Email marketing is one of the most effective initiatives for successful eCommerce businesses. Statista’s research shows 80% of industry experts use email as a marketing strategy.

One way to reach out to an existing and potential customer base is by sending out a newsletter. They are an essential component in the overall marketing strategy, especially in sales generation.

When sending your eCommerce newsletter, you need to remember that your customer’s inboxes are crowded. So, one of the key components is to find a way to grab their attention.

Research by American email marketing service provider Mailchimp shows that the average open rate of newsletters in the eCommerce sector is 15.68%.

Therefore, for your marketing campaign to succeed, you need your newsletter to stand out from the crowd. In this article, we’ll look at some of the ways to do that.

What is an eCommerce Newsletter?

Newsletter marketing involves sending company information, announcements, or product-focused content via email to a list of existing subscribers.

E-commerce businesses send out this email to carefully picked segments of current and potential customers to engage them and communicate any new offerings to generate sales.

eCommerce businesses need a newsletter to keep the customers in the know about any new products and company news.

This marketing strategy keeps the brand on top of their minds because customers get notified as soon as there is a new development going on.

Your newsletters aren’t limited solely to one item like promotional emails; they can be used to communicate a wider range of information.

How To Make Your eCommerce Newsletter Stand Out?

According to research by Statista, global email users are expected to reach 4.6 billion by 2025, up from 4 billion in 2020. This presents an opportunity for marketers to reach more people via email marketing using newsletters.

Here are some of the ways to make your newsletter stand out from the competition.

Have a Clear Purpose For The Newsletter

To create content that stands out, you need a clear purpose. When you have a focus, it becomes easier to make it engaging. You need to decide whether the newsletter is meant to introduce seasonal sales, announce new products and services, or the company’s limited offers.

Additionally, the newsletter’s purpose can be audience building, creating referrals, or getting customer feedback about the new product or service.

You can also announce company procedures such as a product return policy for your eCommerce. When your customers understand the return policy, they are more likely to buy from you again. 

Understand what you are communicating and to which audience. It’s essential to know why your audience signed up for the emails because this gives you direction for the newsletter.

Define Your Newsletter Strategy

Along with having a strong business strategy, you also need a newsletter strategy before you start sending out emails.

A strategy covers details such as the topics you’ll cover, how the audience will sign-up for updates, and the frequency of sending emails. This strategy should be part of your overall marketing campaign.

Define the audience you need to reach out to and create content that appeals to them. Additionally, you should consider having multiple email lists segmented to the audience according to their interests.

Email segmentation into unique sets of groups helps businesses improve their email metrics and increase sales.

Choose A Newsletter Platform

There are different email marketing platforms that your eCommerce can use to send the newsletter.

Instead of using regular mail clients like Gmail, send your eCommerce newsletter on email marketing platforms such as Mailchimp, SendInBlue, or Campaign Monitor. These offer all the tools you need to send newsletters and create strong welcome email sequences.

An ideal email newsletter platform has tools such as built-in email templates, email personalization, customizable themes, email automation, email testing, email scheduling, and campaign analytics.

All these features make the newsletter sending process much easier.

In addition, a professional platform prevents your emails from landing in the spam folder and your audience can receive the content in their inboxes.

Customize Your Newsletter Theme and Design Template

To stand out in your customer’s inbox, you need a custom design with a unique layout, font, and color scheme that is easily recognizable.

Your eCommerce needs to have a consistent design that builds familiarity. Choose a theme and template from the email marketing platform that matches your brand colors and fonts.

Some platforms like Mailchimp allow you to select a layout and template and customize it to have your business logo and company colors. Ensure that the design is also eye-catchy to prompt your audience to open the email.

Optimize Email Subject Lines

A report by Forbes shows that boring subject lines are one of the reasons customers don’t open emails. Subject lines create that first impression; hence, they need to be

creative enough to entice your audience to open the newsletter. It should also be personal instead of generic for it to stand out.

Before sending out your first eCommerce newsletter, conduct some tests to see how the subject line appears on the email. This will help you address issues in advance, like the key message cutting-off before sending any emails to your customers.

Keep The Email Interesting and Simple

Email marketing can generate sales for your eCommerce business, but only if you know how to write an effective copy. You need to keep the story short and to the point to draw the reader in. Make the email easy to read and relatable. You can also personalize the email to improve the click rates.

According to research by Campaign Monitor, personalized email messages improve the click-through rate by 14% and conversions by 10% because they make the customer feel important.

To stand out from other brands, use clear product images and visuals. Eye-catching visuals will give your eCommerce newsletter more personality.

Have A Clear Call-To-Action (CTA)

Every newsletter should have a strong call to action. The CTA tells your audience what you want them to do. You can use it to direct your subscribers to your website to read more information or purchase products.

You need to have the CTA featured prominently and easy to find. Make it clear how they can complete the action for the best results. You can also include the CTA a few times by using a text link, using a button, or linking to a product image.

Use Social Media To Push The Newsletter

For your newsletter to reach more people and stand out, you need to use social media. Ask people to sign up for the newsletter via social media and add a link to subscribe on your Instagram or Twitter bio.

In addition, if you have a new newsletter out, promote it to your followers. Share updates across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram to keep your audience in the know. To increase your subscribers, you can also sponsor paid ads and target them to potential customers.

Include an “Unsubscribe” Option

Your emails must include the “Unsubscribe” option for customers who want to opt-out. Ensure that the opt-in forms are visible to your audience if they don’t want to receive any more communication from you. The “Unsubscribe” option is required by law; therefore, ensure that it’s included.

When including this option, you can also give your recipients alternative options. Instead of having the all-or-nothing unsubscribe option, an ideal newsletter allows recipients to manage their preferences. You can do this by providing some options for your audience to change the email frequency or to update their preferences if they don’t want to receive a specific type of email.

Optimize Your Email For Different Devices

Online shopping has become more common today; therefore, you need to prioritize eCommerce email marketing in 2022. To reach your audience, your emails should be optimized for mobile phone and tablet viewing.

The number of smartphone users globally is 6.648 billion, translating to 83.72% of the world’s population. More and more people are shopping via their phones.

So, conduct an email test to ensure the content can be viewed on the phone before sending out the first newsletter.

Some email automation tools offer a mobile and increasingly popular “dark-mode” preview to make the job easier for you.

Send The Newsletter Consistently

To offer value to your audience, the eCommerce newsletter should be sent consistently. Set a schedule early on and decide whether it should be weekly or monthly. The send schedule affects the open and click-through rates; so, you should choose your day and time of the day wisely.

If you have a new product, schedule the newsletter during this period for promotion purposes. You need to ensure that your inventory management system is efficient and that you have enough stocks if the newsletter generates orders. If your newsletter is about a new product, you need to have the inventory ready for shipping to avoid any delivery delays.

How Do You Gauge The Success Of Your eCommerce Newsletter?

Here are some ways to check whether your eCommerce newsletter is achieving its objective. 

Increased Recipients

You can gauge the success of your newsletter by looking at the number of subscribers. Check the analytics on your email marketing platform to see if you have any new subscribers based on your past campaigns.

Open and Click Rate

When measuring your analytics, you need to check how many people opened the email and newsletter and the number of people each newsletter has reached. Additionally, you also need to monitor the click-through rate. As per research by Mailchimp, the average click rate in the eCommerce sector is 2.01% which shows if the customers have fulfilled the desired action.

Purchases

You can measure the success of your eCommerce newsletter if the customers are making purchases based on information from the newsletter. Monitor the company’s generated revenue from the newsletter marketing campaign and use this information to improve.

Summary 

E-commerce newsletters can help your business generate leads. Sending newsletters allows you to be personal with your customer and incorporate targeted messaging.

Additionally, they allow the eCommerce business to get the message directly to the consumer’s inbox, forging a continuous communication channel.

Building a solid email list can grow a loyal customer base.  

Author’s Bio

Jake Rheude is the Vice President of Marketing for Red Stag Fulfillment, an eCommerce fulfillment warehouse that was born out of eCommerce. He has years of experience in eCommerce and business development.