16 Mind Blowing E-commerce Email Marketing Stats + Benefits & Best Practices for Online Stores[2024]

The statistics are clear and e-commerce email marketing is still one of the most effective channels for online stores.

Whether you’re a small online retailer or a major e-commerce brand, email marketing can help you boost conversions, increase engagement, and build loyalty.

So, how can you get the most from your email marketing to grow your e-commerce brand?

We reached out to the email marketing experts at Woodpecker, one of the top email outreach tools for e-commerce, to get the inside scoop on why email marketing is so effective for online retailers, and the best practices to follow for success.

In this guide, we detail the benefits of e-commerce email marketing, highlight top e-commerce email stats to demonstrate its impact, and share best practices to ensure your campaigns deliver maximum results.

7 Benefits of E-commerce Email Marketing

Email marketing offers several key benefits for e-commerce, making it a powerful tool to increase sales, improve customer engagement, and build brand loyalty.

Let’s take a look at some of the most important benefits of email marketing in e-commerce:

1.Direct and Personalized Communication

Email allows direct, personalized communication with customers. You can divide your audience into different segments and tailor content based on their browsing history, past purchases, or customer behavior to boost engagement.

According to Woodpecker, personalization can double your reply rate. Adding custom snippets to include things like the recipient’s name and their company name increased cold email reply rates from 7% to 17%!

Regular email updates, newsletters, and promotional offers help maintain a consistent connection with customers, building relationships and fostering brand loyalty.

2.Precise Targeting with Audience Segmentation

Segmentation capabilities allow you to create highly segmented email lists based on demographics, shopping behavior, or preferences, ensuring offers are relevant to each customer group.

Boosting conversions with timely emails—such as abandoned cart reminders, limited-time offers, or product restocks—is highly effective.

3.Drive Website Traffic and Repeat Purchases

Cross-selling and upselling with personalized product recommendations or complementary items based on previous purchases encourages repeat visits and increases the average order value (AOV).

Effective re-engagement with win-back campaigns or special offers targeted at dormant customers.

4.Cost-Effective and Scalable Marketing Channel

Email automation tools allow you to send timely, relevant content at specific points in your sales funnel making it both effective to drive conversions and easily scalable as your needs grow.

This applies to your existing customer base, as well as prospects for outreach marketing. 

This video by Woodpecker.co details how to safely scale your email outreach efforts: 

As a low-cost marketing channel that provides high ROI, email is one of the most cost-effective channels you can use.

5.Measurable Performance and Campaign Optimization

Trackable metrics include open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and sales attribution for real-time campaign optimization.

A/B testing, or split testing, your subject lines, content, or calls-to-action (CTAs) allows you to see which formats work best and refine content to maximize engagement.

According to Woodpecker, you should run A/B tests for various elements of the email itself, such as the subject line, value proposition, or CTA, as well as the delivery time, to determine which elements impact performance. 

6.Timely Promotion of Seasonal Campaigns and Product Launches

Emails allow you to notify customers timeously when promoting time-sensitive offers, like holiday deals or product launches.

Pre-launch emails can build excitement for upcoming collections, special sales, or exclusive deals, driving traffic on release days.

7.Increased Customer Loyalty and Retention Rates

Emails integrated with loyalty or reward programs keep your customers informed about points earned, current promotions, or exclusive offers/discounts, which strengthens brand commitment.

Post-purchase surveys or feedback requests sent via email help you better understand customer satisfaction levels and identify where you need to improve customer experience.

Reviews or testimonials requested via email allow you to choose the ones you want to display publicly so you can select the ones that are most useful to your prospects and customers.  

16 Stats That Reveal the Impact of Emails on E-commerce

As you can see above, email marketing offers some very significant benefits for e-commerce businesses.

Here are the e-commerce email stats to back it up:

1. Close to 21% of all email campaigns are opened within an hour.
2. According to Forbes, 61% of consumers spend 8 or more seconds viewing an email, while 23.5% of emails get engagement time of just 2-8 seconds, and 15% of emails are looked at for less than 2 seconds.
3. Emails caught in spam filters or undelivered account for 3% of all emails.
4. The best time to send a marketing email is 9:00 AM – 12 PM EST, then 12:01 PM – 3 PM EST. The worst is 1 AM – 3 AM EST, according to research by HubSpot.
5. A 2023 survey by Constant Contact found that 60% of respondents say that marketing emails influenced their purchase decisions.
6. Abandoned cart emails have the highest conversion rate when compared to other automated emails, converting 3x more.
7. HubSpot research found that 38% of brands using email marketing plan to increase their budget, while only 10% plan to reduce it.
8. Mobile devices account for 41% of email views, desktop accounts for 39% of views, and tablets and other devices account for 20% of email views.
9. Amongst marketers who use generative AI, 43% say that it’s most helpful for creating emails.
10. Amongst marketers who use generative AI to write emails, 95% rate it as ‘effective’ and 54% rate it as ‘very effective’.
11. In sales, 21% say that it’s most useful for writing messages to prospects, and 32% say it’s most useful for re-purposing messages by adapting them for different audiences.
12. Close to 80% of consumers will only engage with an email offer if it has been personalized based on previous brand interactions.
13. Close to 50% of emails are opened based on the subject line
14. The average email marketing open rate for retail brands is 29.55%, and the average across all industries is 32.5%.
15. Retail (including e-commerce) emails have one of the lowest bounce rates (7.70%) after opening.
16. According to Forbes, 50% of people said they buy from a marketing email at least once a month.

15 Email Marketing Best Practices for E-commerce Success

For effective e-commerce email marketing, the following best practices can help drive engagement, increase conversions, and improve customer retention:

1.Develop Email Reputation for High Email Deliverability

Before you send a single email, it is important to follow an email warm-up process and establish a good email reputation.

Doing this aids your email deliverability, which is essential to ensure that the emails you send reach the recipient’s inbox and are not diverted to the spam folder (or simply not delivered at all).  

2.Segmentation and Personalization

Audience segmentation, based on factors like past purchases, browsing behavior, location, or engagement levels.

Identifying smaller segments within your audience that share specific characteristics allows you to adapt messaging, suggestions, and offers to appeal to those specific groups.

Personalized emails using the customer’s name, recommending products based on their behavior, and offering personalized discounts or product suggestions achieve better results.

3.Use Dynamic Content

Use dynamic content blocks to tailor emails for different segments within a single campaign. For example, showcase different product categories depending on a customer’s preferences or recent interactions.

Dynamic content in email marketing allows you to customize the content to appeal to different segments of your audience, for example, this email from Nike has a different image for male and female recipients:

4.Automation and Triggers

Implement automated or triggered email sequences for key lifecycle stages, such as:

• Welcome series for new subscribers
• Abandoned cart reminders
• Post-purchase follow-ups for cross-selling or requesting reviews
• Re-engagement emails for dormant customers

5.Compelling Subject Lines and Preheaders

Craft engaging subject lines that grab attention. Keep them short, direct, and relevant to the recipient’s interest.

Use the preheader text as an extension of the subject line to give additional context and entice recipients to open the email.

6.Use Strong, Clear and Concise CTAs

Make sure call-to-actions (CTAs) are prominent, clear, and actionable. Use actionable language like “Shop Now,” “Get Discount,” or “Explore More.”

Check out this great step by step guide from Woodpecker: Perfect CTA, or How to Write a Persuasive Cold Email?

7.Mobile Optimization

Ensure that emails are mobile-responsive, as most users check emails on their mobile devices.

Use a single-column layout, larger fonts, and clear CTAs (call-to-actions) for easy navigation.

8.Regular A/B Testing

Regularly conduct A/B testing on subject lines, design elements, CTA placements, and offers to identify what resonates best with your audience.

9.Monitor Performance Metrics and Optimize

Track essential performance metrics to identify where your email campaigns need to be improved.

The metrics to track include open rates, click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, and bounce rates. Use this data to refine your strategy, identify pain points, and continuously improve campaign performance.

10.Include Compelling Visuals

Use attractive and high-quality pictures of your products. Where appropriate, include videos or GIFs to make your emails more engaging.

11.Use Limited-Time Offers & Create a Sense of Urgency

Drive conversions by incorporating scarcity or urgency (e.g., “Only five left!” or “24 hours left to claim your discount”) to motivate immediate action.

12.Maintain Consistency in Design and Branding

Maintain consistent branding across all email communications, including colors, fonts, and tone of voice. Consistency builds trust and aids brand recognition, making your audience more receptive to your communications.

13.Provide a Clear Unsubscribe Process

Make it easy for users to unsubscribe if they no longer want to receive emails. This will help keep your email list healthy and prevent spam complaints.

14.Send Time Optimization

Use send-time optimization to deliver emails at the best times for audience engagement. This will vary depending on things like the type of customer or the region your audience is in.

Advanced email sending platforms have the option to set emails to send at the optimum times.

You can also test your emails at different times to see which days and times result in the highest engagement.

15.Compliance with Privacy Laws and Email Regulations

Ensure compliance with regulations such as CAN-SPAM and GDPR by including clear consent options, providing an easy way to unsubscribe, and using accurate sender information.

The Bottom Line

Done right, e-commerce email marketing is one of the most efficient channels for online retailers because it allows you to reach highly targeted audiences with highly personalized messaging and gain verified leads.

This value-rich marketing channel cannot be ignored if you want to grow your online retail store and retain customers for higher lifetime value!

References

Backlinko: 60 Key Email Marketing Stats

Forbes: 49 Email Marketing Statistics In 2024

Market.us: Email Marketing Market Report 2024

Woodpecker.co: Cold Email Statistics Based on Sending Over 20M Cold Emails