Churn is a business killer but when you learn how to use retention techniques in your emails, you can boost revenue with a few well-timed and thoughtful messages.
Your email marketing campaigns' success depends on various factors:
- The email’s creatives (the layout, colors, general aesthetics)
- The offers you make (discounts, sales)
- The timing of your email campaigns (based on the triggers or gaps you set)
- The email marketing frequency (how often you send emails)
- The email copy
- Whether you use HTML or plain text
- Subject lines
But here’s a little something that most e-commerce brands miss out on: The part-art and part-science aspect of how to use repeat sales email sequences.
This is where a wee bit of stickiness, determination, and some care is required. In this article, we’ll talk about why and how to use retention email sequences.
Tap into this often underrated type of email and you’ll see benefits over time.
But first, we have to discuss terms…
What are retention email sequences?
Retention email sequences, also called customer retention email sequences, are an email series made for your existing customers. These customers already know who you are and have bought at least one product from you.
This email sequence’s objective is twofold:
- to remind them of your brand
- to persuade them to keep buying from you
Examples of this type of email sequence include:
- thank you emails
- promotional emails
- welcome emails
- cart abandonment emails
How do retention email sequences reduce churn? By nurturing customers, they make them feel valued, thus boosting customer loyalty and repeat purchases.
If you want to see examples of retention email sequences in action, as well as other forms of marketing emails from all kinds of industries, check out Panoramata. It has a searchable database of any email flow you want to get your hands on, giving you inspiration for whatever use case you need.
Why use repeat or retention email sequences?
Email broadcasts are one-time. Automated email sequences are trigger-based, or URL-based (depending), and so on.
Somewhere along the way, e-commerce brands put a stop to these campaigns sooner or later.
Most brands, for instance:
- Use one-time email campaigns to send out announcements, updates, and so on.
- Put up 3 to 5 automated emails to nurture the leads generated using pop-ups that promise a store discount.
- One-time emails are triggered based on transactions (like order confirmation, order updates, or shipping updates).
- Advanced email marketing strategies include retargeting email campaigns and emails dependent on the activity of subscribers or customers. These emails are action-based, account-based, or according to assigned tags or segments.
There’s more, though. It has to do with the often-forgotten art of follow-up.
Follow-up email sequences are the secret sauce leading to much more revenue, sales, and profits in a way that doesn’t add too much to your effort (and that’s good news).
By nurturing customers, they make them feel valued, thus boosting customer loyalty and repeat purchases.
When you send out cold emails to prospects, for instance, this is how it looks:
Send just one email to a potential customer and you’d get a 9% reply rate.
Add at least one follow-up message to the cold-email sequence, and your reply rate goes up by 13%.
For experienced cold-emailers, the numbers are higher: one email (without follow-ups) gets a 16% reply rate.
Add follow-up emails (at least one), and the campaigns get 27% reply rates.
Email experts recommend adding at least 2 to 3 follow-up emails regardless of who, why, and when you send these emails to your target audiences -- be it subscribers, cold prospects, or customers.
Can you do something similar with e-commerce-specific automated sequences?
Of course, yes.
How do you use repeat sales email sequences to bolster your revenue and profits? Let’s check these examples.
Examples of Automated Repeat Email Sequences For Ecommerce (Sequences & Workflows)
Take a close look at some of the email workflows, sequences, and other types of email campaigns you could use to enhance your email marketing success.
For your ecommerce business, don’t just stop at one, two, or three emails.
Build it up into a sequence of cleverly organized and well-crafted emails that aim to “build trust and nurture” instead of just giving away offers and trying to sell.
Here are some e-commerce store-specific examples to try:
- Post-Purchase Flows for Repeat Purchases (and Non-Subscribers)
The point at which a purchase is made is also the “moment of truth”, a sign of implied trust, and a point at which a customer is primed to buy.
That’s why you need a post-purchase flow. Specifically, you need a post-purchase email campaign flow built to generate repeat purchases.
- Abandoned Checkout Email Campaigns
Various e-commerce studies point to the average shopping cart abandonment rate at around 75%.
Shopping cart abandonment hurts your ecommerce business, bleeds you dry, and leaves you no room to be casual about it.
Seventy-five customers “leave” out of 100 potential customers who add items to their cart (this is after you do everything you could to get them to take action at checkout in the first place).
If you only had to use a single repeat email sequence or an email marketing campaign for ecommerce at all, it should be the abandoned cart campaign or the abandoned checkout email campaign.
Add reminders, case studies, success stories, testimonials, use customer reviews in emails, create a sense of urgency, entice customers with offers, and more.
You can also run parallel and targeted retargeting email campaigns for customers who abandon shopping carts.
- Churn Prevention Flows
Each business differs when it comes to churn rate. For instance, the accepted churn rate for a SaaS, app, or software business is around 5%.
Regardless, it's the equivalent of “bleeding” when it comes to eCommerce profits and revenue.
Can you use email sequences to reduce churn rate? Absolutely, yes.
What the churn prevention email sequence should do:
- The email should give them options (Choose another plan? Switch up their next order? Handle objections? Ask for feedback?
- The next email in the sequence should do more of the same (with a different angle) -- try to build customer loyalty, remind customers about their offers or reward points.
- Winback Email Sequences
Only two things you do with your eCommerce business help you grow revenue, boost profits, and scale: getting new customers and keeping existing customers (or making existing customers buy more depending on your business).
There are measurable effects when you have effective customer retention strategies.
Using “nurturing emails” to keep existing customers and using “winback email sequences” -- you can also tap into your inactive customer segments, one-time customers, and more.
Add follow-up email sequences to your winback email sequences and get exponential results.
The emails don’t just stop at “We hate to see you go” or “Are you coming back?” -- the idea of a repeat email sequence for ecommerce is to bring back lost customers or nudge existing customers to buy more products.
You can get creative with how you line up the repeat email marketing sequences. You can experiment. You can measure results. You can test things out.
What hurts is “not” using repeat email marketing sequences at all.
What’s even worse? Not using email marketing for ecommerce at all.
Do you see how you can boost your email campaign results for ecommerce by adding a few more strategic email campaign inclusions that you usually send out?
Mistakes to avoid when making retention email sequences for e-commerce
Before sending your retention emails, make sure the content is relevant to your audience.
Irrelevant content annoys readers and makes them more likely to unsubscribe. To mitigate this, segment your customers and personalize the emails you send.
Other things to avoid are wordy and confusing subject lines and a lack of clear CTAs.
It’s important to make customers feel valued, so when you waste their time, confuse them with strange subject lines, or send emails with no purpose, it’s a negative point for your brand.
Want more ideas and inspiration? Check out our email swipe file with over 100 newsletter ideas you can use for your next campaign.
Get access to Panoramata and dig into inspiration for some of the world’s best email marketing campaigns, get insights and benchmarks for ad creatives and email marketing flows, and so much more.
FAQs
What are retention email sequences?
Retention email sequences are email sequences sent to customers who have purchased from you in the past to remind them of your brand and to persuade them to keep buying from you.
What are some factors that influence the success of email marketing campaigns?
The success of email marketing campaigns depends on various factors, including the email’s creatives (the layout, colors, general aesthetics), the offers made (discounts, sales), the timing of your email campaigns, email copy, and subject lines.
