A Better Ecommerce Newsletter

A robust email list could be an ecommerce business’s best investment. Depending on the survey, email marketing returns as much as $40 for every $1 invested in 2024. The challenge is acquiring and retaining subscribers.

Fortunately, a simple change in perspective can unlock growth.

Many merchants offer a discount — typically 10 to 15% — to encourage signups but then engage subscribers solely with more deals and offers. The merchants train subscribers to buy only when items are on sale.

What would happen if those merchants — retailers, wholesalers, direct-to-consumer brands — approached email marketing like social media?

Content Marketing

Editorial emails are a content marketing tactic for attracting, engaging, and retaining customers. Including tips, instructions, and advice expands email from promotional to informative, giving prospects new reasons to subscribe, engage, and buy.

The process is similar to social media marketing and goes something like this:

• Create a compelling and product-relevant editorial newsletter.
• Attract subscribers.
• Include products in each newsletter.
• Optimize for sales.

Content

Step one is to create compelling content related to the products your business sells.

Take Masterbuilt as an example. The company’s products are grills and smokers. Its content and social media marketing focus on recipes — the product and the content work together.

Masterbuilt posts recipes on TikTok (shown here) as well as Facebook, Instagram, and X.

Masterbuild would require little additional effort to produce a grilling newsletter. It could bundle several of its recipes into a weekly round-up.

The approach is a proven winner. Consider these five email recipe newsletters and their reported subscriber counts in March 2024.

Subscribers

The next step is to attract subscribers. Social media algorithms show posts to like-minded users who might follow your business.

But many social media marketers also boost those posts via advertising. Something similar exists for editorial newsletters. Let’s consider four subscriber growth drivers.

Organic recommendations. Substack, which blends editorial newsletters with social media features, was among the first to offer organic recommendations. When someone subscribes to an editorial newsletter, the platform suggests others.

For example, “The Real Heroes of Ecommerce” is a newsletter on Substack from marketer Jason Shepherd. Subscribing to that newsletter produces Shepard’s recommendation of “The Human Voice.”

The author of “The Real Heroes of Ecommerce” recommends “The Human Voice.” Both are on Substack.

Paid recommendations. Newsletter publishers can acquire subscribers for about $3 each via Sparkloop, ReferralHero, and others. Recommendations are available only for editorial newsletters, not marketing.

Paid growth. Several newsletter growth businesses have emerged. These agencies — Email Crush, Paperboy Studios, GrowthLetter — place ads in various channels to attract subscribers.

Blog and forms. Let’s not forget your company’s blog and web forms. Double down on promoting newsletters.

Include Products

An editorial email must be worth reading. Don’t skimp on this part. And don’t forget to include products, as follows.

Treat products like sponsors. Editorial newsletters frequently have sponsors. No rule prevents a sponsor from being a company’s own offerings.

Make it a recommendation. Many editorial newsletters recommend products after the main content. Think of these as text ads for your products.

Treat them as editorial. Masterbuilt could publish a weekly editorial newsletter featuring three recipes, an interview with a barbeque pro, and a tip for using the company’s “Autoignite” system. This mention could push a subscriber to place an order.

In each example, set up tracking to attribute sales.

Optimize for Sales

The last step is to optimize the editorial newsletter to produce the most revenue.

• Measure the newsletter’s sales performance.
• Segment subscribers to the products they are likely to purchase.
• Monitor subscriber sources. Focus on folks who subscribed via an organic recommendation if they produce the most sales.

Email Delivery, Explained

Gmail and Yahoo are adding new requirements this year for email senders in an effort to reduce unwanted messages. For recipients, it’s a blessing. For ecommerce businesses, a critical marketing channel may be in jeopardy.

To assess the impact, we must first understand “deliverability.”

Gmail announced new 2024 rules for email senders in an effort to reduce spam. New Yahoo email rules are similar.

Deliverability

Deliverability is the degree to which an email reaches recipients.

Good deliverability means messages arrive in subscribers’ inboxes. Subscribers may not open them but will see you sent them.

Messages with poor deliverability are marked as promotional and filtered to an alternate inbox or tab (such as “Promotions” in Gmail), sent to spam, or potentially blocked entirely.

Without deliverability, it doesn’t matter how well-written and designed emails are. You could have the best products and offers, and nobody will see them.

What influences deliverability? Let’s dive into that.

Domain Consistency

A sender’s domain appears in three places:

• In the “From” address (e.g., admin@mybusiness.com),
• In the “Reply-to” address,
• The sending domain.

Your email service provider typically assigns a sending domain. It’s an alias of sorts, as the actual sender is the provider, not your company. However, providers (e.g., Mailchimp, Klaviyo, many more) allow clients to use sending domains that match From and Reply-to addresses.

Ensure your domain is consistent in the three places, and you’ll be in good shape.

Authentication

A recipient’s email provider must know the sender is not an imposter.

Setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records at the sender’s domain registrar passes this basic deliverability test. Without authentication, recipients’ providers are much more likely to block marketing emails.

Most email providers offer tools and guides to streamline or entirely configure SPF, DKIM, and DMARC settings.

Reputation

Someone who registers a domain and immediately sends 10,000 emails is not likely trustworthy. Neither is a domain with 50% of past emails marked as spam or sent to expired or invalid addresses.

Conversely, a well-established sending domain with few spam complaints and consistent email engagement likely has a good reputation.

A domain’s sending reputation is critical for inbox delivery. Multiple services offer reputation monitoring. The best place to start is Google Postmaster Tools, which is free.

Building a good reputation includes:

• Only sending to people who sign up,
• Never buying email addresses,
• Sending good, relevant content,
• Removing lapsed subscribers and invalid addresses,
• Using a list cleaning service such as Neverbounce or AtData to detect bad addresses.

Google Postmaster Tools monitors domains’ email-sending reputation. The service is free.

Content

The final component of deliverability is the most obvious: send accurate, clean, and relevant content. Say an apparel store sends subscribers emails about Lego sets. That would annoy and confuse a lot of recipients and deserve a poor reputation.

Loading up an email with excessive images and exaggerations — “win big,” “millions,” “lottery,” “gold” — can flag an email as spam.

Some of this is intuitive. Take excessive images, for example. The emails of many ecommerce brands are clipped and cannot be easily read owing to so many product photos and links.

Using Glockapps, my favorite deliverability testing tool, I’ve checked the same message with more versus fewer images. I consistently achieve better deliverability results with fewer images. Studies from HubSpot show the same thing.

Definitely use images in your marketing emails. Just don’t overdo it — use mostly text.

Delivery KPIs

Inform “good” or “bad” delivery with these key performance indicators:

• Open rate. The number of recipients who open an email divided by the number of emails delivered. Some email apps (such as Apple’s iOS) mark all messages as open for privacy reasons. Nonetheless, shoot for at least a 20% open rate for ecommerce campaigns.

• Click rate. The number of recipients who click in an email divided by the number of emails delivered — ignoring clicks to unsubscribe and “view in browser” links. Aim for a click rate of at least 1%.

• Bounce rate. The number of emails immediately returned (typically due to invalid or blocked addresses) divided by the total emails delivered. Keep this KPI below 1%.

• Unsubscribe rate. The number of recipients who click the unsubscribe link divided by the number of emails delivered. Keep it below 0.5%.

• Spam rate. The number of recipients who click the spam link divided by the number of emails delivered. Spam is perhaps the most critical KPI. If the number is 0.3% or higher, deliverability and reputation will suffer. Aim for 0.05% or less.

My ecommerce business sells downloadable music software. In 2023 we sent 7.9 million marketing and automation emails, with these KPIs:

• 42% open rate,
• 1.28% click rate for marketing; 3.43% for automation,
• 0.43% bounce rate,
• 0.27% unsubscribe rate,
• 0.005% spam rate.

Prioritize your business’s email deliverability and achieve results as good or better.

Email and Text Marketing Are Cookie-proof

In 2024, Chrome will end third-party tracking cookies once and for all, forcing some marketers to look for alternatives. 

Google Chrome is the world’s most popular internet browser, with just over 65% of the global market in February 2024, according to Statista. Chrome began eliminating tracking cookies last month for approximately 1% of users and will have wholly removed third-party cookies by year’s end.

Chrome is among the last bastions for third-party tracking cookies. Up to now, Google has permitted tracking while it devised ways to blunt the impact of going cookieless on its advertising business. Meanwhile, Apple’s Safari, Mozilla’s Firefox, Opera, Brave, and the surging Arc Browser have all taken elimination steps.

Signal Loss

Google, Facebook, ad networks, and retargeting platforms have long relied on third-party cookies for targeted advertising for their clients. Placing cookies across millions of websites enables those providers to track the actions of individual consumers across the web and serve relevant, high-performing ads.

The end of cross-site tracking cookies means the advertising networks lose signal and become relatively less effective.

The result for most marketers is to double down on direct relationships with consumers.

Direct Message Marketing

Direct message or lifecycle marketing employs email, text (i.e., SMS and MMS), and messaging apps to communicate directly with customers and prospects.

Direct message marketing is already a popular promotional channel for many good reasons.

Stong engagement. Email and text messages are sent directly to subscribers and tend to have strong engagement rates.

For example, at least one report put the average return on advertising spend for email marketing in 2024 at 3.5 to 1. Compare this to 1.8 for Facebook ads and 1.55 for pay-per-click search advertising. 

Text message marketing may even be better. A top example is Gary Vaynerchuk’s Wine Text. The service sends regular wine offers to a willing audience of shoppers.

Three Wine Text offers from February 2024. Text messages can have extremely high engagement rates. Click image to enlarge.

Personalization and targeting. With direct message marketing, marketers can use subscribers’ interactions and behaviors to tailor messages, increasing engagement and conversions.

If a subscriber tends to buy more red wine than white, WineText can send offers for the former or bundle bottles to introduce a variety.

Less expensive than ads. Direct message marketing is relatively more cost-effective than top-of-funnel ads. Focusing on individuals who have shown an interest in a product or service lowers the cost. 

Strong customer relationships. With direct message marketing, a business “owns” the relationship. The subscriber is familiar with the company and presumably welcomes its solicitations. 

Getting Subscribers

To be sure, the ROAS of email and text marketing has always been high, long before the elimination of third-party cookies. So if direct messaging is so powerful, why weren’t marketers focused on it?

The answer is getting email or text subscribers is difficult. For example, Mailchimp estimated that the average email subscription rate in 2024 for ecommerce businesses was 0.19% — for every 500 folks who see an ecommerce email subscription form, slightly fewer than one will sign up.

Many online stores sought subscribers in conjunction with a first sale. It was easier to acquire a customer via, say, a Meta ad than enticing her to the website to subscribe. 

Thus direct messaging marketing is effective, but obtaining subscribers is not easy.

Privacy Tactics Complicate Ecommerce Marketing

Leading web browsers and email clients are doing more to stop user tracking, effectively reducing or eliminating the conversion signals many marketers depend on.

Advertisers love connecting ads with sales. That’s how they measure return on advertising spend, a key metric.

The same goes for ecommerce affiliate marketers, who need to know which affiliate partner drove a specific sale, to pay the commission. Simple.

What’s not simple is how individuals feel about being tracked. For years, consumers, legislators, and software makers have prioritized privacy. Those efforts have resulted in the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, the California Consumer Privacy Act, Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, and more.

Now the fight over tracking has moved to advertising links in email newsletters and websites.

Browsers

Initially released in 2022 for Apple devices, the Arc browser has been called the “Chrome killer.” This free web browser has a slew of features that have led many reviewers to call it the best in the market. Arc is coming to Windows in 2024, bringing “clean” URL copying and tracking warnings that will interrupt some of the most basic marketing metrics.

The Arc browser has little market share but has received positive reviews.

Clean URL copying removes tracking parameters in a URL string when an Arc user copies it. Here is an example.

Imagine you were an Amazon affiliate. You write an article about the 10 best science fiction television shows and link to several box sets on the Amazon marketplace. The link would end something like this.

...&tag=affiliate-20&ref=affiliate_site

A consumer using the Arc browser could read the article, copy the URL, and click through to Amazon, removing all the tracking parameters.

The Arc browser has an icon for copying the current URL.

Amazon could lose valuable conversion data if someone followed the clean link, and the affiliate would not get paid.

The Arc browser removes all URL tracking code when copied.

If browser review articles are believed, Arc users love clean URL copying. Arc makes this feature the default; it’s available via extensions in other browsers.

The Arc browser, via the uBlock Origin extension, also warns users when links pass through known tracking servers, similar to how Chrome warns users of an invalid or missing SSL certificate.

For example, think about affiliate marketing again. ButcherBox is an ecommerce subscription service that uses Impact, a popular affiliate platform, for its links. Typical Impact tracking will look like the following:

https://butcherbox.pxf.io/c/3668901/1366393/16419

When you click on this link in Arc, the browser warns you, letting you know that the domain (pxf.io) was found on Peter Lowe’s ad and tracking server list, a popular collection of known tracking parameters.

The uBlock Origin extension is installed by default in the Arc browser, prompting warnings of many affiliate and advertising links.

A shopper using Arc could still click through to ButcherBox, but many will not.

Arc uses several lists of tracking parameters. Even many website display ads generate this warning.

Email Clients

Arc is not alone in taking on tracking. Apple announced last year that it would remove tracking parameters from links in Messages and Mail, as did Proton Mail, a leading privacy-first mail client.

Proton Mail, like Arc, is not widely used, but it may reveal coming privacy features in mainstream email clients.

Proton’s feature works similarly to Arc’s clean URLs, striping away the parameters that tell marketers where a click came from.

Ecommerce Marketing

At first glance, consumers may value these new anti-tracking features. Yet the privacy they protect is minimal. An advertiser deploys URL parameters to track the performance of a channel — such as email or Google Ads — not an individual consumer.

Moreover, an advertiser can still place cookies on the browsers of visiting consumers. Thus a consumer could strip tracking parameters, land on an advertiser’s site, and end up with a cookie.

Nonetheless, eliminating URL parameters means marketers will lose signal, complicating their ability to know a channel’s performance.

Perhaps the hardest hit would be affiliate marketers, who presumably could not link a sale to a specific affiliate partner or even the entire channel.

In short, the actions of Arc, Proton Mail, and others may foretell a new era wherein marketers rethink attribution to find new and better promotional channels.

Secrets of Email Segmentation

Segmenting marketing emails puts the right offers and messaging in front of the right people at the right time. Segmentation is powerful, with seemingly limitless ideas for campaigns and automation.

I’ll focus here on two core segments and a method to otherwise build them specific to your store.

Email segmentation targets the preferences of individual consumers.

Top Customers

A key segment for most merchants is their best customers. But “best” varies from one business to the next. For example, a jewelry store with prices ranging from $50 to $1,000 per item would likely focus on total spend — customers with the highest lifetime purchases.

But a merchant selling low-cost consumable goods such as coffee, vitamins, or snacks might define “best” by the number of orders. The top 10% of customers might order six times a month, compared to an average of two.

A store with little history or with similar order behavior across customers could focus on email engagement. If it sends two emails monthly, a store’s “best” could be anyone who has clicked on at least two in the last 90 days.

With a best-customer segment created, a merchant can send variations of broader emails to that group. Acknowledging their importance can go a long way, even without offering a discount. An email to standard buyers might start:

Acme Coffee is proud to announce Madagascar Vanilla, our newest flavor. Available today!

The best-customer variation could read:

We’re excited to launch our newest flavor, Madagascar Vanilla. As one of our top customers, you’re invited to order first and share your thoughts.

Soliciting feedback in any form from top purchasers — via a survey or email reply — has the dual benefit of recognizing their importance and providing valuable feedback.

Surveying customers and subscribers provides valuable feedback, aiding segmentation. This example is from Indie Beauty Market, an online skincare provider. Click image to enlarge.

(Re)joining the Club

Next are lapsed customers, those who have not purchased in a long time. Lapsed customers should not receive frequent emails, as they require special attention to reengage.

First, how do we identify them? One metric is the average time between orders. Klaviyo and other email tools can produce this automatically. Say the average time between orders is 60 days. A lapsed customer could be 90 days or more — 50% higher than the average.

Another metric is email engagement. For example, customers who have not opened an email in six months or clicked in three are lapsed. The exact numbers depend on a store’s products and email frequency.

Once identified, entice lapsed customers with an automated email sequence that excludes recipients after they click. The sequence could be as follows.

1. Note that “it’s been a while” and briefly apprise them of new products, promotions, or improvements.

2. One week later, offer a discount on their next purchase.

3. The next week, solicit feedback by extending assistance, such as “Is there something we can do for you?” or “Are you looking for a certain product we don’t carry?”

4. A week afterward, inform recipients you will not email them again since it appears they aren’t interested. Good angles are “Time to say goodbye?” or “Should we stay quiet for now?”

Customer Preferences

There’s more to customers than how much (or how often) they purchase. Encourage their engagement by knowing the content or products they’re interested in. For example, my company produces software for musicians. We like to know their music preferences, such as rock, metal, or country.

To determine this, we first review their behavior — what they buy or click, not how much or how often. Have they clicked email links about metal guitars? Yes! We add them to our “Metal-Interested” segment.

We also build a survey, directly integrating with Klaviyo, our mail software. Klaviyo provides a custom “email preferences” page to collect arbitrary information from subscribers. We place answers to survey questions on this page and pipe directly into a subscriber’s profile for segment-building.

Combining behavioral and customer-supplied data facilitates very accurate segments, leading to outstanding results from targeted email campaigns. Our “interested” emails (e.g., “Metal-Interested”) routinely have 60% opens and 4-5% clicks — very strong for ecommerce.

Next Steps

Segmentation is a free feature of any email service provider worth its salt. Start using it immediately if you’re not already. It produces better results for your business and customers.

New Gmail and Yahoo Policies Impact Ecommerce

Google and Yahoo announced this month new email-sending policies that could impact ecommerce and omnichannel marketers.

The policies require email authentication, single-click unsubscribes, and low complaint rates.

The new rules take effect in February 2024 for Gmail and “in the first quarter of 2024” for Yahoo and AOL email clients — both Yahoo services. 

Messages from noncomplying senders will likely be automatically marked as spam, damaging deliverability and, for marketing emails, reducing clicks and conversions.

New policies from Gmail (shown here) and Yahoo aim to reduce unwanted email messages.

Less Spam, More Security

The new policies aim to slash the number of unwanted email messages.

“We firmly believe that users worldwide deserve a more secure email environment, with fewer unwanted messages for an improved overall experience. We look forward to working with peers across the industry to boost the adoption of these email standards that benefit everyone,” said Neil Kumaran, a Gmail group product manager, in a published statement.

Changes for Email Senders

The policies reflect practices already adopted by most reputable senders. 

Authenticate email messages. For years the best marketers have authenticated their emails, but starting in 2024, unauthenticated messages will be spam.

This requirement means email senders must implement by 2024 the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) or DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) — using both is optimal — and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) records. The policy applies to all emails: transactional and marketing.

Finally, senders with frequently forwarded emails — likely not ecommerce — should also use the Authenticated Received Chain (ARC) to preserve authentication from one email server to another.

Easy to unsubscribe. Senders who deploy 5,000 emails to Gmail or Yahoo Mail in one day must offer a one-click unsubscribe link.

The link is necessary only for “subscriptions,” — i.e., email marketing, not transactional messages such as order confirmation or delivery notifications.

Businesses using email service providers almost certainly comply with this requirement. However, the risk to those merchants could be over-implementation if ESPs attach the one-click link to all messages, including transactions.  

Send emails folks want. The next policy is not a change. Google and Yahoo want email senders to deploy messages recipients want. This has always been the case, but it’s now required.

Specifically, email senders must keep spam rates reported in Google Postmaster Tools below 0.3%. Yahoo has shared this rate with select email senders but could soon expose it publicly in its Sender Hub.

Impact on Marketing

There are other new requirements, but authentication, one-click unsubscribe, and low spam rates are the most likely to impact commerce — online or in-store. Google stated it does not want businesses to delay implementation until February, adding that early adoption could improve email deliverability.

Meeting these new requirements should result in more email marketing messages landing in inboxes.

But there are a few things to watch for. 

Deliverability. Businesses using external domains for sending emails could add their own domain with DMARC to build a trusted reputation and thus improve deliverability.

More unsubscribes. Some email professionals have wondered if the single-click unsubscribe link will lead to accidental cancellations from humans or spam-prevention bots. 

List hygiene. Keeping reported spam rates low typically requires list hygiene — removing unengaged subscribers.

Different from Apple

The announcements from Google and Yahoo differ from Apple’s email privacy protection initiative.

The Google and Yahoo policies primarily focus on ensuring emails are legitimate, authenticated, and wanted. The goal is to reduce spam and fraud. Apple’s focus is preventing senders from collecting actionable information about opens or clicks.

Google’s and Yahoo’s policies should improve email performance, while Apple’s could complicate measurement.

Benefits of Email Opt-outs

Email marketers know the challenge of in-box saturation, with modern consumers receiving dozens of daily promotions.

Giving recipients more control, especially around holidays, can help. Take Mother’s Day and Father’s Day as examples. Both have much sales potential but can pain customers experiencing bereavement or separation. Allowing them to opt out of those occasions reduces unsubscribes and builds trust,  leading to more sales in the long term.

Here are three examples.

Email Opt-outs

Red

Red, a sporting goods merchant, allows subscribers to opt out of Father’s Day messages. It sends a dedicated email for that purpose. The message is clear, with a prominent “Click to Opt Out” button. However, the subject line — “Update your preferences” — is unclear and easily overlooked.

Red sends a dedicated email allowing subscribers to opt out of Father’s Day messages. Click image to enlarge.

Marks & Spencer

The U.K. retailer Marks & Spencer allows subscribers to opt out of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day messages. The subject line — “Prefer not to hear about Mother’s Day?” — is direct and unambiguous. The body copy includes a deadline, setting expectations and mitigating questions and follow-ups.

Marks & Spencer allows subscribers to opt out of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day messages. Click image to enlarge.

Bloom & Wild

In 2019 online florist Bloom & Wild offered an email opt-out for Mother’s Day. The overwhelming response led the company to launch “The Thoughtful Marketing Movement,” now a community of 170 businesses.

Bloom & Wild’s opt-out emails are text only, styled as a personal message. The screen capture below reads:

Subject line: A sensitive occasion is coming up

Hello Sam,

In a few weeks’ time, we’re going to start sending emails about Father’s Day. If you’d rather not hear about it, that’s totally fine. You can let us know here.

Once you’ve opted out, we won’t send you anything related to this date. You’ll still get our other emails though, like normal.

And remember, if you ever want to update your contact preferences for a different sensitive occasion, you can do that at any time from your account.

Have a lovely day.

Lucy

Bloom & Wild’s opt-out emails are text only, styled as a personal message. Click image to enlarge.

Bloom & Wild’s head of retention addressed thoughtful marketing in a Medium post, describing the positive response from the media and customers, stating, “Lifetime value is higher for customers who opted out. In fact, in our most recent sample, opted-out customers had a lifetime value 1.7x that of non-opted-out customers.”

Getting Started

Merchants looking to implement email opt-outs should consider which occasions align with their audience. I’ve received opt-outs for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Grandparent’s Day, and Valentine’s Day. Religous-themed occasions and geo-focused holidays are prime opt-out candidates.

Send a dedicated email long before the occasion and ensure the subject line and body copy are clear. Remind recipients that opt-out is specific and does not affect other messages or their subsubscription.