For effective and powerful email marketing, there are a few things you should consider. Our technology partner Mailchimp is an expert in ecommerce email personalization and marketing and explains in this article how your ecommerce business can benefit from email marketing.
Whether your business is in the early stages or you have already established a loyal customer base, email can be a powerful—and effective—addition to your marketing strategy. Not only can it help you boost brand awareness, but you can also use email to strengthen your relationships with the people who already support your business, keep customers engaged between purchases, and drive sales. Oh, and did we mention that email has a high return on investment, too? A 2019 study by Litmus found that, on average, email marketing generates an ROI of 42:1—for every 1 USD that marketers spend on email marketing, they generate 42 USD in return.
Must-have tools for any marketer
Every business is different, so every business owner or marketer might define success in different ways. For some, success might be strictly focused on ROI, while others may be more interested in reaching new audiences, converting new customers, or keeping existing customers engaged. Fortunately, email marketing can help with each of these things—but you need to be sure you have the right tools to get the job done.
An email builder
While some businesses might prefer to use HTML code to build their email campaigns, it can be helpful to use a platform that makes it easy for anyone to create beautiful, branded emails that stand out in a customer’s crowded inbox. Many platforms will offer plenty of template options, too, so you’ll always be able to create the perfect email campaign for any message, whether you need to promote a new product, thank a long-time customer for their patronage, or anything in between.
A full-service Marketing CRM
Customer relationship management (CRM) is the process of managing interactions with existing and prospective customers during the sales process. It can help you grow your audience, collect customer data, and then organize it in a way that makes sense for your business. Many Marketing CRMs will also let you create custom tags based on any other important or unique details you might have about your customers, giving you additional insights to incorporate into your marketing anytime you see fit.
The ability to send targeted emails
Your customers already receive a lot of email, so the emails they receive from your business should be deliberate and relevant. By filtering your data and sending to small segments of your list, you can target customers who share common interests or characteristics instead of sending every email to every person. Not only will this help prevent email fatigue in your customers, but it will boost engagement, too—we’ve found that, on average, segmented campaigns result in 23% higher open rates and 49% higher clickthrough rates than unsegmented campaigns.
Do more with your shop data
On their own, the tools mentioned above could help your business reach the right people and create meaningful customer connections. But when you bring your ecommerce and marketing data together in one place—like by connecting your Shopware 6 shop to Mailchimp, for example—you unlock additional functionality and insights that can help you take your business to the next level. Here’s how.
Personalize the customer experience
In email marketing, every piece of information you have about your customers is valuable. It can all be used to help you create a unique experience for each customer based on who they are and how they interact with your business. You may decide to send a re-engagement email to win back lapsed customers or an automatic abandoned cart message to reconnect with people who left items in their cart without making a purchase. You could send an email promoting your newest arrivals and best-selling items or surprise customers with a special discount each year on their birthday. You could even create emails containing personalized product recommendations based on individual customer purchase data.
Save time with automation
Sometimes it can seem like there are not enough hours in the day to get everything done. Marketing automation takes work off your hands by reducing the amount of time and effort it takes to communicate with your audience. Once you set goals, determine your strategy, and create an automation, your platform does the work for you. For instance, you might set up a welcome automation to greet new contacts and tell them more about your business and products. Or, maybe you want to automatically send an email to first-time buyers, asking them to provide feedback in a survey or thanking them for their business with a promo code they can use on their next order. You could even use automation to keep customers informed during every step of the buying cycle, too—from invoices and shipping confirmations to warranty details and usage instructions.
Get smarter as you go
After sending an email to your customers, take time to review the engagement and revenue analytics that your platform provides. You will learn which customers have interacted with your marketing and whether they’ve clicked through to your shop and made a purchase. You can also keep track of how much revenue each email generates and use all of the data you collect to determine which elements of your marketing are most effective, so you can make any necessary adjustments.
Installing Mailchimp for Shopware 6
When you connect your Shopware 6 store to a Mailchimp audience, you get access to all of these tools and insights—and a whole lot more. You will be able to sync new and existing customers, current orders and historical purchase data, and all of your products (and product variants) to Mailchimp. Then, you can combine all of that ecommerce data with Mailchimp’s powerful email marketing tools, making it even easier to reach the right people with the right message at exactly the right time.
If you already have a Mailchimp account, you can get the Mailchimp for Shopware 6 integration from the Shopware store. (Don’t have a Mailchimp account yet? Visit our website to get started for free.)
After completing the order, open your Shopware 6 shop dashboard, click Extensions, and choose "My extensions". There, you will be able to install the Mailchimp for Shopware 6 app, enter your Mailchimp account credentials, and review the authorization details.
Once the connection has been established, you can select which Shopware 6 sales channel and Mailchimp audience you want to connect and choose how you want to synchronize your customers. Then, click "Create Connection With The Settings", and your sales channel will start to sync to your Mailchimp audience.
For a step-by-step walkthrough of the connection process, refer to this helpful article from the resources section on the Mailchimp website.
