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Effective Email Automations for ECommerce

Email Automation

What are Email Automations? 

Email automations are the main way to create timely emails for your customers or users without needing to write and send one every time. By now, most of us are used to some of the standard automations, especially the order confirmation email after a purchase. However, they can go much farther. Effective email automations can increase your website’s functionality, attract new customers, retain old ones, and generate sales. The best part? It all happens automatically and saves you time. 

Automation will also keep track of each user’s engagement with emails and can be connected to your ecommerce platform (for customer relationship management). Those metrics are extremely valuable because they can create personalized email automations. Someone hasn’t opened an email in 3 months? Someone else hasn’t bought something from your website’s store in 6 months? Email automations can entice them to renew their interest in your business. 

Creating Email Automations 

There are a few standard email automations that are effective for nearly every business: 

  • Order confirmations – confirm a customer’s order with purchase invoice 
  • Shipping confirmations – notification of package shipment with tracking information 
  • Birthday Greetings – a personalized birthday message 
  • Abandoned Product/Cart – reminder of product(s) placed in cart, but not purchased 
  • Welcome to New Subscribers – friendly welcome to a new newsletter subscriber which often includes a one-time discount 
  • Cross-sell or Upsell – notification of products similar or related to those previously bought by a customer 
  • Win-back – notification to unengaged subscriber who has not opened any emails after X days 
  • Sunset Email – notification that an unengaged subscriber will be unsubscribed 

The strength of these automations will depend on their design, how they are scheduled, and their workflow. Order and shipping confirmations should be instant notifications, but an abandoned cart email should wait at least an hour or more before reminding a customer. 

Workflows refer to an email’s set of conditions that can then flow into another email automation. A common workflow is a win-back campaign. The win-back email sends when a subscriber has not opened an email in X days, e.g. 90. The win-back entices them to open the email and open future ones as well. If they open it, they loop back into the normal subscriber segment. If they do not, then they move into the sunset email’s workflow. After another set of days, they receive an email that tells them they will stop receiving emails unless they want to stay subscribed. If they open the email and want to stay subscribed, they move back into the regular segment. If not, they will be unsubscribed from the list. It may seem like a bad thing to “lose” subscribers, but this kind of workflow curates your subscriber list. A smaller subscriber list engaged with your emails is much better than a massive list that never even sees them. Besides, un-engaged subscribers can actually damage sender reputation. 

Best Practices 

Don’t Spam: There are countless kinds of email automations that you can set up for your business’s website, but you don’t want to flood clients’ inboxes. They’ll unsubscribe, block your emails, or, even worse, mark them as spam. That last one can prevent others from receiving your emails because they become targeted by spam filters. To get past these filters you also want to make sure you aren’t making ad heavy subject lines and are following Canada’s anti-spam legislation, such as always including unsubscribe links. You need to determine what kind of automations best suits your business and users. 

Personalization: It may be surprising that a strength of email automation is personalization. One of the simplest ways email automations personalize emails is by using your customers’ first names. Setting up an automated email that addresses someone by their name immediately increases open rates. It can go even further though. Email automation with the assistance of your CRM (customer relationship management) will track if someone opened the emails, visited a link, what they have purchased, and more. You use this valuable information about each of your customers to segment subscribers based on their interests and behaviours to send more specific product recommendations or notifications. Your customers are giving you a lot of valuable data; use it to their advantage, and yours. Personalization will make customers feel like they are receiving tailor-made emails from a friend. This will quickly increase email engagement and click-through rates, meaning more visits to your site and potential sales. 

Design Templates: Visually striking and well-designed emails will increase engagement, but they can take time. Create email templates in your email automation service to save future time. Email marketers can focus on the content and plug them into the template for each campaign. Use the same template styles for all other automated emails. This will also give your emails consistent branding, which keeps users engaged.

In Summary 

Effective email automations have become an essential part of ecommerce. They are key for retaining your customers, gaining customer loyalty, and will save you a lot of time in the future. Want some help figuring out your email automations? Rosewood can help you pick the right service, get set up, and build effective workflow automations. Contact us today.

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Everything You Need to Know About Fundraising with Catch the Ace

A graphic of a lightbulb inside of a circle. The graphic is for the blog "Everything You Need to Know About Fundraising with Catch the Ace"

Many people believe that in order to raise money for their organization, they need to invest a huge amount of money to begin with. Catch the Ace is an online charity raffle that offers a fantastic return on investment (ROI) without forcing you to spend a fortune to start your fundraising efforts. Let’s take a look at what you should know about fundraising with Catch the Ace.

What is Catch the Ace?

Catch the Ace, which may also be called Chase the Ace, is a progressive weekly raffle. Participants purchase tickets for the chance to win either that week’s jackpot or possibly the progressive jackpot. The aim is to find the Ace of Spades, which participants try to do by choosing a card from a standard deck of 52 cards. This is a type of online charitable gaming-based fundraiser which helps to raise money for your cause. Your game can run for up to 52 weeks or until the Ace of Spades is found.

Each week a random winner will be selected, and they get a percentage of your ticket sales for the week. The card they picked is also revealed at this time, and this card is removed from the deck for future weeks. The progressive jackpot will roll over so that it keeps growing each week. When the Ace of Spades is found, the winner wins the weekly prize AND the progressive jackpot prize. 

The longer the draw goes = the bigger the prize and the better the odds!

The Benefits of Using Catch the Ace for Fundraising

No Limit to the Number of Entries

There are no limits to the number of times someone can enter and donate to your charity. The pricing model is set in a way that encourages more ticket sales.. When someone purchases multiple tickets, they’ll naturally find their luck increases.

Two Chances to Win for Each Player

Each player will receive two chances to win. They could win the weekly jackpot or the progressive jackpot, which builds up week after week.

The Jackpot Increases Each Week

Each week, the progressive jackpot for the game increases until someone finds the Ace of Spades. While it’s impossible to predict an average number of weeks, some jackpots can build into the millions for some nonprofits.

The Prize Money is Fairly Split to Help Your Organization

One thing that makes Catch the Ace so unique for fundraising is how the ticket sales are split. 20% of the week’s sales will go to the weekly winner, 30% to the progressive jackpot, and 50% to the nonprofit.

The Rules And Regulations Surrounding Catch the Ace

As Catch the Ace is classified as charitable gaming, you need to be aware of the rules surrounding this game. In both the USA and Canada, the game is regulated. You will need a state or provincial license to run the game. This license lasts for up to one year, but the rules will vary throughout the country. In the US, you can find out more through the state’s Attorney General’s office, whereas in Canada, you can visit the Alcohol and Gaming Commission’s website for your province. For Ontario you can visit the AGCO’s website.

Catch the Ace is a very cost-effective way to raise money for your nonprofit. You will need to pay the licensing fee, and you may want to run ads for your raffle on social media and websites. While there might also be some software and payment processing costs, these are minimal when you compare them to other fundraising efforts you may have used in the past.

If you are interested  Catch the Ace to raise funds for your nonprofit, schedule a call with the Rosewood team today for more information. Rosewood is a Licensed Gaming-Related Supplier with the AGCO. 

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Email Workflow Sequences for Shopify and E-Commerce Stores Part 2

Blog Graphic of the Shopify logo (Green shopping bag with the letter S in the centre) with letters flying around the top of it.

In our last blog, we talked about email workflow sequences for Shopify and E-Commerce stores, specifically with nurturing leads and new customers. In this blog, we continue with that topic and what to do once you’ve converter your lead into a customer,

Here’s a refresher from the last blog :

“As a Shopify store owner, email marketing is one of the best tools on offer to help you retain customers and build relationships with potential clients. When compared to other digital marketing options, you’ll find that it offers the highest ROI and encourages more repeat purchases. The key to a successful email workflow is to find campaigns that work for your audience. Keep reading as we share some of our top email marketing ideas so you can set up email workflow sequences to build your customer base this year.” 

Welcome Emails Workflow

The first template we recommend setting up for email marketing is a welcome email. This is the message a customer will receive when they first sign up for a Shopify store’s mailing list. While you might have a template already for customers who’ve purchased from your store, you also need another one for those who have yet to convert to paying customers. Welcome emails have a higher open rate than standard promotional emails, so it’s a great time to convert customers who weren’t quite ready to invest in your products or services. A welcome email should start with a warm welcome to your new subscribers before offering a discount or incentive to purchase. Use this email to set clear expectations with your customers and encourage them to connect with you on Facebook or Instagram for more information about your Shopify store.

An Abandoned Cart Email Workflow

Customers who’ve abandoned their shopping cart were so close to purchasing from your store, so you just need to give them that final push to secure their business. Email marketing of this type should take on a series of emails, which help to push towards securing their business within a few days. The first email should come one day after the abandoned cart, and it needs to remind them of the products they left behind. Another day later, you’ll send an email that strives to overcome any objections they have. You can offer a FAQ section about the product or service or share product benefits.

Finally, 72 hours later, it’s time to offer them a discount or final incentive to purchase. Find a way to offer this discount without heavily impacting your profit margins. This three-part series is something you should have set up straight away as a new business owner and will help to convert customers who need that little extra push to part with their hard-earned cash.

Repeat Customer Emails Workflow

Repeat customers are just as important as new customers for your email marketing efforts. They make up roughly 25% of most company’s revenue, so don’t overlook building your relationship with these loyal customers. You need to treat them differently from your new customers so that they choose to return to your business over and over again in the future. A few ways to do this include checking in a couple of days after their purchase has arrived. You could also use this as a time to get their feedback or a review of your site. Following that, you’ll want to offer them customized recommendations based on their last purchase. You don’t necessarily need to rely on promo codes with these customers, as this will offer them great value and make shopping easier than before.

There are so many different ways to use email marketing as a Shopify store owner. By using a combination of the email workflow sequences we shared here today, you’ll find that you not only retain existing customers but also convert new customers to paying ones. We highly recommend creating templates that you can use over and over again so you don’t spend hours sending emails. You’ll quickly see a huge improvement to your sales when you apply all of these techniques this year, helping your Shopify store to have its best year yet in 2022. Seems like too much? Contact us today and we can help you set up your next email campaign! 

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