I’ve got a real quick ecommerce email tip that you can use. It’s a little trick you can throw into your business. Now this thing is working really well for us, and it’s so super simple. I don’t see very many people using it. We know email marketing works. We know it’s a great way to get into your customers inboxes– get them to buy more from you. But we also know that email open rates are dropping. They’re getting lower and lower and lower every year, every day.
However, there is one email that gets an astronomically high open rate in almost every industry, and that’s the receipt email. The email they get with their receipt information, after they purchase. It has almost a 70% open rate across all industries. So if 70% of your customers or more are opening this email, then why are you just putting the garbage receipt information in there that looks like crap and that’s it?
If 70% of your people are seeing it, what does that mean? Well it’s the perfect time for you to make an offer. One of the big things about e-commerce, and any business really, is getting them to buy again. After a customer makes a purchase, how can you get them to buy again? So what do you do? Why don’t you throw a coupon, throw an incentive, throw some kind of a special offer in the receipt email that says “Hey, we appreciate you. Thank you for being a customer. Because you’re our customer we’d like to offer you free shipping on your next order (or a 10% discount, or a 15% discount, or hey buy any three of this and we’ll give you one of this). Whatever fits your store.
Now we use this across the board in all of our stores. Once we tested it alone, we saw how amazing the uptake was we took it across the board and put it in everything. We have one store that’s a little bit more advanced than other stores, and it uses behavioral, or a dynamic type information that gets plugged into the email. So based on what they purchase, we’ve assigned rules in the background that’ll say if they purchase any of these products — show them this product– give a discount on this product — and that’s behavioral. if your accounting cart allows for that and you’re capable of setting up those rules, it can be incredibly effective. We’re getting a 22% uptake on that dynamic coupon offer when we do that in the open email — so 22% of people are reordering again.
And how long it takes from the time they get the receipt email to when they use that coupon is around 8 days. For that particular store. We have another store on Shopify that doesn’t have a dynamic hub capability, so we use a blanket “get free shipping on your next order” and that has about a 16 and a half percent uptake and it’s just generic, there’s no specific special offer, and we’re testing that right now between that and you know a discount 15% or 20% discount.
Both of these type methods work incredibly well for us and I guarantee you you have a receipt email as well. So test it out. Take your receipt email, add a special offer to it, make it a unique coupon code so you could track the redeems, and how many people are actually taking you up on your offer, and see if it doesn’t give you a nice boost to your business.
Now before I wrap this up, I will tell you one more little email trick. So the receipt email gets opened 70% of the time. What other email has an astronomically high open rate that you send out as an ecommerce store? Think about it for a second— the shipping notification email. Most stores send out whenever you ship a product… it sends out a shipping notification email with the tracking link. You can also customize that email. So why not throw another offer, or a repeat of the same offer in that email, and get another boost in sales. Works like a charm! So give those a shot guys to make a big difference in your business.