Autochat TeamA bunch of prospects has landed on your Shopify store.
They’re interested in your products and have subscribed to your mailing list.
What’s the next step?
How do you engage with them?
How do you start your first email?
Can you engage with them over a series of emails and nudge them to buy your products?
Here are five email types to kick-start your email marketing.
#1 – Welcome Email
This is the first email your subscribers receive from you.
A welcome email is your best chance to make a great first impression.
The average open rate for welcome emails is a whopping 50%, which is more than other email types.
Welcome emails are 86% more effective than newsletters.
If this email doesn’t catch their attention, your subsequent emails wouldn’t either.
What should your welcome email contain?
- Welcome and thank your subscribers.
- Introduce your brand briefly.
- Offer referral coupons or discounts.
- Ask your subscribers to follow you on at least one social channel.
When to send your welcome email: Immediately after signing up.
#2 – About You – Email
The best purchases and investments are people-to-people transactions.
Your website is just a medium to make a purchase.
Brands that strike a personal connection with customers do better than brands who don’t.
The About you email is your chance to introduce the people behind your brand to your subscribers.
Tell your story briefly and tell them why you chose to run this business.
Let your subscribers get to know you as a person, who happens to sell products online.
What should an ‘about you’ email contain?
- A bit about you – the founder(s) – and your team members.
- Your reason for starting the brand and your journey so far.
- Tell your subscribers that they can reach you via email and at least one social channel.
- A link to your About us page.
Most Important: Make sure that the email is written in first person. This helps you form a genuine connection with your subscribers.
When to send: 1 to 3 days after the welcome email.
#3 – Educate Your Subscribers via Email
Your next email should educate your subscribers.
Educate them on how your brand or products add value to their life or lifestyle.
Highlight the one thing that makes your products unique. Include stats to support your unique proposition.
What should an educational email contain?
- A feature that sets your brand or product apart.
- A compelling reason for your brand to focus on that feature.
- Supporting images or videos.
- Call-to-action for a relevant product.
When to send: 1 or 2 times in a month (depending on the unique product features of the brand).
#4 – Show Authority via Email
By authority, we mean the effectiveness of your product and brand credibility.
People are more inclined to buy stuff that’s worked for others.
In this email, focus on one case study or a couple of great testimonials that highlights a powerful impact your product has made for customers.
What should an authority email contain?
- Testimonials and case studies from customers.
- How your product has helped them enhance their lifestyle.
- The before and after story in the form of stats, videos and/or images.
- The continuing long-term advantages of using your product.
When to send: Once per week or twice a month.
#5 – Emails that sell your products
While a blatant sales email wouldn’t work, you can send out emails with value.
Cart abandonment emails, re-engagement emails personalized to the individual’s viewing history or about a top-selling product – are a few types of sales emails you can send.
Craft an interesting and informational email about your product.
What should a selling email contain?
- Focus on one product.
- Highlight special features of the product.
- Include product images.
- Include customer reviews.
- And a Quick Buy link.
Most Important: Don’t confuse subscribers with multiple call-to-actions. And never pitch more than one product. Pitch multiple products only when they complement each other.
When to send: 3 days after visiting the product page or cart; 2 to 4 times a week for general sales emails.
Now that you have an email sequence to kick-start your campaign – here is a simple guide to send your emails on Mailchimp.
The following steps work well with other email campaign marketing apps as well.
How to Use Mailchimp with Your First Email Campaign
Running your first-ever email marketing campaign on Mailchimp is very simple.
Here’s an eight-step process to send your first email campaign.
Step 1 – Define the Purpose of Your Email
This is a crucial step for any email marketing campaign.
Are you sending out newsletters?
Or sales emails?
Or do you want to re-engage with your old customers?
Pick a purpose and move to step 2.
Step 2 – Building Your Email List
You need email addresses to send your emails. If you haven’t got a lot of email addresses, you need to generate them organically.
Here’s what you do.
Reach out to your followers on social media, talk about your email list on forums and prompt your site visitors to sign up for your email newsletter.
Mention a clear takeaway for the people to subscribe to your emails — something that’s beneficial and adds value to them.
Step 3 – Sending Your Welcome Email
Set up automated welcome emails on Mailchimp that talks about your brand, what they can expect from the emails and a quick link to browse.
Step 4 – Selecting the Type of Campaign
Choose between:
- promotional emails with special discounts and offers,
- educational emails,
- retargeting emails
Step 5 – Time To Choose Your Email Template
Mailchimp has many great email templates.
But you don’t want to confuse your subscribers with a different template every time.
Choose one template and stick to it, at least for a while.
You can customize the template with your brand logo, colors, and fonts.
Most Important: Always test if the template looks great on desktops and smartphones. Preview the email before you send it out and check if the images, videos and email copy – look natural in both versions.
Step 6 – Creating Content For Your Emails
So far you have set up the bells and whistles. This is where your email marketing begins to take shape.
Your email copy should add value, and should not be sales-y.
Of course you can send promotional emails, but such emails should be mixed with value-based emails that interest your subscribers.
As a rule of thumb – you can follow a 3:1 ratio. Where you send one sales email for every three value-based emails.
As you focus on creating informative emails, make sure to add visual elements such as GIFs, images and videos that support your content.
Most Important: Don’t miss out on testing your email subject lines with Mailchimp. Understanding what type of subject lines do better than others is vital. Great subject lines implore subscribers to open the email. Use this CoSchedule’s email subject tool generator to create catchy subject lines.
Step 7 – Send A Test Email To Your Email Address
This is the one step that many brands skip and regret later.
You don’t want your email to go out with typos or broken links.
Send a test email to your personal email address,
Analyze the copy, images, links and buttons carefully.
Fix issues if any and you are ready to send your emails.
When To Send Your Emails?
Fix a specific time and day to send your emails. This habituates your subscribers to expect your emails on those days and even look forward to it! You can create emails beforehand and schedule them on Mailchimp.
NOTE: to avoid your emails landing in the SPAM folder, you need to warm up your domain (website address). Here’s Lemlist’s guide to warm up your domain before sending your emails – read here.
Step 8 – Analyzing Your Sent Emails On Mailchimp
Analyze your email reports on Mailchimp.
Focus on open rates, click rates and unsubscribes.
Analyze these metrics at the end of every day.
What if your emails are performing badly?
Here’s what you can do.
What to do when open rates are low?
Poor subject lines and/or a cold domain can lead to low open rates.
Always send emails in batches, where each batch has a different subject line.
Analyze which subject line gets better open rates and apply that to the rest.
Warm up your domain and send no more than 10 blasts per day for the first week. Followed by 20 blasts the second week, 40 on the third week, and 70 on the fourth week.
Start another campaign if you need to send more than 70 blasts per day.
What to do when click rates are low?
Click rates fall flat for two reasons.
1 – you have not given your subscribers a compelling reason to click on the link.
2 – the link(s) must be broken.
What to do when unsubscribes are high?
People unsubscribe from your emails for two main reasons.
1 – Your subscribers find no value in your emails. In fact they find it Spamy.
2 – Or you are sending way too many emails way too often.
Add maximum value by writing like you talk.
Let your content be authentic, funny, entertaining, and above all a bit emotional.
Avoid selling a product in every email.
Wrapping it up
Here’s a quick summary of this guide.
Start your email campaign with these five email types:
- Welcome Email
- About You – Email
- Educate Your Subscribers via Email
- Show Authority via Email
- Emails that sell your products
Follow this eight-step process to send your first email campaign on Mailchimp.
- Step 1 – Define the Purpose of Your Email
- Step 2 – Building Your Email List
- Step 3 – Sending Your Welcome Email
- Step 4 – Selecting the Type of Campaign
- Step 5 – Time To Choose Your Email Template
- Step 6 – Creating Content For Your Emails
- Step 7 – Send A Test Email To Your Email Address
- Step 8 – Analyzing Your Sent Emails On Mailchimp
While social media is great to connect with, and influence your audience, nothing comes close to email – to connect with your audience directly.
Unlike social media platforms, getting your email in front of your audience is not restricted by algorithms.
Of course there’s more to email than just setting up and sending your first email campaign. We at Autochat create helpful actionable content to help ecommerce store owners like you to:
- boost your sales and revenue
- and scale your customer service speed, accuracy, and quality
Do bookmark our blog and subscribe to our newsletter for well researched, informative, and actionable content each week.
Checkout our other FREE Shopify Store guides:
- Free guide to creating the best Facebook and Instagram ad strategies – access here.
- Free guide on how to use FOMO on your Shopify store – access here.
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