3 Reasons to Marry Shopify and Email Marketing

Retailers are on a never-ending mission to find new and innovative ways to improve the consumer experience. Therefore, they can appreciate life hacks to help make their jobs a little easier.

Integrating email marketing with Shopify is one of these helpful hacks that can make a magnitude of difference for retailers and customers alike. Whether you operate a brick-and-mortar storefront or e-commerce site (or both), a high-performing email list is one of the best weapons in your sales arsenal. Integrating with Shopify helps retailers get better results from their email marketing by making it easier to target the right customers with the right message (which, you know, helps you sell more stuff).

There are lots of great reasons to marry email marketing with Shopify, but here are three of my favorites:

1. You'll have a better understanding of your return on investment. In retail, it's all about the bottom line and the balance sheet. For most of us in the industry, understanding and quantifying a project or tool's ROI is absolutely critical. That's one reason why using email marketing and Shopify together is so useful; it allows you to track purchase activity that comes directly from your emails.

For example, women's boutique Mabel & Zora tracks the ROI of every email it sends, enabling it to do more of what's working and less of what's not. The integration allows the boutique to see exactly how much revenue each email is generating and target customers with the best message based on their purchase history.

The sales data generated from each email displays right alongside the rest of Mabel & Zora's response data (e.g., mailing score, opens and clicks), so the boutique can see the full picture of how each email performed at a glance, and in real time.

2. It helps you get the right message to the right customer at the right time. For email marketing to deliver the best results for your brand, it needs to be targeted, relevant and timely. And to do that, you have to have access to the right data.

Building email campaigns that are integrated with Shopify allows retailers to deliver a more personal sales experience by automatically segmenting audiences into groups based on purchase history. In other words, brands can easily find and reach high-value or recent customers without going cross-eyed from digging through mountains of data.

In addition, all existing Shopify customer lists seamlessly update as the customer data changes. This saves you a ton of time from manually updating your email list and makes tailoring your message for different customers a snap.

3. Automated thank-you and reward emails provide a turnkey close to the purchase experience. When retailers integrate their email with Shopify, they can automate the post-purchase process by setting up emails that send automatically based on a change in customer data, like number of purchases or spend.

This is a great way to reward your most loyal customers with a special offer and keep them coming back to your store. And since it's automated, it keeps building customer loyalty for you while you focus on other projects (or maybe just grab a snack).

Take peach purveyor The Peach Truck, for example. When the mobile produce vendor connected its email marketing to Shopify, it allowed the team to track purchases that resulted from each email. This helps The Peach Truck identify which customers are ordering a lot (so it can send a nice thank-you email) and which ones it hasn't heard from in awhile (so it can send a special offer) to keep them coming back for more tasty peaches.

Automated thank-you emails are great for rewarding existing customers, but the same approach works for new buyers, too. A recent Experian study found a "thanks for joining us" email series has a 15 times higher response rate and 21 times higher revenue per email than standard promotional emails.

Furthermore, by identifying first-time purchasers through the Shopify integration, you can nurture those subscribers properly with an automated welcome series that keeps them engaged and gives them the best brand experience possible.

There are so many great ways retailers can use Shopify and email marketing together to boost engagement, traffic and sales. Integrate your own Shopify store with an email marketing campaign this spring and watch the results roll in!

Christopher Lester is the vice president of sales at Emma, an email marketing company.