Email Marketing for E-commerce Explained: What It Is, Best Tips, and Examples

What is e-commerce email marketing?

Imagine your client chilling on a couch, lazily looking through their inbox, and suddenly discovering a message from your online store. In this message, you offer a stylish presentation of your products, a gentle reminder to finish the abandoned purchase, and a tasty discount. Even better, the link to the store is in the email. 

You can do this and a lot more with e-commerce email marketing, which is email communications aimed at boosting online sales, increasing customer loyalty, and contributing to brand awareness. With emails, brands can send targeted recommendations, distribute promotions to as many people as possible, and bring leads to the online stores in a click or two.

Benefits of email marketing for e-commerce businesses

The e-commerce market has experienced consistent revenue growth in recent years, and it’s far from reaching its peak. Forecasts provided by Statista indicate that from 2024 to 2029, the revenue in the U.S. e-commerce sector is expected to grow by 53.79%. Impressive, right?
If after seeing these numbers you still wonder, why your brand should invest in email marketing for e-commerce, here are some more reasons that might help you launch your email marketing campaign as soon as possible:

• A higher ROI. Email marketing is known for providing a quick and large return on investment (ROI). As estimated by Litmus, for the e-commerce industry you can expect $45 for every $1 spent. This is not only a good potential profit for a small brand, but also the highest ROI among all the industries. 
• A wider reach. Emails allow you to communicate directly with each customer. Social media algorithms hide your messages from hundreds of potential customers — for example, the average reach rate of Instagram was only 7.6% at the beginning of 2024. Meanwhile, the average open rate in e-commerce is approaching 30%.
• Working on brand awareness and retention. Regular emails allow brands to create brand awareness and better engagement. Your subscribers will recognize and remember a brand through constant but friendly reminders, that you are always around and ready to please them with your products. It is essential because it builds trust, fosters customer loyalty, and ultimately drives sales.
• More targeted messaging. Segmentation and personalization allow you to send more relevant content and offers. It will affect your sales a lot better than, for example, offering the same thing to your entire social media followership.
• Email marketing automation. Automation saves time and money by communicating with customers instead of you. You can set up triggered campaigns so your emails replace a sales rep in real-time — while you count your revenue, figure out the marketing strategy, or just chill.

Types of emails to use in your campaign

Consider sending different types of emails to get your customers interested in your products without spamming them with the same content. Let’s explore various types of email content with examples.

Welcome and onboarding emails

Welcome and onboarding emails are the first messages your customers receive after subscribing to your newsletter. They act as an introduction to your brand and set the right mood for future engagement. In such emails, you can include your brand story, philosophy, and identity — especially if you’re selling something unique. In this case, it’s vital to create a newsletter with a story behind it, explaining what the product is, why your subscribers may need it, and why it’s good.
Here’s a great example from Bored Cow (found on Really Good Emails), a milk alternative brand. This message starts with a joke and then explains the company’s eco-friendly stance and the idea behind the product.

Lead-nurturing newsletters

Lead-nurturing email campaigns don’t sell anything directly — instead, they systematically keep your target audience interested through meaningful interactions. These include informative or entertaining content. So, don’t shy away from humor, especially if your brand’s tone of voice has room for it.

Here’s an awesome example from Who Gives A Crap. The brand shared a fun quiz that doesn’t encourage you to buy stuff right away. However, such interactions work for customer loyalty in the long run. Next time your subscribers will choose you because you made them laugh a little — that’s how it works.

Promotional emails

Promotional emails are a great opportunity to stimulate sales. These are targeted messages sent to subscribers, designed to inform them about special offers, discounts, or new products, which encourages them to make a purchase.

Here’s a baseline example from Juliet. This email is pretty straightforward: a brief offer description, a discount code, a bold picture, and the mandatory “Shop now” button. You can go more creative than that but you can’t go wrong with the classics.

Cart abandonment

Cart abandonment is when your customer intended to make a purchase but then left items in their cart without making an order and paying. It’s more common than you think! According to the regularly updated review by Baymard, the average cart abandonment rate across all studies has reached 70% in 2024. Now, convert that number to all the revenue you’re losing. However, you can regain some of it via cart abandonment emails.
Such campaigns are usually pretty simple — they consist of a short copy, a list of items in the cart, and a CTA button leading to a website where customers can complete their abandoned purchases. There’s surprisingly a lot of room for creativity though. For example, check out this hilarious email from Dote.

In addition to abandoned carts, you can cling to the browsing history and remind subscribers about the viewed pages.

Re-engagement campaigns

Sometimes your emails don’t seem to yield any results. Your audience receives them, but won’t click through or even bother opening them. In this case, you can try to re-establish a rapport with your inactive subscribers by sending a re-engaging email campaign. 

Such newsletters solve several problems at once. Customers who are not interested in your product will remove themselves from the contact list. And those who simply forgot about your brand can come back, get curious about your offers, and make new purchases. Anyway, it’s a win-win. 

Don’t know which content to include? Here’s a fun example from Sourse — they even created a themed promo code specifically for those wanting to say goodbye.

Cross-selling and upselling emails

These emails suggest additional or complementary items based on the recent purchase or the purchasing history in general. They leverage customer data to present personalized product suggestions, encouraging customers to add related items to their orders.

For example, if someone purchased a pair of shoes, you can send a cross-selling campaign promoting clothes and accessories that go well with them — as GOAT did. Would you wear a total yellow look?

Holiday emails

Such email campaigns offer your customers special discounts or limited items linked to holidays. These can include state holidays, customer birthdays, anniversaries and milestones, or even something niche like National Coffee Day. 

Holiday email campaigns are a great opportunity to boost sales. They’re effective, good both for you and your customer seeking a present, and they leave a lot of room for creativity. From copy to design and layout — all things bright and unusual will do so you stand out from other brands’ offers. There are many holidays and seasonal events — use a holiday email marketing calendar to track all of them and prepare content in advance. Or, if you want to surprise your customers, check out our selection of alternative holidays. 

Back in stock or restock emails

In e-commerce, high-demand items quickly run out of stock. It can be the customers’ favorite design or a limited drop. When such items reappear in your store, remind your subscribers about restocking via email. 

To make such campaigns work, you can come up with an intriguing subject line like “Guess who’s back?”. In the newsletter, you have to provide a clear answer as Sproos did. “Red is back” is simple and catchy, a red shower in the picture leaves no doubt that they want to inform you about this exact item reappearing in their online store again.

Customer feedback emails

Everyone loves good feedback. By requesting a review after a purchase, you show your customers that you value their opinions and strive to improve. You can then use reviews in social proof email campaigns and build even more trust in your customers.

You can also ask your customers to participate in a referral program by sending a pretty simple and straightforward referral email, like Surreal did.

Here’s another interesting example of a referral email. Love Wellness say that the referral bonus is already yours, you just need to access it by referring a friend.

E-commerce email marketing strategy best practices

You have just learned about different types of emails. And now let’s figure out what email marketing practices and techniques to use to get your emails to the right customers. 

Segmentation

Let’s say you sell art supplies and handmade items. Not all your customers would buy the same thing from you: some are interested in finished products, and others want means of production. The first group would be happy to receive a selection of unique handmade jewelry. The second one would be more interested in guides on how to make your own accessories. So, list segmentation allows you to do exactly that — you can send different email campaigns to different customer groups to boost your sales and email ROI.

It’s not the only way to segment your emails. Other criteria include location, website behavior, email engagement, and even generations. For example, you can take the fact that Gen Z customers prioritize affordability. So, the best way to prompt Zoomers to buy stuff from you is discounts and deals.

Selzy allows you to make segments as niche and complex as you want — thanks to compound conditions and multiple filtering criteria!

Personalization

Unlike segmentation, personalization tailors your email content to a particular person, not a group — and making a mass email relevant to each and every recipient is exactly as hard as it sounds. Putting your customers’ names in a subject line won’t cut it, you have to personalize the entire email. To do this, you have to leverage the purchasing history and behavior data.

Take a look at this email from Lyst — every item suggested in this list (pun intended) of recommendations is tailored to the taste of this particular subscriber. This is how you do personalized email marketing in e-commerce.

Mobile optimization

Mobile optimization in email marketing is the practice of adapting email content to display correctly and work well on smaller screens of smartphones or tablets. By catering to the needs of smartphone users, you get a much wider customer reach, more email engagement — and more sales. Here’s how to make your email more mobile-friendly:

• Use a responsive email template that adjusts itself based on the screen size.
• Stick to larger, sans-serif fonts for more legibility.
• Choose shorter subject lines that won’t get cut on mobile devices.
• Pay attention to CTAs — opt for a shorter copy and bigger buttons.

Modern email tools are mobile-first — including Selzy! Our free email template builder is responsive by default, whether you’re using a full readymade template or creating your own with pre-made or even empty blocks.

A clear call to action

Each email should have a clear and compelling call-to-action (CTA). This is how you invite your clients to take the next step.

To maximize efficiency, opt for a shorter CTA copy, use the direct appeal, and focus on action verbs like “Shop now”. This email from Ghia is a good example.

Incentives and offers

Your customer needs a reason to even open your email in the first place, let alone take action — this is where incentives and offers come in handy. In this case, even a little bonus goes a long way: a small discount, free shipping, or even an actual freebie. For example, RAINS even allows you to choose a gift, isn’t that cool?

Automation

Automated emails do the job of a salesman 24/7 with no vacations, seek leaves, or even sleep — use that opportunity to make the most of your campaigns! You can automate many types of messages like greetings, countdowns, retention, and so much more.

Selzy’s automation tool provides you with multiple actions and conditions to build your own sequence from scratch. And, if you’re not an experienced marketer, you will absolutely love our automation templates!

Testing and optimization

To boost the efficiency of your marketing efforts, regularly test various elements of your emails, such as themes, content, and design. Use A/B testing to optimize your campaigns for better results. For example, you may find that your customers are more responsive to “50% discount” than to “Half price deal”!

Key metrics for measuring the success of your e-commerce email campaigns

After you launch your email campaign, it is essential to keep an eye on how it is running. The following key metrics will help your brand estimate the effectiveness of e-commerce email marketing campaigns: