Every day e-commerce brands use multiple applications to conduct businesses. There are apps for pretty much everything: marketing, shipping, fulfillment, etc. And all of them send automated messages to customers in real-time.
However, all of the messages that businesses send to their customers–promotional and transactional–should come from the same email service provider (ESP). Although it might look unnecessary at first, there are several compelling reasons for doing that.
What is an ESP?
An ESP is a technology partner that essentially makes it easier for marketers to collect and organize email lists and send marketing messages.
In addition to these two basic functions, more advanced ESPs—especially those tailored for ecommerce—offer more features, such as email automation, messaging via different channels (SMS, push notifications), A/B testing, customer segmentation and advanced reporting.
Before choosing your ESP, it’s important to make sure that it integrates with your e-commerce platform and any other business software you use. That way, it’ll be easier to connect them and launch all of your communications via a single provider.
5 Reasons To Send All of Your Brand Messages Through an ESP
1. Consistent Sender Name and Domain
You work hard to build relationships with your customers. Looking at their inboxes, customers recognize brands by both the sender’s name and the domain name. Ideally, these should be the same. It reinforces brand credibility and consistency.
Also, using the same dedicated sender domain for all messages can positively affect your email landing-to-inbox ratio – meaning your automated messages have a greater chance of landing in your customers’ inboxes.
If you are serious about your brand communication, you should pay attention to deliverability metrics and email hygiene. Any decent ESP will offer insight and tools to help you navigate both.
2. Ability to Brand Your Messaging
Usually, ecommerce platforms and ecommerce applications offer standard templates for automated notifications. As a result, the different emails you send – your order confirmation, shipping confirmation, promotional, cart abandonment emails – often look inconsistent in terms of the brand and tone of voice.
If you move all of your email communications to your ESP, you can customize the look and feel of these messages to match your brand. You’ll be able to pick and choose each message’s template and colors and create copy that speaks in your brand’s tone of voice.
In addition to your transactional message content, you can also add secondary information, such as tips on taking care of your products, your loyalty program, bestsellers, coupons for the next purchase, etc. This kind of content can help you increase email engagement, maintain better customer relationships and start generating revenue from your automated transactional messages.
Here’s an example of the iHerb order confirmation:
3. Better List Management
Email service providers can help you to maintain a growing email list by storing your subscriber details, identifying inactive email addresses, tracking growth, and monitoring customer behavior. You can use this data for more advanced marketing strategies – such as splitting automated messaging by customer behavior, average order value, segment out high-spenders, etc.
To remain legally compliant, brands need to be aware of international spam and data protection laws. ESPs can help you operate according to domestic and international laws. For example, all commercial emails must have an easily accessible “unsubscribe” link.
By sending emails through your ESP, you will always remain compliant.
4. Advanced Email Marketing Features
Email marketing remains one of the most effective and profitable marketing channels. If businesses don’t use it to its full potential, they simply leave money on the table.
It’s not only just promotional campaigns that work well. At Omnisend, we see businesses drive significant revenue from marketing automation. They enrich their order, shipping confirmation, and other transactional messages with promotional content. In addition, retailers set up post-purchase messages, cart recovery series that bring them 20-60% of overall business revenue.
Look at the example below. The order confirmation becomes a part of the automated post-purchase communication. So you first confirm the order, send a “Thank you” message, and then messages requesting a review. One of them is sent via SMS, which makes it even more effective in this case.
Another example – the most effective marketing automation in ecommerce – is the cart abandonment workflow. In this case, messages are diversified by abandoned cart value: customers that left a high-value cart get a discount to finish the purchase, and customers with low-value carts receive only a reminder about the purchase they haven’t finished. Any of ecommerce platforms can offer such message diversification in their standard cart abandonment functionality.
5. Comprehensive Tracking and Analytics
Last but not least, the final reason to use your ESP is its in-depth performance tracking and reporting. Functionality like that is only possible if you have everything centralized in one place.
If your ESP is focused on ecommerce, in each report generated you’ll see data such as how people interacted with your messages, if they opened your messages, clicked on them, where exactly they clicked, how many sales each email generates, which messages fail to convert, etc. This level of insight is valuable knowledge which will help you improve your communications and increase sales.
An example of advanced reporting at Omnisend can be seen below:
Key Takeaways
If you are serious about your business, willing to track your performance and improve conversion and engagement, integrating all of your ecommerce applications is a must.
Moving all your brand messages to one ESP:
- helps you centralize your brand communications;
- enables you to be consistent with your messages;
- helps you maintain your email list;
- empowers you to enrich your standard, transactional messages with content that generates you money 24/7.
Furthermore, by using an e-commerce ESP, you’ll also get valuable business insights that help you improve your strategy and leverage your business results.
Karolina Petraškienė (Omnisend Guest Contributor)
Karolina is a writer, content marketer, and email enthusiast at Omnisend. When she’s not curating articles, you can find her in the woods challenging herself in hiking boots or off-roading her bike.
