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What is Email Marketing?

As the name suggests, promoting your brand, products, and services through commercial emails is called email marketing. Businesses also use email marketing to build trust and loyalty.

The receivers are usually your customers who have permitted you to send promotional messages by signing up to your email list.

The promotional emails brands send to their customers typically have a call-to-action button embedded. These buttons, when clicked on, will take customers to a product or service page.

Today, the market has intelligent email marketing tools like SEO to personalize your emails and target the right audience for the best ROI.

6 Benefits of Email Marketing for Ecommerce

1. It's Extremely Affordable

If you are a small business, email marketing is perhaps one of the best ways to start. It is way cheaper than other forms of advertising.

It also requires less time to manage. Hence you need not allocate more resources to manage it. There are automation tools to help you schedule the mails in advance.

You can start your email marketing campaign with even $10 per month. Several companies offer free plans as well. For example, Brevo’s paid plan starts at $8. You can send up to 10,000 emails per month using this plan.

Compared to other marketing materials, generating content for your email marketing is extremely cheap. You can use your in-house designers and copywriters to your advantage.

2. It Converts Better

Email marketing fares well in terms of Open Rate (OR), Click-through Rate (CTR), and Click-to-Open Rate (CTOR.) When these three things fall in place, the Conversion Rate also starts to shoot up.

According to a study by Mailer lite, the average email OR, CTR, and CTOR for 2025 are 43.46%, 2.09%, and 6.81%, respectively. And the conversion rate stands at 15.22%.

Though the email marketing conversion rate has been steadily declining for the last few years, we must consider the astonishing growth of e-commerce. Not to mention the ubiquitous advertising that comes with the growth.

Also, bear in mind that the average conversion rate for e-commerce sites in the US stands at 2.63%.

The main driving factors for the high conversion rate are segmentation and personalization. Unlike other marketing channels, you can laser-target your audience in email marketing with personalized subject lines and more.

3. You Own Your Email List

Trends die, but classics do not. In a world full of viral marketing and influencer campaigns, adopt email marketing to remain a classic.

Email marketing has been here for more than 40 years. Yes. That was not a typo. The first email marketing campaign happened in 1978. Though Thuerk, the sender, was widely criticized for sending unsolicited emails, the campaign was successful.

"We sold $13 million or $14 million worth of the DEC machines (computers) through that campaign," Thuerk says.

Email marketing stands the test of time. Unlike your social media accounts, you have complete control over your email list. To be precise, you OWN the list.

Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter may get pushed to extinction. Take the case of TikTok. When it was banned in India, people who had crazy followings lost them all just like that.

4. Great ROI

The best part is that email marketing gives you an impressive (Return on Investment) ROI than any other marketing strategy.

According to this study, for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can get a return of $38. The reason for the great ROI is because email marketing is personalized.

Unlike other marketing channels, email marketing empowers you to segment your audience and send them one-to-one messages.

Let's see some data on how powerful email marketing is. Nearly 64% of small businesses across the globe use email marketing to get in touch with their customers. It helps them forge a good relationship with customers.

B2B audiences give more importance to emails than point-blank advertisements.

5. To Laser-target

We live in an age where everyone gets bombarded with loads and loads of advertisements from dawn to dusk.

Complaints are pouring in from all corners that personalized ads blatantly violate people's privacy. The meaning of personalization is lost in the advertisement battle.

This is where email marketing scores. Emails are less intrusive and can be genuinely personalized according to marketing needs.

Targeted personalized advertising will make your customers engage. They will feel unique while seeing their name in the subject line.

Now, what does that mean for your business? According to a study, personalizing your emails will increase the transaction rates by six times.

If you are an e-commerce store, you can send out Abandoned Cart Emails, displaying the product(s) left behind by your email subscribers. You can even give them unique coupon codes to complete the purchase.

6. More Brand Awareness

The amount of interaction between a business and a prospect determines the level of brand awareness.

The challenge here is to get a prospect's attention enough to implant your brand in their mind. Emails help you do this.

Since email marketing enjoys a high OR, CTR, and CTOR, you have enough room and time to tell your brand story that they will remember forever.

Take the case of social media. Your customers need to log in to see you. On the contrary, your customers will get a notification whenever you send a promotional email to them.

The flexibility to personalize emails empowers brands to make a lasting impression. If you call a customer by their name or give them a nickname (based on segmentation) and offer them a unique code, chances are high for them to remember your brand.

13 Ecommerce Email Marketing Tips

1. Offer Discounts

You can make your customers feel special by offering them discounts. By segmenting your audience based on their purchase history, you can give the most loyal ones a better deal.

For those who added products to their cart but did not purchase, you can send discount codes. On seeing the code, they will get encouraged to complete the purchase.

You can also send out coupon codes to your customers on their birthdays.

Emails are great to make your regular customers sign up for a loyalty program. While doing so, include an urgency factor in the email.

For instance, you can offer a 'Gift Card' or 'Free Delivery for 90 Days' if they sign up for the program in the next 30 minutes.

Include a timer in the email and see how people beeline to your loyalty program.

2. Optimize for Mobile Devices

Statistics clearly tell people's paradigm shift from big screens to mobile phones.

According to Campaign Monitor, today, more emails are opened on mobiles than desktops.

Younger generations prefer mobiles over other devices for accessing emails. Another fact you must consider is that people do not tolerate poorly formatted emails.

Your email is likely to be deleted in under 3 seconds if it is not optimized for mobile phones. Nearly 15% of your subscribers will even unsubscribe if the content is not displayed correctly on their mobile devices.

With mobile phones, the email marketing game is a bit different. Please take advantage of the preheader as it takes a prominent space in the email inbox.

When it comes to the CTA buttons, make them finger-friendly. Make the touch targets no less than 45 pixels, which is a typical adult's finger width.

3. Keep the Design Simple

While designing a newsletter or a promotional email, keep it as simple as possible.

People's attention span has touched new lows in recent years. Do not expect them to consume a large amount of content through your email.

Instead, vet the parts that do not serve the purpose of the email and cut to the chase.

That does not mean you should talk about business straight away. In fact, doing so will hurt your business.

Never use Sales Language in your emails. Make the recipients want to be a part of your company as a customer.

Try to invoke emotions and proofread before sending emails.

4. Auto-enable email Subscription

There are multiple ways to make people subscribe to your email list. You can also leverage the checkout page to get subscribers, apart from placing an email subscription box on your website.

An email opt-in box is a nice addition to your checkout page. You can also include a small message about why your customers should subscribe to your email list. Give them a compelling reason to subscribe.

A pre-checked opt-in box is excellent for collecting emails. The more actions you force your customers to make before completing a purchase, the higher their frustration.

Keep your checkbox selected by default so that customers can subscribe to your email list quickly. If you are concerned about your customer's consent, keep the box unmarked.

5. Use an Automation Tool

Automation saves your time, and everyone in the business world knows time translates into money.

Using an automation tool for your email marketing eases the workload of your team. It helps your workforce save its energy for more creative works that require human intervention and dedication.

Secondly, automation helps you stay consistent.

You can stick to an email marketing schedule for a week, a month, and probably for a few months. But sooner or later, you will stray a little since sending emails is a mundane task. And this is where your success may lie.

Inconsistency is bad for business. An automation tool can help you concentrate on what really matters. And if you think automation tools are just for scheduling, you are WRONG.

There is more than meets the eye.

Segmentation, personalization, analytics, and quality lead generation are the other features of a standard email marketing tool.

6. Upsell & Cross-sell

Email marketing is phenomenal to increase your average order value.

You can program your automation tool to send pre-drafted emails to customers when they are ordering your products.

Let's say a customer order a 'Dog Bed' from your store. You can encourage your customer to add a hot-selling 'Dog Blanket' to the order in a cross-sell email.

If the email prompts the customer to do the same, your store's average order value will increase.

You can set up email sequences to do this job.

You can dictate your automation tool to send the mail as soon as a customer adds a product to their cart. If you think that will make you sound too pushy, you can email them right after ordering.

But it is recommended to send upsell or cross-sell mail before your customers check out.

7. Be Creative

Newsletters are boring. There is no denying that. No matter how easy email marketing is compared to other forms of marketing, you still need to sweat a little to make the most out of it.

One spot where email marketing loses its charm is its static nature. You must do something creative and unique to turn heads. Do it otherwise, and you will get lost in the sea of emails and newsletters.

On average, people get 121 emails every day. To make people open and read yours, you must do something unique and creative.

Try out quirky layouts, funny one-liners, and give recipients nicknames.

Use the K.I.S.S (Keep it Super Simple) strategy while drafting emails. Keep your tone conversational and write digestible content.

Leverage memes and cartoon characters to get noticed. But don't come off as a spammer. Do it with elegance.

8. Give a Personal Touch

There is a reason people prefer email marketing over other channels to receive marketing materials. They feel that email marketing does not intrude on their privacy.

Leveraging this advantage, you can forge a strong relationship with customers. Start with sending out birthday e-cards, coupled with special coupons.

Show them that you care, and they will remember you.

Maya Angelou once said, "People will forget what you said, but will never forget how you made them feel."

This is true when it comes to personalized marketing emails.

Personalization goes beyond just including your customer's name in the mail. It's even beyond sending birthday and anniversary cards. Personalization is knowing what your customers like and dislike.

Sending details on Indoor Game Items to a travel enthusiast will yield you little or no result.

9. Segment Your Audience

Categorizing your audience will help you in allocating your resources. Segmentation and Personalization go hand in hand.

You can personalize your emails only if you segment your audience in the first place.

When you segment your audience, you will know what message to send to which customer at what time.

For example, sending back-to-back emails to a loyalty program member to sign up for the same will put you in a bad light.

Also, sending details about your new baby products collection to a father is nearly pointless. P.S. This is not a sexist statement. WE ARE TALKING BUSINESS HERE. A mother is your best bet to sell baby products.

It is that simple.

10. Don't forget the CTA

If you are sending an abandonment cart email, do not forget to add a strong Call-to-Action (CTA) button.

Do not expect the recipients to click the URL link you have included in the mail. Ease their job by adding a prominent CTA button such as Buy Now and Shop Now.

While doing so, be congruent. Use the same CTA button color of your website in the email.

Let's say you are taking a survey among your customers about the deals they would like to see often.

Instead of giving them a form to fill out, you can just give them touch targets so that they do not have to toil to participate in the survey.

Yes. In today's context, asking someone to fill form fields is considered equivalent to asking them to toil under the sun.

11. everage the Subject Lines

Subject lines are the hooks to get the clicks. Spend more time drafting them. Including your customer's name in it will make them feel unique.

However, some customers may feel that their privacy is being compromised if you use their name. Hence, it is up to you to decide on this.

Never use an exclamatory mark or strange characters such as * and # in your subject lines.

People may mistake your emails for spam messages. Always give them a hint of what's inside the mail.

The hook must entice them to open the mail and read the content. But do not be too mysterious in your subject line in the name of hint.

Speak in people's language. Infuse your emails with the right emotions. Trust us; it touches them.

12. Use Spin-to-Win Wheels

Several Shopify stores use this trick to build their email list.

Let's accept a fact. The traditional newsletter subscription boxes that you see at the bottom of most e-commerce websites are dull and lifeless.

You need something eye-catchy to make your store visitors sign up for your newsletter.

Discount wheels are excellent attention-grabbers. They improve the User Experience (UX) too.

Discount wheels are spin-to-win wheels to give discount codes to your customers in a fun-filled way.

At first, your customers may scratch their heads as to the purpose of the wheel. Hence you have to give them a brief explanation of the wheel.

Start with something like, "Feeling lucky today?" and ask your site visitors to give their email id to make the wheel spin for a welcome coupon code.

Make sure you disable the wheel for existing customers. Otherwise, the wheel may annoy them and prove unfavorable to the user experience.

13. Don't Forget To Brand

To begin with, let's talk about congruency.

Do not use colors, patterns, designs, and fonts that are not part of your brand. Uniformity across different channels will make people remember your brand.

Remember: A marketing space is not a place to play around with brand elements.

Secondly, keep your tone consistent. If you want to be funny with your emails, be funny all the way. Do not change your approach midway.

If you are a baby products store and want to forge a meaningful relationship with mothers, write emotive copies. And stay the same on all of your copies. As time goes, the customers will start associating their emotions with your brand.

Thirdly, do include your social media icons in all your newsletters and marketing emails. Tell your customers that they can find you on their favorite platforms too.

Core Insights

1. Personalize and Segment Your Audience

2. Offer Discounts and Exclusive Promotions

3. Optimize Emails for Mobile Devices

4. Use Email Automation Tools

5. Keep Email Design Simple and Clear

6. Create Strong Subject Lines and CTAs

7. Maintain Consistent Branding and Creativity