A step-by-step guide to your complete Email Marketing strategy. By following this step-by-step guide, you’ll gain all the knowledge, techniques, and tools necessary to improve your Commerce-related email marketing efforts and achieve success.
In my work with email marketing clients, I’ve identified a troubling trend:
91% of the clients I worked with had almost no automation
95% of them had super basic or default transactional emails
100% of them were willingly or not spamming their subscribers
These statistics reveal that there is a significant gap in how brands engage with their target audience and an enormous missed opportunity to foster meaningful connections. Automation is more than just a tool of convenience; it’s a crucial component for creating sustainable, customer-focused growth in email marketing.
Email marketing is now more influential than ever. It now offers vast potential for businesses looking to connect meaningfully with their targetted audience. If it is executed with the right strategies, it becomes a powerful tool to outshine competitors and to also capture the attention of your target audience, drive meaningful engagement, and boost sales. In this series, I’ll break down the foundational principles of email marketing, showing you how to craft campaigns that stand out and build lasting connections with your audience. Mastering the basics will create a competitive advantage that will position your brand for long-term success.
What are the most important KPIs you need to know in email marketing?
Deliverability
This tells you what percentage of your emails are landing in your recipients’ inboxes versus bouncing or getting stuck in junk folders. If your emails aren’t getting delivered, the rest doesn’t matter.
Open Rate
Open Rate is the percentage of subscribers who open a specific email out of the total sent. In simpler terms, how many of your emails are being opened? It directly reflects your subject lines and the sender’s reputation.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
CTR measures the percentage of people who clicked on a link in your email out of those who opened it. Is your content worth clicking on? Or are you just spamming your subscribers with noise?
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate tracks the percentage of subscribers who take the desired action, like making a purchase, after clicking through your email. This is where the sales happen: how many conversions are you driving from your emails?
When setting up email marketing automation, you need to get a few key factors to consider. These will make or break your campaigns and how well you connect with your audience.
Deliverability
This is one of the most important things to focus on when you’re starting. The more your subscribers open and, better yet, interact with your emails, the better your domain’s reputation becomes. A solid reputation means more of your emails will land in inboxes instead of the dreaded junk folder. Better deliverability = more sales.
In eCommerce email marketing, having a solid sender reputation translates directly into higher deliverability, more opens, and, ultimately, more revenue. Achieving a good sender reputation in eCommerce email marketing leads to better deliverability, resulting in more opens and ultimately driving more sales.
First, make sure your sending domain is set up correctly.
Are your emails being sent from an @yourdomain.com address? Or are you using a generic sender provided by your email service or hosting provider?
Sending emails from your domain shows email providers (like Gmail, Verizon, Yahoo, and others) that you’re a legitimate sender who takes responsibility for your content. Plus, it helps subscribers recognize your brand and trust your emails.
Check that your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records are configured properly to ensure everything is set.
Next, check if your domain has been blacklisted.
If your domain is blacklisted, it will hurt all of your email marketing efforts—and likely your entire business. Luckily, there are tools to help. I recommend using MXToolBox. It’s simple to use, and they even offer a free monitoring service so you can set up weekly automated checks to stay on top of things.
By getting these foundational elements right, you’ll set yourself up for better deliverability, stronger campaigns, and more successful email marketing.
Related Article
Here is a detailed guide on the three essential checks you should prioritize to improve your email deliverability.
Transactional Emails
Alright! You’ve confirmed that your sending domain is set up correctly and that your domain isn’t blacklisted; that’s a great start. Now, here’s the next simple yet impactful thing you can do today to boost your domain reputation and improve email deliverability: Optimize your transactional emails
Transactional emails (like New Account confirmations, New Order notifications, Forgot Password emails, etc.) are often overlooked, ignored, or worse, sometimes even disabled entirely. But here’s the thing: these are the most opened emails you’ll ever send. Seriously, nothing else comes close.
Now, imagine this: what if you could take these highly opened emails and make them work harder for you? By encouraging your subscribers to interact with them, click links, and engage with your content, you’d essentially tell email providers like Gmail, Verizon, Hotmail, and Yahoo that your emails are relevant, valuable, and worth delivering to the inbox.
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. Transactional emails in Magento (or whatever platform you use) are relatively easy to customize. Over the years, I’ve refined and tested templates that achieve two main goals:
- Keep the messaging clear and make the purpose of the email immediately obvious. No one wants to search for important details.
- Include relevant links. Add links that matter and entice the subscriber to click, whether it’s tracking their order, learning about a related product, or revisiting your site.
Transactional emails offer a massive opportunity to improve email deliverability and build trust with your audience with minimal effort.
Related Article
Want to dive deeper? I’ve broken down the process of optimizing transactional emails in this article. Don’t miss it!
Open Rate
The conversation around email open rates often revolves around subject lines, with countless articles and experts emphasizing their importance. While subject lines still matter, the game has changed significantly by 2020. Assuming you already know not to use spammy, all-caps subject lines, let’s get to the real ways to improve your open rates:
Clean Up Your List
Do you have subscribers who haven’t opened an email or made a purchase in over a year? Remove them. What about those who purchased once but never engaged with your emails afterward? Remove them, too.
Focus only on active subscribers. Keeping your list clean will improve your domain reputation, directly impacting your deliverability and open rates.
Stop Overloading with Bulk Emails
Seriously, STOP sending so many bulk emails.
The transition from bulk sending to automation is a game-changer. Automated emails consistently achieve higher open rates and better click-through rates, boosting your domain reputation. This, in turn, improves the effectiveness of any bulk emails you send out.
Click-Through Rate
Let’s address a common misconception: improving click-through rates is not just about having better email designs and clearer communication, though these are important. The truth goes deeper.
To truly boost your click-through rates:
Reduce Spammy Bulk Emails
If you’re blasting out two bulk emails every week, ask yourself: how much time are you spending on crafting thoughtful content and designing those emails? Probably not much.
Sending fewer bulk emails allows you to shift your focus to meaningful automation and thoughtful email design.
Invest in Better Email Designs
Fewer emails mean more time to dedicate to creating high-quality, engaging designs. Better designs result in clearer communication, stronger messaging, and, ultimately, more clicks.
Automate Emails
Automation isn’t just about convenience; it’s about results. Automated emails consistently outperform bulk emails because they are more personalized, timely, and relevant to the subscriber.
Automation & Personalization
Email Marketing Automation is still surprisingly underused, even though it’s absolutely AMAZING! Seriously, automation will save you time, cut down costs, boost your sales, and give you a massive edge over your competition. Sound good? It should.
If you’re already interested (and let’s face it, why wouldn’t you be?), I’ve put together a series of no-nonsense articles to walk you through every step of the setup process. Follow them, and you’ll have a corporate-level Email Marketing Automation program running in your store in no time.
Article 1: The Quick Guide to Email Marketing Automation – A simple, actionable guide to help you hit the ground running.
Article 2: Email Marketing Automation – The Blueprint – A deeper dive into building a scalable, results-driven automation strategy.
Go through these, and you’ll have everything you need to set up automation that actually works.
Need help along the way? Reach out to me below, and I’ll do my best to guide you through your specific case. Let’s get your automation game on point!
So thorough! Honestly, it’s a lot of information and as I’ve read through the article it all made sense but I’m a bit discouraged to get started… Do you have a shorter step by step guide for each component? Or maybe an e-course? Thank you!
Hi Jeff!
You’re spot on – I’m currently working on getting smaller, step-by-step guides prepped for each email marketing component and a couple of case studies on Magento. I just dropped a guide on Transactional emails optimization and Magento instructions.