towards the end of a big sale.

plain text email

Use this strategy sparingly so it keeps its novelty.

And I know this may not be something that’s on-brand for every store, but if you’re open to trying it you might be surprised at how well it performs.

#3 – Split-Test Your Automated Emails For Higher Open Rates, Which Means Better Deliverability & More Sales For Every Other Email You Send

Having continuous split tests running on your flows or automations is always a good idea. You can split test everything from templates, to copy, to offers and many other things. However one good place to start is with split-testing the subject lines for your automated emails, with an ongoing goal of beating the open rate of the current winner.

Doing this obviously mean that more people see your marketing messages and therefore have a chance to purchase. But a strong secondary benefit to improving these numbers is that over time it will increase the health of your email strategy as a whole… and mean that EVERY other email you send should perform better.

But why is this?

In general, better open rates in your account on average means better deliverability and better chances of hitting the inbox for anything you send. Because your email automations are constantly running the in the background on autopilot, they can do a lot to improve your overall account health and engagement.

This means that whenever you send a big campaign, more people are going to see it in their inboxes if your account is in good health. You’ll be in a great long-term position to see consistent sales from email without ending up in Spam folders.

Pay special attention to the open rates of your automated emails with the highest open and click rates. Examples would include the first emails in your abandoned cart and welcome sequences. Having great engagement stats on these messages which lots of people will see does wonder for your wider account deliverability.

Aim to run tests monthly, and always try to beat the current winner!

That’s all for today.

And this post actually brings this series to a close. I truly hope you found it valuable. If you’re able to put the time and effort into building an effective email strategy for your Ecommerce brand following the principles in these guides, you’ll absolutely see the benefits.

The email channel has always been one of the highest ROI marketing channels out there, and will be for a very long time to come.

Thank you for reading 🙂

Earlier Parts of This Shopify Email Marketing Guide:

Part 1: Results You Can Expect From Email & Why You Should Take It Seriously

Part 2: How to Build Your List & Implement The Core Ecommerce Email Automations For Additional Sales

Part 3: Campaigns to Drive Incremental Sales & Build Relationships With Your Audience

This is a guest contribution from Ryan Turner. Ryan is an eCommerce email marketing expert and founder of The Email Funnels Agency. He helps eCommerce brands profitably grow sales, increase repeat purchase rates, and scale their businesses using the latest email marketing strategies designed specifically for online retailers.

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