The purpose of any digital business is to sell. Obviously.
No matter what mission and great goals you have, it’s only effective if there is a real cash flow. A few years ago, selling products online meant that you had to set up newsletters, send all of them, answer endless calls and somehow also manage to promote your products.
Okay, ten years ago it all was somehow bearable.
Now, however, considering that the competition grows with every day and the number of unanswered emails is growing higher, this seems impossible.
But that’s not even the worst part. The real problem starts when it gives you no result.
All the sent newsletters, prepared emails bring no sales to the shop. We discovered that sales online in no way depend on the amount of time you put in. You can prepare a newsletter in a few minutes or spend hours on that — and the results won’t change at the smallest bit.
Online shop management has changed tremendously
Luckily, now we have Shopify. It helps out a lot with managing orders and shipping, granted. You don’t have to worry about collecting the customer information or misunderstanding order details because Shopify saves things like that.
What about getting customers though?
Shopify blog advises using email marketing for product promotion so if you by chance thought that email marketing is dead, you might change your mind. It remains one of the major channels to offer your goods online.
But there are some modifications, indeed.
Shopify offers its own tools
Shopify App Store offers a lot of instruments that allow to collect email addresses, manage subscriber’s lists, and monitor the results. Sounds great but realistically, sooner or later platform users see that the functionality of most of them is hardly enough.
Let’s see why.
- Even though email marketing is the main way of promoting e-commerce, Shopify is not mainly focused on the purposes of promotion, but rather shop management. In other words, the platform lets you manage email marketing on some level but doesn’t give any tools to make these emails actually good.
- The functionality is still pretty bad. For basic newsletters, you might do just fine. But if your goal is to create a personalized campaign, based on customer’s behavior on the page, Shopify custom tools give no such opportunity.
- Not enough for big shops. If you own a large online store, you have dozens if not hundreds of different campaigns, oriented toward different audience segments. Shopify gives you no possibilities to meticulously segment your audience.
- You still need marketing advice. Even though Shopify official tools do automate some part of the process, they still don’t cover most of business owners’ questions. If you haven’t run email campaigns before, don’t hope for the tool to educate you.
Don’t look for management tools, look for assistance
The best way to pursue email marketing effectively is to automate it. Perhaps you already knew that but here is a quick breakdown of the main reasons.
✔️ Automation keeps you consistent. When you do things manually, it’s easy to forget to set up the next campaign and deviate from the marketing strategy.
✔️ It’s crucial if you want to scale. There is no way you can keep track of dozens of newsletters without getting majorly confused.
✔️Automation saves your time. No explanation needed there.
We really don’t think you need convincing in why automation is awesome. It was already discussed in plenty of best-selling books (take even Four-Hour Workweek). The question, and it’s the one we get all the time, is:
‘How do I make sure my automation truly works? What if I will spend more than receive?’.
It’s a fair concern, indeed. With so many platforms for automation available, it’s easy to get caught up just on choosing what you need. Really though, you don’t need to follow dozens of rules. There is just one principle, and it works impeccably:
Choose an assistant, not a management platform.
As simple as that. If you want to find an email marketing automation solution, focus not on getting the tool that will manage the process for you but the one that helps you throughout that entire process.
Let’s see what this means in terms of product’s functionality on real-life Shopify Extensions.
Manager Extension:
- You can manage lists of collected subscribers and segment them.
- Set dates and benchmarks for your email campaign.
- Create a newsletter design using a comfortable constructor.
- Make discounts and special offers right in the extension and add it to your campaign.
Assistant Extension:
- Software will collect email addresses and segment them for you, based on customer behavior.
- The extension will suggest you the optimal schedule and KPIs.
- The assistant will suggest you a ready-to-go template and you can make edits (if needed, of course).
- The only thing you have to do is to specify the conditions of such discounts, and the extension will do the rest — create a template, find suitable receivers, and segment the audience. You just hit the Send button.
Can I find such tools in the Shopify App Store?
Yes. You don’t even have to look because you have already opened the right door. Triggmine, an email-marketing automation service, has its own Shopify app.
Artificial Intelligence tracks customer behavior on the website so users can receive personalized emails, based on their own search and buying history — just like this one.
The email design is also done automatically but the owners are free to make any edits if needed. Also, the extension builds a strategy, suggests KPIs and monitor the efficiency. IT doesn’t just manage the process, it does the process.
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