If you run an online store, someone has probably told you to invest in email marketing services at least a dozen times. You nodded, thought “yes, I really should sort that,” and then carried on doing everything else instead. Sound familiar?
Here’s the thing: email is one of the highest-returning channels available to online retailers, consistently beating paid social and PPC when it comes to revenue per pound spent. The DMA puts average ROI at £38 for every £1 invested, with Omnisend’s US merchants reporting even higher returns of $68 per dollar spent. No, those are not typos, it’s real money on the table.
So what does eCommerce email marketing actually involve? What separates the brands doing it well from those sending the occasional newsletter and wondering why nothing happens? Find out below.
Table of Contents
- What Is eCommerce Email Marketing?
- Why Email Outperforms Most Other Channels
- The Two Sides of eCommerce Email Marketing Services
- How to Choose the Right Email Marketing Platform
- What Is Segmentation in Email Marketing?
- What Makes a Good eCommerce Email?
- Common Email Marketing Mistakes
- How to Measure Email Marketing Performance
- How to Get Started
- FAQ
What Is eCommerce Email Marketing?
At its most basic, email marketing means sending targeted, commercial messages to people who have given you permission to contact them. For eCommerce brands, that translates to driving purchases, recovering lost sales, retaining existing customers and building genuine loyalty over time.
The gap between a brand doing email well and one doing it badly is enormous, both in revenue and in how customers feel about you. Good eCommerce email is personal, timely and relevant. Bad eCommerce email is whatever lands in your promotions folder and gets deleted without a second glance. We have all been there on the receiving end.
So Why Does Email Still Make So Much Money?
You might assume a channel this old would have lost its edge. It has not, and the data makes that clear.
Automated emails convert around one in every three people who click, while campaign emails convert roughly one in twenty. For welcome and abandoned cart emails specifically, those conversion rates climb even higher, with nearly one in every two people who click going on to purchase. That kind of performance is hard to argue with.
The deeper reason email works so well comes down to one concept: ownership.
With social media, you are renting an audience. The algorithm shifts, organic reach collapses, and the 50,000 followers you spent years building suddenly see maybe 2% of your posts. Your email list belongs to you. No platform stands between you and your customers; no algorithm can take that away.
There is an intent factor too. Someone who signed up to your emails raised their hand and said, in effect, “yes, I want to hear from you.” That is a warm, established relationship rather than a cold introduction, and it is a big part of why email conversion rates tend to sit in a different bracket altogether. Channels like PPC are brilliant for reaching new audiences and driving discovery; email is where you deepen those relationships and bring people back.
The Two Sides of eCommerce Email Marketing Services
When brands talk about email marketing services for eCommerce, they are typically describing a combination of two things: automated flows and campaign sends. Understanding both, and the way they work together, is where most brands start to see a real difference in results.
Automated Email Flows: Revenue Running in the Background
Flows are sequences triggered by specific customer actions (or inactions). Set them up once and they run continuously, reaching people at precisely the right moment without you manually sending a thing. The core flows every eCommerce brand needs are:
- Welcome series: first contact with new subscribers; sets your brand tone and often includes a purchase incentive. Welcome emails average a 54.3% open rate and generate around $2.65 revenue per recipient across eCommerce industries.
- Abandoned cart: sent when someone adds items but leaves without buying. Abandoned cart flows average a 50.5% open rate and generate $3.65 in revenue per recipient, making them the single highest-revenue automation available to eCommerce brands.
- Browse abandonment: triggered when a customer views a product but does not add it to their cart.
- Post-purchase: thank-you messages, order updates, review requests and cross-sell suggestions.
- Win-back: targeted at lapsed customers who have gone quiet, with the aim of pulling them back before they are gone for good.
Flows do the heavy lifting. Automated emails account for just 2% of sends but drive 41% of all email orders, according to Omnisend’s eCommerce data. That ratio alone justifies treating them as the first priority in any email programme.
Campaign Emails: Keeping Your Brand Front of Mind
Campaigns are your broadcast emails: sale announcements, product launches, seasonal promotions, editorial content. They need more planning than flows, but they are essential for keeping a connection with your audience between purchase moments.
The brands that do campaigns well treat them like content, not megaphones. There is a real difference between an email that gives a reader something useful and one that just shouts “BUY NOW.” Your subscribers have seen enough of the latter to recognise it immediately.
How to Choose the Right Email Marketing Platform for eCommerce
The platform you use shapes almost everything, from how sophisticated your automation can be to how accurately you can target specific segments. Two names dominate the conversation for eCommerce specifically.
Klaviyo
Klaviyo is built for eCommerce from the ground up. It connects natively with Shopify and BigCommerce, pulling real-time purchase data, browsing behaviour and customer lifetime value directly into your automations. For a scaling eCommerce brand, it is the most capable option on the market, and eComOne is a certified Klaviyo partner.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is more general-purpose. It suits brands earlier in their journey or those with simpler needs. The eCommerce features have improved, but the data depth and automation logic of Klaviyo remain a meaningful step ahead once you start scaling.
How to Decide Which Platform Is Right for You
The right platform depends on three things: your current revenue, your tech stack and what you actually need the tool to do. A brand doing £500k a year has different requirements from one at £5M. Start with what fits now and migrate when the ceiling becomes obvious. If you want a second opinion on which platform suits your setup, our eCommerce strategy session is a good place to start that conversation.
What Is Segmentation in Email Marketing and Why It Matters
Here is a mistake that comes up constantly. A brand builds a list of thousands, then sends every single person the same message at the same time, regardless of whether they made a purchase last week or have not opened an email in a year.
Segmentation means splitting your list into groups based on shared characteristics, then sending each group something that actually applies to them. That could be based on:
- Purchase history and frequency
- Average order value
- Which products someone has browsed
- Where they sit in the customer lifecycle (new, active or lapsed)
- Geographic location or device type
When the right message reaches the right person, open rates rise, click rates rise and unsubscribes fall. It sounds obvious, and it is, but the number of eCommerce brands still not doing this properly remains surprisingly high. Pairing strong segmentation with a solid Customer Value Optimisation strategy is where the real gains tend to compound.
What Makes a Good eCommerce Email?
Getting the strategy right is one thing. Getting the actual email right is another. Here are the elements that consistently separate high-performing sends from the ones that get ignored.
Subject Lines: The One Thing That Has to Work First
If the subject line does not earn the open, nothing else in the email matters. Full stop.
The best subject lines tend to be short (under 50 characters), specific and either curiosity-led or benefit-led. Personalisation (a first name, a reference to a recent purchase) lifts open rates in ways that are hard to argue with. Vague lines like “Check this out!” or anything that reads like a corporate press release tends to land badly.
Preview Text: The Underused Second Hook
The snippet visible next to your subject line in most inboxes is prime real estate. A surprising number of brands leave it blank or let it auto-populate with “View this email in your browser.” Use it to extend the subject line or add a second reason to open.
Email Body Design and Layout
One clear call to action per email almost always outperforms four competing ones. Mobile-first design is non-negotiable: 61% of people check their emails on a mobile device, and a broken mobile experience means the majority of your audience is not reading your email.
Personalisation Beyond First Names
Dynamic content blocks that change based on purchase history or browsing behaviour are a step above basic personalisation. Klaviyo makes this reasonably straightforward to implement, and it works hand in hand with the kind of eCommerce SEO and content strategy that brings the right people to your store in the first place. The result, when done well, is an email that feels like it was written specifically for the person reading it, because in a meaningful sense, it was.
Common Email Marketing Mistakes That Cost eCommerce Brands Revenue
It would be strange not to mention where things go wrong. A few patterns recur across brands of all sizes.
Emailing too often, or not often enough
There is no fixed universal cadence, but too many emails creates list fatigue and too few creates complete disconnection. The right frequency is the one your subscribers respond to, and the only way to find that is to test.
Neglecting list health
A large list sounds impressive. A large list full of unengaged contacts is a deliverability liability. Keeping your list clean (removing contacts who have not engaged in six months or more) protects your sender reputation and keeps your emails reaching real inboxes.
No A/B testing
Gut feel is a starting point, not a strategy. Testing subject lines, send times, button copy and layout builds a picture of what your specific audience actually responds to, rather than what you assume they will.
Treating deliverability as an afterthought
If your emails are landing in spam, none of the above matters. Sender reputation is earned through consistent engagement signals: clean lists, relevant content and proper technical setup (SPF, DKIM and DMARC records). This is one area where working with experienced email marketing services pays for itself quickly.
How to Measure the Performance of Your Email Marketing
Knowing which metrics matter cuts through a lot of noise. Here are the numbers that tell the real story for eCommerce, benchmarked against Klaviyo’s 2024 industry data:
| Metric | What It Tells You | Benchmark to Aim For |
|---|---|---|
| Open rate | Subject line quality and sender reputation | 25-35% for campaigns; 42%+ for flows |
| Click-through rate (CTR) | Whether the content drives action | 2-5% |
| Conversion rate | Are clickers actually buying? | 1-5% depending on flow type |
| Revenue per recipient | The truest measure of email performance | $3.65 average for abandoned cart flows |
| Unsubscribe rate | Frequency or relevance issues | Below 0.5% per send |
| List growth rate | Is your audience expanding or contracting? | Positive month-on-month |
Open rate
Click-through rate (CTR)
Conversion rate
Revenue per recipient
Unsubscribe rate
List growth rate
Of all of these, revenue per recipient is the most honest single measure of whether your email programme is working. High open rates feel good; revenue pays the bills.
What Do Professional Email Marketing Services Actually Do for eCommerce?
You can run email yourself, particularly early on, but as you grow, the complexity compounds: more segments, more flows, more campaigns, more testing, all needing to function as a coherent whole rather than a collection of disconnected sends.
A specialist email marketing service accelerates the process. Rather than spending weeks learning the nuances of a platform or diagnosing why your deliverability has dropped, you are working with people who have built hundreds of flows, managed large lists and know where the common pitfalls are before they become expensive mistakes.
At eComOne, email sits alongside eCommerce SEO, Google Ads and Digital PR as part of an integrated performance marketing approach.
The practical benefit of that is cohesion: your email strategy works with what you are doing across paid and organic channels, rather than running in isolation. If you want to talk through where your email programme stands and where it could go, get in touch with the eComOne team today.
