Use These 3 Triggered Email Campaigns to Drive More E-Commerce Sales
If you’re looking to expand automation for your email-marketing program, be sure to use these 3 triggered email campaigns for the biggest impact on increasing your e-commerce sales and overall return on investment (ROI).
The beauty of triggered email campaigns is that, once created, they continue to automatically drive revenue from your prospects and customers without you having to do anything. (Of course, it’s important to periodically test and optimize your triggered email campaigns to continually get the best-possible results.)
So, as you look to automate your email-marketing efforts, the 3 types of triggered emails that will have the biggest impact on your ROI include:
- Welcome campaigns
- Online shopping cart-abandonment campaigns
- Post-purchase nurturing campaigns.
With the help of these 3 email campaigns, you can make the most of subscribers’ heightened interest in your products. By setting up email triggers based on such consumer behaviors as signing up to receive your emails, leaving a product in an online shopping cart, or purchasing a product, you can craft and automate email campaigns to help take consumers through your sales funnel based on where they are in their customer journey.
Triggered Campaigns Generate Higher Engagement Compared to Typical Marketing Emails
MailChimp scanned hundreds of millions of emails to track average email-marketing statistics in various industries. The MailChimp results showed that for e-commerce businesses, average open rates were 16.75% and average click rates were 2.32%. So, how do triggered welcome, abandoned-cart, and post-purchase emails compare in terms of performance results? Here are some of the latest statistics:
- Welcome Email Campaigns
When new subscribers sign up to get emails from your company, be sure your welcome email campaign takes advantage of their piqued interest. The welcome campaign is where you should focus on telling your story, including why consumers should buy from your company versus a competitor.According to Experian’s Welcome Email Report, welcome emails generate the following performance results compared to typical promotional emails:
- Total open rates 4 times higher (57.8% vs 14.6%)
- Click rates 5 times higher (14.4% vs 2.7%)
- Transaction rates 9 times higher (0.94% vs 0.10%)
- Revenue per email 8 times higher ($1.24 vs $0.15)
In another study by Listrak:
- For all retailers studied, the average welcome email open rate was 29.7%
- 35.4% of prospects who opened a welcome email clicked through to the retailer’s website
- E-commerce retailers that got the best results from their new subscribers typically sent a series of 3 emails and offered a discount in the first welcome message
- 45% of first sales from new customers happen within the first day of subscribing, whereas 92.5% come within the first week.
- Online Shopping Cart–Abandonment Email Campaigns
About 75% of online shoppers leave e-commerce sites without purchasing the items that they placed in their carts. Abandoned-cart emails give you the opportunity to reconnect with those online shoppers and convince them to complete their purchase. And marketers are realizing just how powerful abandoned-cart email campaigns can be:- This study showed that nearly 50% of all abandoned-cart emails are opened, 13.3% are clicked, and more than a one-third of clicked abandoned-cart emails convert to a sale
- Timing is important for the success of abandoned-cart emails. In a recent study by Salecycle, emails sent 1 hour after prospects abandoned their online shopping carts had almost double the conversion rates of emails sent less than 1 hour later (3.14%) and between 1 and 2 hours later (3.41%).
- Post-Purchase Nurturing Email Campaigns
Post-purchase emails are a great way to keep customers engaged, improve satisfaction with the overall buying experience, drive additional sales, and increase customer lifetime value. Sales confirmations and receipts, product renewal reminders, win-back campaigns, loyalty reward offers, and product recommendations are examples of post-purchase emails that can be used to help educate customers about the products they purchased and encourage more sales in the future.But just how effective are post-purchase nurturing emails? Conversio analyzed 12.1 million post-purchase emails and 24.5 million digital receipts/purchase confirmations sent by e-commerce retailers in 2016 and found that engagement was much higher than the performance results of typical promotional emails:
- Post-purchase emails are 2 times as likely to be opened and clicked (40.5% open rate and 6.4% click rate)
- Digital sale receipts are more than 3 times as likely to be opened and clicked (65.0% open rate, 10.4% click rate).
Because post-purchase sales receipts tend to generate such high engagement, they provide an excellent opportunity for marketers to nurture customers and motivate future sales. Conversio also analyzed post-purchase sales receipts that included the following promotional/nurturing elements: a discount codes, product recommendations, customer feedback requests, refer-a-friend links, and social sharing buttons. Compared to basic digital receipts, post-purchase receipts with just one of these promotional elements:
- Increased open rate by 14.6%
- Increased click rate by 64.7%
- Increased conversion rate by 2,200%.
Whether it’s to welcome new subscribers, encourage prospects to purchase products left in their online shopping carts, or nurture customers with post-purchase emails, automated triggered email campaigns can have a huge positive impact. When done right, triggered campaigns boost engagement, build brand loyalty, improve customer satisfaction, and increase overall revenue.
At FulcrumTech, optimizing ROI is our main mission. And we excel at developing successful strategy and effective creative for automated triggered email campaigns. Contact us, and we’ll show you how to drive more revenue from your email-marketing efforts.