The 7 Must-Have eCommerce Marketing Automations

A robust series of automations are the present and future of email marketing. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an eCommerce business doing six figures a month from your Shopify store, or if you’re a chiropractor sending the odd newsletter to your patients — email automations NEED to be a part of your digital marketing strategy.

This begs the obvious question: What automations should I have?

While this post is being written for the average eCommerce store, many of these automations can be applied to many business types, regardless of niche or size.

Create These 7 Marketing Automations

The inspiration for this post came from my friends in the Mailchimp Partner Slack network. I asked them for a resource that outlines all the must-have email marketing automations for eComm clients.

There was one unanimous winner (a blog post) that came out of asking that question.

It was this article written by David Sandel for Low Gravity Solutions.

David’s recommended automations were as follows:

1. Abandoned cart

2. Abandoned browser

3. Welcome email

4. Nurture sequence

5. Purchase follow-up

6. Win-back (Re-engagement)

7. Sunset (List cleaning)

I’m going to dive in on each automation — I’ve added examples (and my thoughts) on each of David’s recommendations.

Let’s take a closer look.

Abandoned cart

Abandoned cart emails are an essential tool for any ecommerce business. By sending a reminder to customers who have left items in their shopping cart, you WILL boost your sales and improve your customer retention.

I wrote “will boost”, not “can boost”, because I have no doubt in my mind that if you set up even one abandoned cart email, you’ll get sales.

Shopify reports that 69.57% of online shopping carts are abandoned. That’s 7 in 10!

In that same report, Shopify shared that ~20% of contacts click while inside an abandoned cart email and 11% will purchase something as a result.

These numbers only rise when creating a multi-step abandoned cart automation.

Abandoned browser

The abandoned browser is an often overlooked automation that could pay huge dividends if set up correctly.

According to omnisend, 89.1% of website visitors never make it as far as placing an item in their cart. Sending those visitors a browser abandonment email can be a great way to get them to come back to your site and make a purchase.

For this level of re-engagement to work, you’ll need the visitor’s email address…obviously. So consider this another call to action to grow your email list!

One retailer reported that 26% of their yearly email revenue came from abandoned browser emails, despite being only 3% of their annual email sends.

Pro tip: Some subscribers might find this level of re-engagement to be creepy. Frankly, it IS creepy. But it does work. You be the judge, and don’t be afraid to test things out.

Welcome email

This is the most obvious automation of all the automations.

If someone reaches out via a contact form, you need to send them a welcome email. Not a confirmation email that confirms you received their inquiry, a WELCOME email.

Think about a welcome email like this:

That makes no sense.

It also doesn’t make sense that if someone reaches out via your contact form, they have to wait days before hearing back from someone.

Send the contact something fun, engaging, or valuable. Discounts, coupons, videos, blogs, and PDFs all work great depending on the context of what it is your business does.

If the incentive to send welcome emails still isn’t high enough for you, consider that they have a whopping 91.4% open rate. Over 9 in 10 people will open your welcome email if you’re doing it right.

Nurture sequence

I like the way David explained the nurture sequence, so I’ll just quote him here:

I wrote a nurture (onboarding) series for a lawyer client of mine. Contacts found it helpful in understanding the next steps in their journey through the Canadian legal system. My client found it helpful because I wrote it in such a way that weeded out clients that wouldn’t be a good fit for him.

Believe it or not, the open rates went up with each email in this series (there were 3 total).

When people are invested in your product or service, trust me: They will read your emails if they’re sent at the right time.

Purchase follow-up

When you’re done your meal at a restaurant, it’s almost a guarantee that the waiter will come up to you as they’re taking away your plate and ask, “How was everything?”

If you’re like me, 95% of the time, you’ll reply with the standard, “Everything was great!” even if it wasn’t.

But the odd time, when things are exceptionally good or bad, I’ll be more forthright with my feelings about the meal and service.

The purchase follow-up email is the digital version of your waiter asking you how your email was and according to OptinMonster, there are three types of emails in this category:

• The thank you letter — An email showing appreciation for the customer’s purchase. Perhaps a discount or referral code can be given as an added thank you.

• The product review — Give your customers a chance to give you feedback on your product or service. 3-7 days after a purchase, send them an email asking for a review. The review can be on Google, Facebook, Amazon, Houzz…whatever. Just ask!

• The product recommendation — This is a chance to upsell or cross-sell. Last week, I bought weightlifting straps. This week, I got an email asking if I wanted to buy a weightlifting belt and shoes. That’s smart marketing automation.

Win-back (Re-engagement)

You should have an automation that gets triggered when someone doesn’t engage with your emails after a certain amount of time.

When I write these kinds of emails, I like making the subject lines a bit click-baity:

• Are you still there, [first_name]?

• Come back, [first_name]!

• Was it something we said?

• Where’d you go?

This is a good win-back email from Myles Apparel.

Sunset (List cleaning)

If you’ve sent the win-back email and are still experiencing crickets on the other end, you’ll eventually have to look at cleaning that contact from your list.

I wrote a post about this not long ago called, Should You Send Emails To Inactive Subscribers?

The answer was nuanced. Way more shades of grey than anything resembling black or white.

The gist of it was this:

The reason we’d keep a contact on our list for four years, despite never actually hearing from them is that they did, on occasion, engage with our emails. They engaged just enough that it didn’t trigger list cleaning for their profile.

That said, if a person stayed on our list for even 12 months while never opening or clicking on an email, we’d probably think about cleaning them as a contact.

The cost-benefit of a smaller and more engaged list versus a bigger and less engaged list isn’t clear, so the parameters you set up for this automation may differ wildly from another business.

Always Be Testing

The Golden Rule of marketing is “Always be testing”. Some businesses may have great success with one abandoned cart email, others may need a series of three emails to get the best bang for their buck.

If you’re looking for inspiration for your automations, check out Really Good Emails and Email Love — you can find loads of welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, and more by using their search functions.

The bottom line that your need to be automating parts of your business with email marketing. While the examples I provided are focused on ecommerce, there are many non-sales-related automations you can deploy as well.

As an example, imagine if your website’s contact form had a drop down for common questions people ask. Then imagine if, based on their answer, you sent the contact a series of emails that answered their questions. That would be a helpful automation, and I’m sure you could make many of those.

I hope you learned a thing of two from this post.

Hit me up on LinkedIn or Twitter if you have any questions!

Cheers,Andrew