5 Essential eCommerce Email Templates to Drive More Sales

B2C email marketing generates an average ROI of 42:1. There’s a lot of room for creativity, but there are five essential emails that marketers should include in every eCommerce email marketing strategy. We’ll share them here along with some eCommerce email templates to make it easy for you.

But the potential ROI you’ll get from email marketing will be limited by the size and quality of your list. So if you need to build your list, you might want to check out our articles on B2C lead generation and email acquisition first.

What eCommerce Email Templates Do You Need?

At a minimum, you need the following five essential email templates. We’ll explain why and share the research behind each one below. Then we’ll tell you how to get them.

Here’s what you need:

• A welcome template
• A recommended products template
• An abandoned cart recovery email template
• An order confirmation template
• A thank you email template

1. The Welcome Email Template

A good welcome email can increase orders by over 90 percent. That’s a significant impact for such a simple email. But if you’re not careful, it’ll be the last time they read one of your emails. So pay close attention to your email engagement metrics to see if it’s resonating with your audience.

One effective approach is to incentivize further engagement. One way to do that is by offering new subscriber’s a first-time discount or free shipping. That will encourage your subscribers to take a look around your store. Another option is to tell them about your loyalty program if you have one.

Research published in Foundations of Management finds that a good loyalty program strengthens your relationship with your customers. But its effectiveness will depend on how easy and affordable it is to participate, how hard it is to earn rewards, and how valuable those rewards are.

2. Recommended Products Email Template

Consumers want to receive emails that are relevant to them. It’s important to get this right because at least one survey suggests that there’s a significant segment of your customer base who will switch brands if you don’t do a good job of eCommerce personalization.

One way to personalize your approach is through product recommendation emails. McKinsey reported that product recommendations and other personalized communications lead to 5 to 15 percent increases in revenue and 10 to 30 percent increases.

These sales email templates are perfect because they can be sent at multiple different points in the shopping experience. Here are several different ways you can use a suggested products email campaign template.

3. Abandoned Cart Email Template

Everyone wants to reduce their cart abandonment rate. But no matter what you do, some shoppers will leave without making a purchase. That’s why an abandoned cart email campaign is crucial. Cart abandonment campaigns increase orders by almost 70 percent.

But what if you don’t have the shopper’s email? Use website visitor identification to capture the email address and other information for visitors that don’t convert. This email acquisition tactic will help you grow your list, collect the data you need for audience segmentation, and allow you to run email retargeting campaigns.

An eCommerce email template designed to remind shoppers to come back to their cart through an email marketing template is an excellent way to get back on their radar. You might now want to do it right away, though.

A study on dynamic display advertising suggests that generic ads to raise brand awareness perform better than dynamic display ads (i.e., ads that include the specific product the shopper was considering) early in the buying process. Another study on retargeting ads for abandoned cart recovery found that they’re most effective one to three days after abandonment.

Both of those studies focused on ads, so it may be a different story for emails. You’ll need to test it to see what works best.

4. Confirmation Email Template

Automating your email marketing campaigns so that your customer immediately receives a purchase confirmation code through email is critical. That way, they won’t worry about whether their payment went through or wonder when they’ll be receiving their purchase.

You don’t necessarily want to push for another purchase here. Save that for the final eCommerce email template.

5. Thank You Email Template

After your new customer has had some time to enjoy the product, follow up with an email to thank them for their business. Showing your appreciation is good for customer loyalty and engagement, but that’s not all.

If you send them a discount or an exclusive promotional offer to thank them for shopping with you, showing your gratitude becomes a valuable marketing tactic. After a positive customer experience, an incentive will make your shoppers much more likely to make another purchase.

This is also a great time to get valuable feedback by sending a customer satisfaction survey. The responses will help you to optimize the customer experience continuously.

Bonus eCommerce Email Template #6: the Opt-In Email

If you use website visitor identification to convert your anonymous traffic into leads, you can email them even if they haven’t opted in. FTC attorney Christopher Brown made this explicit in this interview, saying, “The CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t require initiators of commercial email to get recipients’ consent before sending them commercial email. In other words, there is no opt-in requirement.”

As long as you follow the rules (e.g., CAN-SPAM), you can scale your B2C email marketing strategy with visitor identification.

Before we get to the template, here’s an overview of the rules. (And, by the way, all of these rules except #3 apply even if the person has opted-in to receive emails from you.)

1. Don’t use false or misleading header information. The sender name and any other information in the header must be accurate and identify you or your business as the sender.
2. Don’t use deceptive subject lines. This is an email marketing best practice anyway. The subject line shouldn’t mislead the recipient about the contents of the email.
3. Identify the message as an ad. You have a lot of discretion here, and you don’t have to include the identification in the subject line. You just have to let the recipient know that the email is from a company sending them an email for business purposes.
4. Tell recipients where you’re located. You have to include a physical postal address. (It can be a P.O. box or a private mailbox if you don’t have an office and you don’t want to include your home address.)
5. Tell recipients how to opt out. Make it clear how to opt out (e.g., the unsubscribe link required by most email marketing platforms). It has to be as simple as sending a reply email or visiting a single webpage.
6. Honor opt-out requests. When someone opts out you can’t send them any more emails, transfer their email address, or sell their email address.
7. Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. If someone else is handling your email marketing, make sure they’re following these rules.

OK, now onto the template.

If you’re using website visitor identification, you can send an opt-in email with an exclusive offer. It could be free shipping, a discount, a free product, or anything else you’d typically use to incentivize someone to sign up for your email list.

Then, you can send them to a webpage where they can submit a form to receive the offer and opt in to your list.

You can get 100 free leads to try that out here.

Where to Get eCommerce Email Templates

Now that you know the five essential templates you need to have, let’s talk about how to get them. There are a few ways to get email templates:

• The hard way. If you understand CSS and HTML, you can code the templates yourself. Here’s how.
• The easy way. If you don’t have the time or ability to code, just about every email marketing platform includes a drag-and-drop editor so you can easily build your own templates from scratch.
• The even easier way. If you’ve got the budget, you can hire a designer to code custom templates.
• The easiest way. If you don’t have a huge budget, you can buy existing templates if you can find some that fit your brand in an online marketplace like Envato.
• The free way. Along with a drag-and-drop editor, every well-known email marketing platform includes free eCommerce email templates. You can use the drag-and-drop editor to make changes as needed.

Increase Sales With These eCommerce Email Templates

All of the eCommerce email templates we’ve mentioned here work together to convert subscribers into shoppers and shoppers into loyal customers. Once you set up the templates, you can automate them through your email marketing platform. Then you can focus on creative email marketing campaigns instead of spending time on the basics.