The Shopify Email Marketing Guide Part 1: Results You Can Expect From Email & Why You Should Take It Seriously

Welcome to part 1 of 4 in this Shopify Email Marketing Guide by Ryan Turner.

Posted 6 years ago by Tamal Santra

Over these 4 posts I’ll be showing you exactly how to increase your Ecommerce sales by 10% – 30% with proven email marketing strategies that are working today. These same strategies are used by the big online brands we all recognize to generate tens of millions each year from email.

The great news is that you don’t have to be a huge brand to get fantastic results from email marketing. These strategies can work just as well for you as they do for MVMT, Pura Vida, and the like. In fact, my team and I use them every day at The Email Funnels Agency for brands large and small.

So who is this series for?

Any Shopify brand looking to profitably grow sales, increase customer lifetime values, and convert more website visitors into new buyers.

It doesn’t matter where you’re starting from.

Whether you have zero email strategies in place, just a few trusted campaigns you like to send, or a more advanced setup with multiple automation already working – this 4 part guide WILL help you grow your sales.

So let’s get started!

Shopify Email Marketing Results: What Can I Expect?

Let’s start by setting some expectations.

The amount of revenue you generate from email marketing depends heavily on the time and effort you put into setting things up, planning your activity, and creating good campaigns your audience actually wants to receive.

There are no shortcuts!

If you only set up a basic cart abandonment campaign and leave things at that, don’t expect more than a few percents of your total sales to come from email.

Just want to send a monthly newsletter and nothing else? Then the same thing applies.

However, if you follow through and implement the strategies we outline in this guide, most brands can expect to see 20% – 30% of revenue coming from the email channel. And in some cases more..

With the key email automation in place, and backed up by high quality manually sent campaigns and promotions, you’ll have no trouble hitting these numbers and seeing a significant portion of your sales being attributed to email… much of it being generated completely on autopilot.

Mindset: Why Should I Invest Time, Effort And Money Into A Shopify Email Strategy?

This is important to cover. Seeing 10-30% of sales driven by email sounds good, but there are even more benefits which aren’t quite so obvious.

Many store owners hear email being talked about as a big opportunity, but don’t truly understand why it is important or what the true value of a comprehensive strategy is.

So here are the highlights…

1 – Email increases the value of every single visitor to your Shopify Store

Not just every lead or customer, but every single website visitor you get.

Why?

For every person who visits your store and doesn’t buy immediately, email gives you multiple additional opportunities to convert them into a customer at some point in the future.

Shopify email automation such as cart abandonment, browse abandonment and the non-buyer welcome series allow you to recover lost website traffic, and turn these people into new paying customers without any effort required on your part.

Also, a holiday email promotion you send out next week could easily convert someone who opted into your email list 3 months ago and had completely forgotten that your brand existed. Now you have a new paying customer who likely would have been lost forever if it wasn’t for your email strategy.

This all adds up to a higher ROI on every dollar spent in other marketing channels such as Facebook Ads, PPC, Influencer campaigns, and even SEO – because email gives you so many ways to turn ‘lost’ website traffic you’d already paid for into future sales.

2 – Sales generated by email are often more profitable than sales driven by ads

Marketing channel wise return on investment (ROI)  (source LYFE Marketing)

Think about this for a second.

If you gain a new customer from Facebook Ads or Google Adwords, you might pay 30% or more of the sale value in advertising costs. After taking into account your Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) and other operating costs, there is often not much profit left over.

A key benefit of email marketing is that there is no advertising cost for any sales coming from the channel.

Yes, you’ll pay a small monthly fee for a good email marketing platform, but for a few hundred dollars per month, you can market to your list of tens of thousands of people as often as you like. And the bigger your list gets, the lower your monthly cost per subscriber will be.

So with very minimal acquisition costs compared to paid advertising, sales coming from the email channel can be wildly profitable and give you fantastic profit margins.

3 – Bring new revenue into your business every day on true autopilot

How would you feel if you saw 10-15% in additional revenue every day, knowing it was being generated automatically?

A good email strategy can give you that, once it has been implemented correctly.

Many brands see about 50% of their email revenue coming from automated sequences that are always working away in the background, with the other 50% driven by manually sent campaigns. In some cases, automation generates an even bigger percentage.

What this means for you is that once your automated Ecommerce email sequences are setup, you’ll have more sales rolling in each month that require zero time or effort from you or your team to generate.

4 – Increased customer loyalty and greater customer lifetime values

These benefits really speak for themselves. The more often you can get customers to buy from you, the more attached to your brand they get, the more likely they are to talk about you to their friends… and the healthier your business will be!

It is common knowledge that converting an existing customer is FAR cheaper that converting a new customer, and email makes the whole process seamless.

But What If I Don’t Have An Email List?

Good question!

Obviously, you need a list of people to market to if you want email to be effective for your brand. If you’re already selling on Shopify successfully then you have that – your existing customer base, and some non-buyer prospects. Even if you haven’t been doing any email marketing so far, hooking an email tool up to your store and getting prepared to start emailing to your current customers is not difficult.

And if you’re just starting out from scratch, or wondering how to grow your current list more quickly, we’ll be showing you exactly how to build your email list effectively from the current traffic your store gets… whether that’s 100 people per day or 100,000!

That’s coming up soon in part 2 of this guide, where we’ll be diving deep into Shopify email marketing automation to start maximizing your sales on autopilot.

In the meantime, if you want to learn more about list growth you can check out these 8 proven ways to build your email list from our blog.

Happy selling!

In the Part -2 of the Shopify email marketing guide, we have discussed how to build your list & implement the core ecommerce email automations for additional sales.

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.