BigCommerce email marketing guide for 2023

Do you know? Each dollar spent on an effective email marketing campaign can bring an ROI from $32 to $42.

Isn’t that a whopping response for a marketing channel?

Moreover, 74% of Baby Boomers and 72% of Gen X responded that email is the ideal channel to communicate with brands. 

Email marketing for your BigCommerce store is a powerful strategy to grow your business opportunities and sales revenue.

This guide covers step-by-step learning on “BigCommerce email marketing” and presents best practices to get the desired results.

What is BigCommerce email marketing?

Email marketing is the process of communicating with prospects and customers online via email to sell more and enhance customer loyalty. 

It is a highly effective and budget-friendly digital marketing channel that allows for personalized communication.

Moreover, email is an owned media channel, so you have complete control over your messaging and targeting.

BigCommerce doesn’t offer email services, so you need to rely on a third-party app to facilitate email marketing. 

Well, don’t worry! You can easily integrate your BigCommerce store with Salesmate to take advantage of CRM and email marketing automation. 

Moving on, if you’re still in doubt about implementing BigCommerce email marketing, see the perks below. 

Importance of email marketing for your BigCommerce store

Email is crucial for eCommerce business communication, with 72% of consumers relying on it. 

Now, let’s discover the advantages of leveraging BigCommerce email marketing:

Reaching large audiences in an instant

With over 4.3 billion email users worldwide, you can connect massive audiences to drive more opportunities with your email marketing campaigns.

You can share meaningful content resources or attract lucrative offers to engage your target audience.

Segmenting your customers and building solid relationships 

Segment your emails into various groups and build a personalized message to target your prospects. Such segmented target campaigns drive more conversion and boost revenue.

Nurturing to convert prospects into loyal customers

You can target them with personalized content that caters to your prospects’ requirements, offers educational materials, and establishes consistent interaction with them to foster trust and inspire repeat business.

Targeting with personalized messages to customers

Nowadays, customers go for brands that deliver personalized experiences. 52% of customers said they would exit the email if it were not personalized. 

Moreover, personalized emails are said to deliver 6X the transactional rates. So, personalize your emails, as your recipients are more likely to respond to emails directly addressed to them. 

Streamlining your business communication with automated emails and sequences 

You can craft and automate your abandoned cart emails to recover lost customers. Also, you can set automated emails and sequences to re-engage your inactive contacts. 

Therefore, you can save time and effort by manually eliminating the need to create and send emails to your customer segments. 

How to do email marketing for BigCommerce stores: Step-by-step 

Step 1: Start building your email list

Email generates 25-35% of revenue for eCommerce businesses. To leverage email marketing, ensure you have a list of emails to target.

This enables you to market your products to as many people as possible. Thus, the greater the number of your target customers, the higher the chances of your business’s profitability. 

The below tactics will help you grow your email list:

1. Setting up a remarkable landing page

Write an excellent copy for your landing pages. Leverage lead generation tactics like offering gated resources, sign-ups for freebies, etc., to encourage potential customers or visitors to share their emails in exchange for valuable content resources.

2. Provide options to create an account for personalized recommendations

Provide an option to create an account for personalized product recommendations or to avail of an offer. This is a good way to encourage customers to share their contact details.

3. Place opt-in forms across your site

Opt-in forms help you collect emails from visitors at any stage of the buyer’s journey.  

Tip: Also, you must ask for user consent to receive communication mail like newsletters, new product updates, or other helpful marketing material to customers.
Hence, opt-in forms ensure emails don’t enter your contacts’ spam folders.

4. Entry-intent and exit-intent pop-up forms

Pop-ups are strategic ways to encourage visitors to sign up. 

You can also set its delay/closing times to ensure your visitors have read your message.  

Look at the intuitive entry pop-up form of Diamonds Direct below:

They encourage visitors to sign up with a catchy and persuasive description.

5. Leverage lead magnets  

You can turn your valuable resources into lead magnets (freebies offered in exchange for contact details like an email address or phone number).

Marketers often leverage lead magnets in exchange for contact information.

Here are some ideas for lead magnets for your eCommerce store:

• Exclusive discounts: Offer special deals to your subscribers for immediate engagement.
• Product guides: Present detailed insights into product usage and benefits.
• Buyer’s guides: Provide expert advice to aid informed purchasing decisions.
• Trend insights: Share upcoming industry trends and forecasts.
• Interactive quizzes: Engage your users with interesting quizzes that recommend products.
• How-to videos: Showcase product use cases through engaging video tutorials.

Step 2: Segment your email list 

Segmentation divides your customer list into different groups (segments) based on various parameters.

When you segment your email contact list, you can send more personalized emails that have higher chances of being opened and read by your contacts.

You can segment your email list on the basis of three parameters:  

Interests 

eCommerce businesses can create and send targeted email campaigns based on specific interests to their contacts.    

Then, email updates and promotions are sent to the customer segments based on those specific styles. 

For instance, a fashion retailer can segment customers by style preferences, such as formal and casual wear.   

Demographics 

Demographics pertain to age, income, location, and gender. 

For example, an online clothing store can use this to its advantage by sending emails on age-specific recommendations or even collections based on gender preferences. 

Purchase history  

You can segment your list by the purchase history of your customers.   

For example, an eCommerce retailer specializing in beauty products can identify their customers who frequently purchase products and offer personalized skin-care routines to those customers.   

They can also send product recommendations on their favorite brands and loyalty emails with rewards or discounts.   

Therefore, segmenting customers is crucial for email marketing as it will help you drive more sales with personalized targeting.

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Step 3: Pick an email software compatible with BigCommerce

Selecting the right email marketing platform is like choosing a partner for your journey.  

Like, you’d want a genuine companion who understands you and ensures an enjoyable trip. Similarly, a good email marketing tool helps you reach your destination (marketing objectives) and provides a seamless experience for both you and your audience. 

BigCommerce app marketplace offers various email marketing tools that seamlessly integrate with the platform, boosting your email marketing game. 

These tools provide intuitive drag-and-drop editors, allowing you to design emails that match your brand’s personality effortlessly.  

Here are some factors to consider when choosing such a tool. 

1. Price 

Ensure the email marketing software is affordable and offers a free trial so that you can have a hands-on experience.

2. Features  

Email marketing software provides various valuable features like campaign creation, personalization, segmentation, targeting, and more.

You need to identify what features you’ll need for your BigCommerce business before making a purchase decision. 

3. Ease of use  

Ensure your email marketing software is user-friendly and offers an easy setup. You don’t want to spend hours figuring out the workings of the tool during business hours. 

4. Customer support 

Make sure the vendor has a good customer support team in place. Read reviews of G2 and Capterra to figure out the customer support of the email marketing platform you are planning to invest in.

I’ve plugged in a great resource highlighting the best email automation tools in the market, so you don’t have to spend time researching them.  

If you’re looking to boost your sales and cut down on expenses, it’s highly recommended that you make an investment in a CRM equipped with email campaign software.

Step 4: Create effective email content for better engagement 

If your email content isn’t relevant and engaging, you’ll waste your time and money. So, make sure your email content is relevant and engaging. 

Here are some content tips to follow while crafting your emails.  

• Create brief and captivating email subject lines that increase the chances of your emails being opened.
• Avoid industry jargon and use terms so your audience can catch up easily. Remember, you must educate and entertain your audience, not bore them.  
• Keep the email copy natural and conversational. 
• Remember to include visually appealing images and videos. You’ve got to keep your contacts entertained! 

Planning can be a great way to boost engagement with your email content. One effective strategy for achieving this is by creating an email marketing calendar. 

Step 5: Track and measure your email campaign results 

Email marketing for BigCommerce is powerful as you can track how your email campaigns are performing.

So, evaluate your campaign’s performance to determine how your customers engage with your emails.

Here are two important steps you should take: 

1. Tracking and measuring key metrics 

For effective measurement, ensure you track these key metrics: 

• Open rates   

Open rate denotes the percentage of recipients who opened your emails. 

• CTR (Click-Through Rate)

CTR denotes the number of clicks in your email against the number of subscribers who received the emails. 

• Bounce rate and spam filters 

It’s also essential to track them to ensure that your email marketing time investments and efforts are not in vain. 

Avoid using capital letters, exclamation marks, and filtered words to prevent spam. Maintain a balance between text and images in your email.

Moreover, regularly update your email lists to avoid sending messages to unsubscribed contacts and ensure that your communications only reach interested recipients.

2. Assessing revenue 

If you want to know how well your email marketing campaigns are doing, checking how much revenue they’re bringing in is a good idea.

This can help you figure out how successful your email marketing strategy is.

To accurately track the ROI of your emails, follow these steps:

• Set a clear goal 
• Implement tracking codes 
• Analyze conversion rates 
• Analyze customer lifetime value 
• Calculate ROI 
• Set a clear goal  

Before measuring your email marketing ROI, you must define your goals.  

What are you trying to achieve with your campaigns? Is it brand awareness, nurturing more leads, increasing website traffic, open rates, or click-through rates?  

Whatever your goal is, you’ll need to measure your progress against those goals. 

Read more: How to measure KPIs in email marketing

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Types of BigCommerce emails that you can send to grow

There are various kinds of emails that you can send through BigCommerce to achieve different goals, like improving lead engagement, generating MQLs, or boosting conversion rates.

These emails can be broadly categorized as transactional, promotional, and lifecycle emails.

Let’s explore the best email types that can help your eCommerce business boost sales opportunities: 

Let’s discuss them in a little more detail:

1. Send welcome emails 

Sending welcome emails lets you introduce new subscribers to your brand and prompts them to take specific actions.

Moreover, you can automate these emails with a power email automation platform and thus save your time and speed up your process.

2. Send abandoned cart emails 

Cart recovery emails are a great way to regain sales from potential customers who have left at their final purchase.

Moreover, abandoned cart emails encourage or push customers to complete their purchases.

You can even cut some slack by automating it, so you don’t have to track down each customer who abandoned their cart. 

3. Send birthday emails 

Birthday emails are effective in showing your customers that you appreciate their business with you.

You can encourage them to purchase something with a discount or coupon created especially for them. 

4. Send product recommendations 

Product recommendation emails are powerful to cross-sell and upsell other products in your storefront to your customers.  

5. Send win-back emails 

Win-back emails let you re-engage with customers who last purchased from you a while ago. 

Read more: 14 Types of BigCommerce email to explore [With templates]

Improving email deliverability for BigCommerce email marketing success

You must ensure your emails reach customers’ inboxes and don’t render your email marketing efforts useless.   

With the rising number of spammers, more regulations have risen. So, one thing that you never want for your emails is to end up in your customers’ spam folders.

Here are some tactics to improve your email deliverability:

• Use SPF and DKIM  

These technologies can help verify that your emails are coming from you and not from a spammer.  

SPF stands for sender policy framework. It helps email servers check if the email is coming from you and not from anybody else.   

DKIM stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail. It is a way for email servers to check if the email contents have been changed since it was sent.   

When you use these SPF and DKIM, you make it challenging for spammers to send emails that look like they’re coming from you.

It helps prevent a lot of phishing attacks.   

• Use double opt-ins or a confirmed opt-in 

Double opt-in is better than single opt-in to prevent spam complaints. It involves sending a confirmation email to new subscribers for further validation and consent. 

• Check your sender scores 

ISPs (Internet Service Providers) look for minimum scores in emails and will reject the mail if it has a low score.    

The higher the score is, the better the chances of your emails avoiding the rejection box.  

• Clean your email list regularly 

This means removing any inactive or unsubscribed subscribers.

You should avoid sending a repeated or restarted campaign to those who have unsubscribed from your emails.

Also, remove recipients who haven’t opened or clicked your emails in months, including inactive and non-responsive contacts.

• Avoid spammy words and phrases 

Some words and phrases, such as “free” and “make money,” can trigger spam filters, so it’s best to avoid them. 

• Send high-quality emails 

Your emails should be well-written and error-free. Ensure they’re relevant to your recipients’ interests. 

• Filter email signups 

Many times, you will get a lot of email signups that have non-existent or invalid email addresses.   

It happens when you give away a free item during contests or bonanzas. People tend to participate as often as possible by entering multiple addresses.  

When you run an email campaign for such a list, the bounce rates will soar, damaging your email credibility.  

So be aware of that and filter out those addresses. 

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10 Best practices for BigCommerce email marketing to improve business

With better deliverability, ensure your email offers something valuable that engages your prospects and encourages them to perform necessary actions.

Here are some of the most helpful tactics to improve your email marketing game.

1. Send emails legally for better deliverability 

You need to get prior permission to send emails. So, ask people if they want to receive your emails before you add them to a campaign list.

Moreover, your customers must be able to opt in and out of emails.

Also, ensure you follow these compliances:

• CAN-SPAM (Rules for commercial email): The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act.  
• GDPR: The General Data Protection Regulation law safeguards the personal information of individuals residing within the European Union.
• CASL: Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation helps protect Canadian data. 

2. Use A/B testing to see what works

A/B testing involves sending two distinct versions of an email to different segments of your email list to discover which one performs better.

It can help you determine which subject lines, images, and calls to action resonate most with your audience.

3. Write compelling subject lines

Make your email subject line clear and attractive, as when a recipient receives your email, the subject line is the first thing they see.

Use relevant keywords and avoid excessive use of all caps or exclamation points to convey your message effectively.

Related read: 7 helpful tips for crafting sales email subject lines for higher open rates.

4. Make your emails mobile-friendly  

Optimizing emails for mobile devices is essential with the increasing number of mobile users. Make your email design responsive to get more engagement from mobile users.

5. Establish a consistent brand voice 

Your email marketing should be consistent with the rest of your marketing materials. This means using the same tone, style, and branding elements across all of your emails, like your logo.

6. Personalize your emails

89% of marketers reported a positive ROI after using a personalization strategy in their campaigns.

People are more likely to open and read personalized emails. Use the recipient’s name in the subject line, body, or signature.  

You can also personalize your emails by leveraging insights from customer data such as purchase history or interests.

Win back customers with personalized drip email campaigns!

Bring back your inactive customers by utilizing tailored email campaigns and fasten targeting with automation.

Explore Email Marketing Automation CRM

7. Keep your emails short and sweet

Keep your emails concise, as people have short attention spans. If you aim for professional-looking emails, write no more than 500 words.

8. Use visuals

Shorter content and visually appealing emails hit just right.

Use images and videos, as they can help to break up your text and make your emails more visually appealing. It helps to explain your products or services more effectively.

9. Offer something of value 

Your emails have higher chances of engagement if there is something attractive, like educational content resources, technical knowledge about your product handling, some freebies, or a bumper discount.

Ensure to deliver a good brand experience by providing great value through your emails.

10. Include a compelling call to action

You need to tell your subscribers what to do, like to explore your landing pages, sign up for your newsletter, or purchase.

I hope this was helpful.

These were the top 10 email marketing tips to grow your BigCommerce store sales.

Sell more with smart email marketing software!

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Elevate your BigCommerce email game with Salesmate

BigCommerce store owners can effectively grow their business by investing in cost-effective, top-notch email marketing software.

Moreover, look for email marketing apps that offer automation features to save time and improve the effectiveness of your email campaigns.

Do you know what’s even better?

An affordable unified customer platform to streamline your BigCommerce sales!

Connect BigCommerce with Salesmate CRM to drive success for your online store.

Build automated email marketing campaigns to win back customers, regain abandoned carts, and more.

Take a look at this abandoned cart email created easily with Salesmate:

Enhance your BigCommerce store sales with Salesmate’s cutting-edge features.

• Capture leads right from the web using built-in lead generation tools.
• Deliver good brand experience with Chatbot/Live Chat assistance to resolve web queries.
• Manage lead data effectively to get more insights for targeting campaigns.
• Advanced segmentation of leads for account-based marketing.
• Connect prospects via omnichannel (VoIP system, email, and SMS marketing).
• Create flawless personalized email campaigns for abandoned cart recovery, win back, or target new prospects for conversion.
• Marketing automation platform and pre-made email templates to boost productivity.
• Visualize your BigCommerce deals with sales pipeline management and identify more opportunities.
• Track your campaigns and get data-driven sales reports to optimize your strategy.

Salesmate is a single platform for building customer relationships and is a great BigCommerce email marketing app.

You can seamlessly integrate Salesmate with BigCommerce by 1Center.

Want to grow your BigCommerce store sales?

Connect your BigCommerce store to Salesmate and unlock limitless possibilities with advanced CRM and email marketing automation.

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Conclusion 

Email marketing is a powerful strategy for BigCommerce businesses, but you must be precise when selecting the email automation tool that meets your needs and budget.

Explore all the best BigCommerce email marketing apps and decide on the one that fits your needs. Go for email marketing tools with a great customer success team.

If you’re looking to boost your BigCommerce store sales, consider Salesmate, a smart CRM with a powerful automation suite.

Moreover, for your BigCommerce email marketing needs, Salesmate CRM is the best tool. 

Frequently asked questions