The e-commerce landscape has been growing at an impressive pace. Last year, the cumulative e-commerce sales amounted to over $3.5 trillion. They have been projected to grow to $6.5 trillion in the next two years. The coronavirus pandemic has also given a sudden boost to e-commerce. The existing online stores are registering increased sales, and more new e-commerce fronts are cropping up.

On the one hand, it is a good sign for the sector and end consumers. On the other hand, it might not be good news for individual stores. The exponential growth of the e-commerce landscape means eventual market saturation, where every entity has to contest more fiercely to get their hard-earned share in the pie.

As a seasoned or aspiring online store owner, you need to take measures to get an edge on your competitors. One way to get that lead over peers is to power your e-commerce operations with marketing and email automation services. For those two services, you can’t find a better option than Mailchimp.

Before we move on to discuss the reasons why you need to integrate Mailchimp in your system and get Mailchimp experts on board, we would like to outline the benefits of email marketing and credentials of Mailchimp for e-commerce websites and online stores.

Why Online Stores Need Email Marketing?

23% of sales of any company come from email marketing

There is a general misconception that email marketing has lost its effectiveness after the arrival of social media. However, numbers don’t support this claim. The above statistic alone is enough to highlight the importance of email marketing. Email marketing is still a lucrative option for businesses because it involves the least effort and higher ROIs.

Welcome Emails Work More Often Than Not

Statistics suggest that internet users are receptive to the first email that they receive from any business. They are more likely to open it and sift through its content. As an online store, you get a great opportunity in that welcome email. You can reach out to the maximum number of your potential customers (given that you are using an integrated service like Mailchimp) and persuade them to visit your store and buy something.

It Takes Less Effort

With all the offline and online marketing channels, it has become taxing and time-consuming to promote your business. For instance, an online store depends on user engagement on social media to generate leads. Email marketing offers a relatively less hectic yet effective means of marketing.  After some initial brainstorming and work, you can automate the process of email marketing and continue to benefit from it.

You Can Remind Customers About Their Abandoned Carts

This is a unique feature of email marketing that is of great advantage to online stores. Many times customers leave their online shopping spree midway. Sometimes they come back on their own and resume the shopping. However, often, that online shopping cart gets lost forever. You can send a reminder to all those customers regarding their abandoned carts.

Statistics suggest that 30% of abandoned car emails convert and result in purchases

Credentials of Mailchimp

The above section has amply highlighted the importance of email marketing for e-commerce websites. We will now have a quick look at Mailchimp’s credentials for the email marketing of online retail stores.

• Mailchimp has administered seven billion emails for its e-commerce clients.
• Online stores that have used Mailchimp for promoting their Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other sales offers have received 12.5 million orders from emails.
• Small businesses, including online stores, have made over $3.5 billion in revenue through Mailchimp campaigns.

5 Reasons to Use Mailchimp for Your Online Store

The discussion above has made a compelling case for using email marketing powered by Mailchimp to promote your online store and increase its bottom line. However, you need to shed light on the functional reasons for integrating this email marketing service and why it is important to get Mailchimp experts involved.

1. This Automation Email Service Works on All E-Commerce Platforms

Different online stores use different web building platforms and point-of-sale systems. The use of these platforms and systems come on their own terms. For instance, you can only use particular web building plug-ins and elements on them. Similarly, not all email automation system works on all those e-commerce platforms except for Mailchimp.

Whether you have built your online store on WooCommerce or Square, you can integrate Mailchimp into it. Moreover, if your online store primarily works on Shopify, you can connect it with Mailchimp via ShopSync. Besides the web-building platforms and payment systems, Mailchimp also seamlessly works with many other apps, including Slack and Adobe Photoshop. When you start using Mailchimp and sync it with your Adobe Photoshop, you get to quickly edit and process your email campaign images on Photoshop and send it to the list without opening and working on multiple programs and windows.

In short, Mailchimp has been designed to synergize with other applications to support different aspects of a working online store. Unlike many automation systems, Mailchimp doesn’t render other applications useless. A Mailchimp development agency can give you more insight into how you can use and integrate Mailchimp with a host of other valuable e-commerce-related plug-ins.

2. Use Mailchimp’s CRM to Customize Your Email Campaigns

This is undoubtedly the most decisive reason to introduce Mailchimp into your e-commerce operational landscape. Mailchimp is not a mere automation button that you press to send emails en masse. Since its development in 2001, Mailchimp has undergone many developments. Today, it boasts an impressive marketing CRM that can help you in various ways to make your email automation more customer-oriented and yielding.

a) You Can Segment Your Lists and Customize Your Emails
List segmentation is now considered a cornerstone of email marketing. Email and Mailchimp experts are in agreement that businesses have to segment their mailing lists for email marketing. No targeted market is homogenous when it comes to online shopping, and, therefore, you need to target them according to their interests, purchasing powers, and shopping preferences.

Mailchimp’s CRM helps you with that. When you integrate it into your online store, it tracks records of purchases, creates every customer profile with their shopping history. It also runs analytics to tell you which customer is more likely to buy what item. All this information comes in really useful when you have to create emails and other digital ads.

b) You Get Insight into Your Business
Besides letting you break your mailing lists into segments for better customization, Mailchimp CRM also helps you in analyzing how your business is doing. You can mine all the information rendered by the CRM to understand the market trends, your strong suits, and weak links.

Here, you must be working with a seasoned Mailchimp agency. Professionals who have mastered Mailchimp are in a better position to use this data to devise business insights.

c) You Can Reach Out to Inactive Customers
Online shopping space is fickle. Customers are introduced to so many options so regularly that they often forget about a store on which they have shopped earlier. It is important for an online store to reach out to those inactive consumers because they haven’t ebbed away due to poor customer service or low-quality products.

Mailchimp can furnish a list of those inactive customers, so you write them a personalized email along with an offer to get them back.

d) You Can Tailor Particular Offers for Particular Group of Customers
If you don’t want customers to mark your email spam, do these things:

• Don’t send them emails too often
• Always have something relevant and interesting in the email for the recipient

You can fulfill the second point by using Mailchimp CRM and email automation. For instance, CRM can tell you that the age group and previous purchases of a customer. This information can help you in coming up with a tailored offer and subject for which they might want to open the email.

3. Always Send HTML Emails to Your Potential Customers

This is another crucial aspect to factor in when you are choosing an email automation service. Many email automation vendors offer you impressive mass emailing services and at a very reasonable price. However, the problem is they only deliver text-based emails in bulk.

Internet users have evolved, and for them, HTML emails have become a standard. If you are reaching out to them while only relying on a text copy of your email, you are in for a disappointing opening rate and overall ROI. HTML emails can incorporate every element that you would like to have in your marketing email.

You can have integrated tabs, buttons, and images in your email. In short, you can add more value to your email that ultimately improves click-through rates as well. You can use Mailchimp to create and send HTML emails en masse.

4. Increase the Conversion Chances of Cart Abandoned Emails

70% of shopping carts at online stores are abandoned

A potential customer that has successfully moved through lead generation and conversion phases but only opts out just before the sale is a disheartening prospect for any business. E-commerce stores encounter this phenomenon more often than brick-and-mortar stores in terms of abandoned carts. It has always been a pressing point for online stores, and the same fickle nature of online shopping is behind that issue.

As per the statistic mentioned above, online stores suffer from a huge number of abandoned carts that hurt them in the long run. Mailchimp can help an online store to overcome this issue. First, it can make it easy for online stores to identify all the customers with abandoned carts with their CRM capabilities.

Once the store has the list of all those customers, it can create HTML emails reminding the customers about their abandoned carts. The HTML emailing feature allows you to add the entire cart to the message you send to customers. This cart integration into the email will make it easy for them to resume shopping. Such emails have higher conversion chances than those messages that just notify customers about their incomplete shopping and ask them to click on links.

5. Send Automated Purchase Confirmations

Keep in mind that any successful businesses, including online stores, keep pursuing their clients even after the successful completion of a sale. You can adopt this practice through Mailchimp by automating customized post-sale purchase confirmation emails. The body of this email should contain the purchase details and guide customers about return and refund clauses. There are two reasons why Mailchimp experts consider purchase confirmation emails important for an online store.

• It makes a professional impression of the store and conveys the sentiment of reliability.
• It reminds customers about the online store they have shopped from in the last couple of days or weeks.
• Due to their personalized nature and sales-related information, purchase confirmation emails register an impressive opening rate. This allows you to plug in a short marketing snippet in them as well.

6. Send “Remind Me” Emails

Many times a certain product gets out of stock and leaves potential customers disappointed. You can give them hope by introducing the “Email me when back in stock” button on such products. It has been noticed that many people subscribe to such an offer in their eagerness to get a particular product.

You can automate this reminding process via Mailchimp. So, whenever a product is restocked, Mailchimp will send out a reminder to all those customers who have asked for it. This email reminder can make sure you don’t lose out customers to your competitors.

Final Thoughts

Email marketing and communication still hold a lot of importance in the digital world. For any online store that strives to create a holistic marketing strategy and good customer services, it is imperative to incorporate intuitive email automation into its operations.  The above-detailed discussion tells us why Mailchimp will be the right choice for such email marketing and CRM services.

If you are new to email marketing and this comprehensive email marketing tool, let’s connect! We’re a seasoned Mailchimp development agency not to mention a certified Mailchimp partner.