The Complete Guide to Dropshipping Email Marketing
Contents
If you have been looking for a low-cost marketing channel to grow your dropshipping sales and make more profits, email marketing dropshipping is where to look.
The reason is simple: email marketing yields an incredible return on investment. Research has shown that for every $1 you invest in email marketing, you can make $36 back.
That’s incredible!
The best part is that you don’t need to have a huge budget or be a guru email marketer to grow your dropshipping business with email marketing.
To this end, we’ve put together this blog post to help you better understand how email marketing works and how to leverage it to grow your business.
In it, you learn the different types of email marketing strategy that work well for dropshipping stores. In addition to that, you will also get to see the email marketing platforms for dropshipping.
Most importantly, we will share tips and best practices for email marketing and the right methods to measure your email campaign performance.
So, stick around!
How does email marketing benefit your dropshipping store?
You might have wondered if investing in email marketing is worth your time and efforts. Does it even work for dropshipping businesses?
To answer those questions, let’s take a look at some interesting statistics because numbers don’t lie.
- 99% of email users open their inboxes every day. Some do so as much as 20 times a day.
- 64.1% of small business establishments effectively use email marketing to reach their customers
- 71% of small businesses use email marketing to communicate with their customers.
- 81% of businesses use email marketing to acquire new customers for their businesses
If those numbers aren’t convincing enough, here are reasons why investing in email marketing makes a lot of sense.
1. It is cost-effective
Google and Facebook ads are excellent marketing channels to promote your store and drive more sales. The problem, however, is that they don’t come cheap. You will need a large marketing budget running into thousands of dollars to use them successfully.
But with email marketing, you don’t really need any marketing budget because you won’t have to spend a dime on ads.
You will only have to spend money on the email marketing software you use. Lucky for you, most of these software have free plans.
2. Abandoned cart recovery
Nothing can be as frustrating as seeing customers abandon their carts before completing their checkout. Cart abandonment is a serious problem in the eCommerce space. Statistics have it that 70% of online shoppers abandon their carts before completion. That’s a pretty serious problem.
Thankfully, you can recover most of these abandoned carts by sending targeted, personalized cart recovery emails to shoppers.
3. Boost your AOV
You don’t necessarily need to acquire new customers to boost your store revenue. All you need to do is to get your existing customers to buy more from you, hence, increasing your store’s Average Order Value (AOV).
Email marketing makes that possible.
5 Types of email marketing campaigns for dropshipping stores
You need to be strategic to see meaningful results with email marketing. To this end, it is important to set up the right email marketing campaign to drive sales.
What is an email marketing campaign?
Simply put, an email marketing campaign is a sequence of email messages sent over a period of time to a particular target audience. These emails are usually sent to achieve a particular business goal, which could be to generate sales, raise brand awareness, recover abandoned carts, etc.
There are 5 types of email marketing campaigns you can deploy for your dropshipping store, and they are as follows:
- Initiation
- Abandoned cart
- Post Purchase
- Engagement
- Promotional
Let’s have a closer look at them.
Initiation
As the name suggests, the goal for an initiation email marketing campaign is simple: to initiate your brand to email recipients and build a relationship with them.
The initiation stage is where you start nurturing your leads with the goal of ultimately turning them into repeat customers.
This email campaign is best sent when a visitor subscribes to your email list.
Abandoned cart
As earlier highlighted, email marketing can help you win back abandoned carts and convert them into sales.
Before setting up an abandoned cart recovery email campaign, it is important to understand why shoppers abandon their carts. Some of the notable ones are as follows:
- Unexpected cost
- Distraction on the part of a shopper
- Complicated checkout process
- High shipping cost
- Insufficient funds to go through with a purchase
If you are going to recover these abandoned carts, you first need a way to track them. Thankfully, email marketing solutions like Sendinblue and Klaviyo can help you with that.
After that, the next thing you will want to do is create catchy emails to entice abandoned shoppers. This will mean spicing up your email copies with coupons, discounts, and product suggestions.
Post-purchase
When a customer makes a purchase from your store, it’s natural to want to thank them for their patronage. This is what the post-purchase email campaign is all about.
But there is more you can do than just thank them. You could send them their order tracking information, suggest products they would like, ask for feedback, and lots more.
Engagement
We can’t overemphasize the importance of keeping your customers engaged, even long after they have bought from you. If you don’t, they might forget your brand faster than a hot knife through butter.
That said, you should periodically send new product announcements, special deals and sales offers, and blog content emails to your customers.
Promotional
Promotional email campaigns are sent to inform customers and subscribers about seasonal or event-based sales promotions, such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, etc.
What are the top email marketing platforms for dropshipping?
The success or failure of your email marketing campaign is largely dependent on the tool or platform you choose to work with. As such, picking the right platform is important for your Dropshipping business.
With that said, here are the top email marketing platforms that we can vouch for.
1. Klaviyo
Klaviyo is one of the leading email marketing solutions for eCommerce. It comes packed with a ton of tools and features designed to help you send the right message to your target audience, just when the time is right.
If you are running your Dropshipping business on Shopify, you won’t have any problems using Klaviyo because it can be easily integrated with Shopify. Not just Shopify, but also WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Prestashop, and Magento.
With Klaviyo, you can send personalized, targeted email campaigns to your customers based on browsing behavior and buying preferences. It allows you to segment your audience and send them product recommendations they will find useful.
What’s more, Klaviyo allows you to A/B test your email campaigns without breaking a sweat.
You can do all these without knowing a lick about coding or web development.
Klaviyo pricing
You can use Klaviyo for free if you send emails to 250 contacts or less. Anything more will attract a fee of $20/month.
2. Privy
If you are looking to grow your email list, recover abandoned carts with cart recovery emails, and grow your Dropshipping revenue, there is no better tool to use than Privy.
With Privy, you can convert passive visitors to your website into ravenous customers. It allows you to do this by creating and displaying popups and flyouts on your website.
In addition to that, it allows you to entice first-time visitors with discounts and coupons and convert them into customers. Also, you can create captivating exit-intent campaigns to win back visitors attempting to exit your website.
Like Klaviyo, Privy can be integrated with Shopify. As a matter of fact, Privy is one of the most popular email marketing apps for Shopify. It can also be used on Wix websites.
Privy pricing
You can start with Privy for free. However, the free plan is only limited to 100 email contacts. If you plan to send to more contacts, you will have to upgrade to the Starter or Growth plans. They cost $15 and $45 per month, respectively.
3. Sendinblue
Sendinblue makes designing professional emails easy, thanks to its intuitive drag-and-drop builder. With this design editor, you can choose to design your email campaigns from scratch or pick a template and customize it to your heart’s content.
What’s more, Sendinblue allows you to personalize your email campaigns by dynamically adding your contacts’ first names, and even use their favorite colors in your emails.
With Sendinblue, you can send transactional emails, HTML newsletters, and cart recovery emails.
Sendinblue can be used on Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, WordPress, and a lot more.
Sendinblue pricing
Sendinblue comes with a free plan, but it only supports 300 email sends per day. To get more out of it, you will need to upgrade to the Lite and Premium plans. They cost $25 and $65 per month.
4. Adoric
Adoric is an email marketing solution that allows you to convert your website visitors into email subscribers and customers.
It comes with a ton of tools and features designed to help you boost your Dropshipping business and boost your revenue. These tools include attention-grabbing popups, slide-ins, and sticky bars to capture your visitors’ email addresses.
With Adoric, you can create spin-to-win marketing campaigns to entice new visitors. It also allows you to create exit-intent opt-in forms to get the emails of visitors attempting to exit your website.
Adoric can be used on Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix, etc.
Adoric pricing
Adoric is free for websites with 5,000 monthly pageviews or less. If your website gets more, you would have to opt for the Essentials, Standard, and Pro plans. They cost $29, $79, and $199 per month.
Email marketing tips and best practices
Looking for tips to make your email marketing dropshipping campaign a massive success? Here are some of the test-and-trusted tips from industry experts.
1. Personalize your emails
If you are hoping to make sales for your Dropshipping business by sending email blasts that lack a personal touch, you would be setting yourself up for a big disappointment.
Needless to say, your chances for success are better when you personalize your email sends because personalized emails get more open than generic ones.
A survey by Campaign Monitor shows that marketers that personalize their email campaigns have seen their revenues grow by 760%.
Personalizing your email campaigns isn’t rocket science: addressing contacts by their first names, segmenting your email list, using dynamic content, etc. will do.
2. Create engaging email subject lines
The average email user receives a lot of emails every day. Hence, they aren’t sitting around waiting for yours to come in.
If your emails are going to stand out and get their attention, you will have to create engaging email subject lines that can grab attention.
3. Build a creative email design
Looks matter a lot when it comes to email marketing. As such, it is important to put in the effort to create visually appealing email campaigns to engage your audience.
Measure performance
Tracking and measuring the performance of your email marketing dropshipping campaigns will help give you a better perspective of areas you need to improve on.
That said, here are important metrics to pay attention to:
Bounce rate
Bounce rate measures the percentage of email sends that never arrive at your recipients’ inboxes.
If your bounce rate is high, it can mean two things: the email marketing software you are using has issues. Or, there are lots of fake email addresses on your list.
Asking subscribers to verify their email addresses will help to eliminate the latter.
Unsubscribe rate
Users will definitely unsubscribe from your mailing list no matter how awesome your email content is. This is not bad per se. Measuring your unsubscribe rate will help you determine the right email content that will resonate with your audience.
Open rate
Open rate is another important metric to keep a tab on. Tracking the open rate of your email marketing campaigns gives you a fair idea of how engaged your audience is, and how you can better improve your campaigns.
Conversion rate
What goal are you looking to achieve with your email marketing campaign? Get more subscribers, drive more sales, or get more sign up? Measuring your conversion rate gives you insight into the effectiveness of your campaign.
ROI from campaign
The last metric to measure is the ROI from your campaign. How much are you getting back from what you invested into your email marketing campaign?
Knowing this will help you determine if the juice is worth the squeeze.
Ready to Get Started?
Email marketing, as you have seen, can help boost your dropshipping business and generate more sales for you.
Best of all, it is easy if you leverage the right dropshipping platform, such as Sell the Trend.
With Sell the Trend, you can easily create pages, generate ads, fulfill orders, automate product research, and find the best supplier for your dropshipping business.
Sign up for an account right away to take Sell the Trend for a spin. It is free!