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Ecommerce email marketing strategy
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Most email strategy advice is a list of every flow it is possible to build. This is the shorter version: which three actually pay, in what order, and how to tell when one has stopped working.
The three that matter
Ecommerce email marketing has a long tail of clever flows and a very short list of ones that carry the programme. Abandoned checkout, welcome, and post-purchase. Build those three properly before anything else, because each sits closer to a purchase decision than anything further down the list.
The common failure is not missing flows. It is having fourteen of them, all mediocre, because the effort got spread evenly instead of going where the money is.
Abandoned checkout
First, because it catches people who already tried to buy. The person who reached checkout and stopped is the warmest contact in your database, and the reason they stopped is usually mundane: delivery cost appeared late, they wanted to check something, they got interrupted.
So answer the objection rather than just reminding them. A first message within an hour that restates delivery and returns plainly does more than a discount, and a discount sent immediately teaches people to abandon on purpose.
Welcome
Second, because somebody who just subscribed is paying attention and will not be again for long. The job is not to sell immediately, it is to explain what the brand is for and set expectations about what you will send.
Where welcome flows go wrong is treating the incentive as the whole message. The discount gets the address; the sequence has to earn the second open.
Post-purchase
Third, and the most neglected of the three. It decides whether a first order becomes a second, which is where the margin in email marketing for ecommerce actually lives. Delivery expectation, how to use the thing, when to reorder, and only then a reason to come back.
If your category has a natural consumption cycle, this flow is also the argument for a subscription programme: you are already emailing people at roughly the moment they run out.
What comes after
Once the three work, the next tier is browse abandonment, winback, and replenishment where the category supports it. Then segmentation that actually changes what gets sent rather than just splitting the list into groups receiving identical emails.
How to tell a flow is failing
Open rate is the least useful signal available and has been since mail clients started pre-fetching images. Judge a flow on revenue per recipient, and judge the programme on whether email revenue is growing faster than list size. A list growing faster than the revenue it produces means you are collecting addresses rather than building anything.
The other tell is unsubscribes clustering on one send. That is rarely a frequency problem and usually a relevance one.
Where we sit, honestly
We run ecommerce email alongside the store itself rather than as a separate retainer, usually on Klaviyo, and we run it on our own two brands as well as for clients. We are deliberately not a general email marketing agency: everything above assumes a catalogue and a repeat-purchase cycle, and none of it transfers cleanly to a business without one.
Common questions
- Which email flows should we build first?
- Abandoned checkout, then welcome, then post-purchase. That order is not about which is most interesting, it is about proximity to money: abandoned checkout catches people who already tried to buy, welcome catches people who just raised their hand, post-purchase decides whether the first order becomes a second. Everything else is worth doing after those three are working.
- How much of revenue should email marketing ecommerce programmes produce?
- The figures published around this vary so widely that quoting one would be dishonest, because they depend on category, list age, purchase frequency and how the attribution window is set. The more useful internal test is whether email revenue is growing faster than list size. If it is not, you are adding contacts rather than building a relationship with them.
- Is email marketing for ecommerce still worth it with deliverability getting harder?
- Yes, and the tightening is mostly good for anyone doing it properly. Bulk-sender rules punish exactly the behaviour that was diluting the channel: sending to unengaged contacts, weak authentication, hard-to-find unsubscribes. A store with a clean list and real authentication has more room now than it did five years ago, not less.
- How often should we send campaigns on top of the flows?
- Frequency matters less than whether each send has a reason to exist. The stores that get into trouble are the ones sending weekly because the calendar says so, with nothing to say. Segment out the unengaged, send to people who want it, and judge frequency by engagement trend rather than by a rule somebody read once.
- Should the flows be different for a subscription store?
- Substantially, yes. A subscription programme needs dunning on failed payments, a pre-renewal reminder that reduces surprise cancellations, and a cancel-flow email offering a pause or a smaller quantity. Those three matter more than any campaign, and most subscription stores have none of them.
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