All You Need To Know About Ecom Email Marketing (in 13 Minutes)

What Actually Matters in Ecom Email Marketing

There is a ridiculous amount of information about email marketing online. You could spend hours learning about subject lines, flows, segmentation, deliverability, email design, A/B testing, and a hundred other things. But in reality, not all of those things matter equally.

I've been doing email marketing for e-commerce brands for nearly five years now. And in that time, my agency has generated over $50 million in email-attributed revenue for our clients. What I've realized is that most brands tend to fall on one of two sides of email marketing.

On one side, they see what a nine-figure brand is doing and assume that a seven-figure brand should be doing the exact same thing: that you might need dozens of hyperspecific segments, massive, complicated flows with hundreds of different branches, that you should be constantly running five or 10 or dozens more A/B tests at the same time.

Suddenly, you've built this incredibly complicated email marketing system without ever stopping to ask whether any of that complexity is actually making you more money. Usually, it's not.

Then, on the other hand, you have the complete opposite: brands that have spent months and months perfecting their product pages and website, tested hundreds of ad creatives, and optimized their website conversion rate to its maximum. Then you open their email account, and they don't even have a proper abandoned cart flow set up.

Both are leaving money on the table, but for different reasons. For the vast majority of ecom brands, you don't need to do everything. You just have to do the important things well.

That's what I'm going to talk about in this video. I'm going to cut through all of that and teach you what I consider to be at least 80% of what actually matters in ecom email marketing in about 10 minutes. We're going to start with probably the most important thing to understand.

1. Email Marketing Starts With Traffic

The first thing you need to understand is that email marketing starts with traffic. Before somebody can join your list, abandon a cart, or enter any of your flows, they have to actually visit your website, and they have to know who you are.

So if you're only getting 500, even a thousand visitors a month, focus on getting people to your website first before spending too much time on email. You could build the greatest email marketing campaigns and strategies in the world, but if there aren't even people entering your website, it's not really going to make much of an impact.

Your bigger priority is getting more qualified traffic, because more traffic means you're going to grow your list faster. More people are going to abandon their carts. You're going to get more customers and, ultimately, more people you can bring back to purchase again.

This is why email becomes really valuable as a brand begins to grow. It's not that you shouldn't invest in email early. I think that's a great idea, but you don't need to be building these complex strategies.

If you're spending tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars every month acquiring traffic, email gives you a way to get incredible value out of those people without paying Meta or Google every time you want to reach them again.

Email marketing starts with traffic. And once you have that traffic, the next question is how much of it you're actually capturing.

2. Your Email List

Your email list is one of the most valuable assets your ecom business can build. But list size alone is not what's important. I'd rather have 20,000 people on my list who actually want to hear from me than 200,000 contacts who haven't engaged in years.

For most ecom brands, building that list starts with your website. The usual funnel is someone visits, they see a pop-up, and you give them a reason to subscribe. Usually, that's something like 10% off, free shipping, early access, or whatever makes sense for your brand.

What you're doing here with the pop-up is you're essentially making a trade. They're giving you permission to communicate with them, and you give them something valuable in return.

That permission is very important. Do not buy lists. Do not scrape emails. And don't import thousands of people who never agreed to receive your marketing in the first place, because the goal isn't to build the biggest list possible. That's just going to ruin your reputation down the road. It's to build a list of people who actually want to hear from you.

Once they're on that list, that's where the flows come in.

3. Flows

What are flows? Flows are basically automated emails that get sent whenever somebody takes a specific action on your site or within your list. Someone joins your email list, abandons their cart, makes a purchase, and an email or series of emails is automatically triggered based on that action.

This is another area where brands tend to overcomplicate things. You don't need 15 or 20 different automations to have a good email marketing system. For the majority of Shopify brands out there, the foundation is just four.

Your welcome flow, which welcomes new subscribers and gives them whatever you promised them when they signed up.

Number two and three are your abandoned cart and abandoned checkout flows, which remind people who were interested in buying but didn't finish their purchase.

Lastly is your post-purchase flow, which thanks customers for their order, follows up after the purchase, and eventually asks them for a review.

That's all you need. That's your foundation. If you're still building towards seven figures, get those core flows working properly before worrying about creating some massive automation system.

Once you're past seven figures, though, and do have enough customers moving through the business, that's when those more advanced flows start becoming much more worthwhile. Get the foundation right first and then build on top of it.

4. Campaigns

The other half of your email strategy should be focused on campaigns. Unlike flows, campaigns aren't necessarily triggered automatically by something a customer does, although you can make unique segments. I'll talk about that later.

Campaigns are emails you actively choose to send to your audience. Maybe you're launching a new product, running a promotion, highlighting a new release or a bestseller—simply giving people another reason to think about your brand.

You could think of flows as your automated foundation, and campaigns are how you consistently stay in front of your audience. For most growing ecom brands, I'd start by aiming around two to three campaigns per week. Not more than that, though.

I would advise most brands to not build your email strategy around discounts. You can talk about your products, tell stories, educate customers, share reviews, announce something new, and, of course, make a good offer. The important thing is that you're consistently giving people a reason to come back without giving away the farm every time.

In a nutshell, flows respond to customer interactions, and campaigns give them a reason to interact with your brand. As you start sending more campaigns to a bigger audience, the next thing you need to understand is who should actually receive them. That's where segmentation comes in.

5. Segmentation

Segmentation really is just deciding which people in your list should receive your emails. For most brands, you really don't need to overcomplicate this.

Your core campaign audience should generally be your 90-day engaged segment: people who have opened or clicked an email within roughly the last 90 days. That's who I'd send most of your regular campaigns to.

The only times I would send out to your entire audience would be on very rare occasions like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or a really big product release that you're doing.

I would only focus on engaged segments to begin. But once you start growing your email list a little more, with 25,000-plus engaged subscribers, that's when you can maybe start having a little fun with customers versus non-customers, VIPs, product-specific users, and so on.

Of course, these aren't laws. They're just rules of thumb. But the point is that when you start creating tiny segments of a few thousand people, you often hit diminishing returns. A lot of those people would have still converted from your standard campaigns anyway, so I just like to keep it simple for the most part. 90-day engaged is your core, and expand only when there's a good reason to.

Finding Your Retention Opportunities

Everything I'm giving you in this video is meant to be a really strong foundation. Every e-commerce business is different. And if you want to figure out where your specific retention strategy has the biggest opportunities, I actually built a free tool just for that. It's called the e-commerce retention gap calculator.

Assessing Your Retention Opportunity

Now, this is for e-commerce brands, and all you have to do to use it is enter some basic information about your business, customers, and your current email and retention strategy. It's going to give you a retention score. It's also going to show you where you may be leaving money on the table and estimate the size of your retention opportunity.

It's completely free. I'll put the link below in this video. Go through it after you're done watching, and it will give you a much better idea of what you should actually be focusing on.

Number Six: Your Message and Offer

We talked about who you're sending your emails to. Next, let's talk about what you're actually sending them. Number six is your message and offer.

This is what you're actually putting into your emails, and it's where people love to obsess over really small things, like: What's the perfect send time? Should you use emojis in your subject lines? What color should the CTA button be?

These things can be worth testing, of course, but they're not going to save you from a bad email. The important question you have to ask yourself is: Why should someone care about what you're sending them in the first place?

For example, if you're launching a new product, let's start with: Is the product actually good? If you're running a sale, how compelling is your deal? If you're telling a story, is this actually going to impact the reader's life, or is it totally meaningless?

Because email marketing is going to amplify something that people already want, but it's not going to manufacture interest out of nothing. This goes for the copywriting fundamentals to begin with. You can write incredible copy, design a good email, spend hours optimizing things, but if the product, offer, and messaging aren't compelling, none of that is going to matter anyway.

The opposite is also true. Even emails with a really bad subject line, or just those little text-based emails, can sometimes outperform ones that have been optimized and tested for months or even years because they have such a good offer and message attached.

So I would spend less time looking for email marketing hacks and really take the time to understand your customer. What do they actually want? What problems do they have? What would genuinely make them stop and pay attention?

Get those big things right first, and then you can start worrying about those tiny optimizations.

Number Seven: Deliverability

Number seven: deliverability. This is arguably the biggest one of all, because none of the above matters if your emails aren't actually reaching people in the first place.

Every time you send an email, providers like Gmail are deciding where it goes. Is it going to go to the inbox, promotions maybe, or is it going to go to spam? One of the biggest things influencing that is how people respond to your emails.

If you're consistently sending to people who want to hear from you, they're opening, clicking, replying, and buying, obviously those are great signs. Your deliverability is probably going to be great.

But if you're constantly blasting people who haven't engaged with your brand in two years, three years, haven't opened an email, or maybe they never even subscribed to your list in the first place, those are very different signals. That's probably a sure sign you're going to end up in the spam folder.

This is exactly why I recommend making your 90-day engaged audience your core segment. Don't fall into the trap of thinking, "Oh, I have all these subscribers. I don't want to risk not selling to someone who's interested." By actively sending to unengaged and non-consenting people, you're actually going to lose people who were engaged and who were good leads in the first place.

You need the basics in place: proper domain authentication, clean subscriber acquisition, removing bad contacts, and keeping your list healthy. Keep your segments healthy.

If you remember one thing, remember this: Your ability to reach people who actually want your emails is way more valuable than your ability to send to the biggest list possible. You need to protect that, because the greatest email in the world is worthless if it ends up in spam.

Number Eight: How to Actually Measure Email Marketing

Now, Claio has made this really good and really bad for a number of reasons. A good example of this is email attribution.

You open Claio, and you can see that email generated 30 to 40% of your store's revenue. That sounds amazing, and it's what a lot of email agencies say that they could do. But here's the problem: Clavio is measuring absolute attribution, not incremental attribution.

Someone could discover you through a Facebook ad, join your list, see your product in a retail store, and just click an email along the way, and Clavio is going to take credit for that purchase. Did the email actually cause a sale? Maybe it did, maybe it didn't.

That doesn't necessarily make attribution useless. I look at it all the time, of course, but your goal shouldn't be to make the percentage of revenue attribution as high as possible. There's a ton of ways to manufacture this number. Your goal as an email marketer should actually be to make the business perform better.

I know that sounds crazy, right? But your goal should be optimized around profit. You should be measuring things like customer LTV independently from Claio and figuring things out like: Are customers purchasing more frequently? Are we converting more of the traffic we're already paying for? And more importantly, is total revenue growing?

Those are the real outcomes that we can best attribute and tie back to our jobs as retention marketers. Email is a great way to improve these things.

Open rates, click rates, flow revenue, campaign revenue, and email-attributed revenue are all useful, for sure, and they help us understand what's happening inside the channel. But don't confuse improving your email metrics with actually improving the business.

Retention Is the Objective

That brings us to the final piece of the puzzle. Lastly, email marketing—what it's really about is retention.

Most ecom brands spend a ton of money acquiring customers through Meta, Google, influencers, whatever. Once you finally get someone to buy, which is already hard enough, the question becomes: What happens next? Are they going to buy once and disappear, or do they come back for a second, third, and fourth purchase?

Because the more customers you can bring back, the more valuable every customer you acquire becomes. Your LTV is going to increase. You're going to become less dependent on constantly acquiring new customers, and you can potentially afford to spend more once you know that your customers are worth a lot more if you can retain them.

That's why I don't think about email marketing as simply saying, "How do we send better emails?" What we should really be asking is, "How do we use email to create more valuable customers?"

That's what everything we've talked about ultimately leads back to. Flows, campaigns, segmentation, messaging, deliverability—they're all part of the same system. Email is the tool, but retention is the objective.

There's obviously a lot more you can learn about email marketing, but if you understand everything we just covered, you understand the foundation. That last 20% is where you start getting into the more advanced strategies and optimizations.

Deciding Who Should Manage Your Email Marketing

That said, understanding email marketing is only one piece of the puzzle. Figuring out whether you should actually manage it yourself, hire someone internally, or work with an agency is a completely different question. That's exactly what I covered in my last video.

I own an email marketing agency myself, but I don't think every e-commerce brand should hire one. If you want to know when an agency actually makes sense, when it doesn't, and the red flags to look out for, click on the video on your screen right now, and I'll see you over