Email Marketing Strategies for BigCommerce Stores

Email marketing continues to be one of the most effective and economical options available for e-commerce brands. For BigCommerce store owners, it is a direct connection to customers, giving brands the ability to engage audiences, promote products, and drive repeat sales. With benefits from targeted campaigns, personalized content, and automations, email marketing can increase revenue, but it can also deepen your relationship with customers, improving their loyalty over time.

In this blog, we discuss analytically-proven email marketing techniques made for BigCommerce stores, along with practical tips to help you maximise conversions and improve customer engagement.

1. Audience Segmentation

Audience segmentation is important when you want to provide relevant content that will connect with specific segments of your customers. By segmenting your email list, you will develop email campaigns that are not generic and feel customized.

Examples of segmentation:

• Purchase history – Create different experiences for first time buyers vs repeat buyers
• Browsing behavior – Present product recommendations for the most recent category of items that customers have been viewing.
• Demographics – Provide a curated offer based on geography, or age segments, or to female or male customers.
• Engagement level – Determine both active and inactive subscribers to develop considered campaigns to meet their interests.

Benefit – Personalized emails allow for opened rates, click rates and conversion rates overall to be significantly higher, which will result in an overall improved ROI.

2. Consider Automating Your Email Campaigns

One of the biggest benefits to email marketing for BigCommerce stores is the opportunity to automate. Being able to create automatic email campaigns allows you to communicate with your customers and potential customers regularly and consistently, without any additional work. It not only saves you a lot of time, but improves the customer experience as well.

Types of automation campaigns:

• Welcome emails: Send a warm welcome to new subscribers and introduce them to your brand. You might also include limited time discount on their first purchase that would lead to increased engagement.
• Abandoned cart reminders: Warmly remind your customers and potential customers about their abandoned shopping carts and offer additional incentives, whether it’s a discount or free shipping, to help convert lost sales.
• Post purchase emails: After a customer has made a purchase, you can upsell or cross sell with related products to the specific product they just purchased. Provide tips and best practices and further engage customers with great recommendations.
• Re-engagement emails: Target customers who have purchased from you in the past while minimizing marketing messages or enticing them with a special offer or discounts.

Pro Tip: Personalization with dynamic content within the email which is based on subscriber behavior, purchase history, or preferences will make email campaigns much stronger.

3. Write Amazing Subject Lines

The subject line is really what determines whether the recipient will open or ignore the email. A strong, amazing, compelling email subject not only greatly improves engagement, it can be the difference between someone opening an email as opposed to ignoring it.

Tips for great subject line creation:

• Keep it easy to read and to the point, ideally no more than 50-ish characters.
• Use action words anytime possible. (ex: “Shop now!”, “Claim your discount”)
• Personalize it if possible. (ex: “John, your favorite sneakers are back in stock!”)
• Use urgency or scarcity wisely. (ex: “Limited stock – order today!”)

4. Optimize Email Formatting

Well-structured emails will facilitate readability and conversion. This is especially important because most users open their emails using mobile devices, so responsive design is paramount.

Ideal Formatting will have:

• Clean layouts and readable fonts,
• High quality product images and images,
• Clear call to actions (CTAs),
• Brand consistency with colors, logos and tone,
• Cross device and email client testing.

Tip: Use interactive tools like countdown timers, or animated GIFs for items with limited time offers to help increase customer engagement.

5. Leverage Abandoned Cart Emails

Abandoned cart emails are a strong opportunity to recover revenue as many studies show that 68%-70% of carts that are filled are abandoned. This is a great opportunity for BigCommerce stores!

Best Practices for Abandoned Cart Email programs:

• Send first reminder within 24 hours,
• Offer discounted or free shipping for second /third mail,
• Be sure to include product images and the associated checkout link,
• Send the final reminder before the cart is emptied.

Final Result: To recover lost revenue, a customer is notified that their cart is on hold and encourages the customer to complete their order.

6. Tailor Your Emails

Personalization boosts relevancy and builds trust and loyalty. Your customers are likely to respond positively when your emails interact with their preferences and shopping activity.

Examples of personalizing your emails include:

• Using their name
• Recommending products based on purchase history and site browsing
• Providing special offers to loyal or VIP customers
• Segmenting your audience based on geographic location in order to promote local offers

BigCommerce Tip: Use Klaviyo or Mailchimp for enhanced personalized and segmented email marketing.

7. Tracking and analyzing the performance of your campaigns

Understanding how your emails perform is a necessity of marketing and email campaign performance is a continuous improvement process. Keeping an eye on your metrics helps you determine what resonates with your audience and refine your marketing emails.

Consider tracking the following key email marketing metrics:

• Open rates – Number of email recipients who open your email.
• Click through rates (CTR) – Number of email recipients who engage with the links or CTAs in your email.
• Conversion rates – Number of email recipients who go on to make a purchase
• Unsubscribe rates – How relevance and frequency may be an issue
• Revenue generated – Measuring the growth of campaigns.

Pro Tip: Experiment with A/B tests of subject lines, content, CTA buttons, and images to find what works best.

8. Additional strategies for email marketing with BigCommerce

• Loyalty and Reward Emails – Send special offers to reward repeat customers.
• Seasonal Campaigns – Plan campaigns around holidays, events, and sales seasons.
• Product Launch Emails – Generate buzz around your new arrivals, or complement your new exclusive product launch.

Feedback Requests: Encourage customers to leave reviews, improving credibility and engagement.

Conclusion

Email marketing represents a key growth channel for BigCommerce stores. By separating target audiences, automating elements of your campaigns, personalizing content, and evaluating and measuring results, your efforts can yield the following benefits:

• Increasing conversions
• Recovering abandoned shopping carts
• Building customer loyalty
• Encouraging customers to re-purchase

When these techniques are applied in a consistent manner, your BigCommerce store will stand out amongst the competition in today’s e-commerce landscape. As long as you are strategic in your planning for your email marketing campaigns, this channel of communication may become one of your most helpful and trusted growth channels for sustainable and reliable, revenue growth.