E-commerce newsletters: how to make them, examples, and templates

In an e-commerce email marketing strategy, newsletters are excellent allies because, unlike promotional emails, they don’t focus on just one issue. Furthermore, not only will a newsletter keep potential customers more engaged with your brand, but they offer a wide array of advantages that you shouldn’t let slip away. In this post, we’ll explore the advantages of having a newsletter for your e-commerce, how to create it, and how to easily organize your template.

The advantages of the e-commerce newsletter

By using a newsletter, e-commerce businesses can communicate with their (existing and potential) customers in a more direct, personalized way, bringing the message “home” to each user, directly in their inbox.

But before we get into how to create and structure your newsletter, let’s consider the essential question: how can a newsletter benefit your e-commerce business?

It helps you increase brand awareness

Not only do newsletters function as a significant communication tool, but creating and sending a newsletter for your e-commerce business is a chance to increase your users’ awareness about your brand and your products.

Your potential customers might not be familiar with your brand, or they may have discovered your e-commerce site through social media ads. A newsletter gives them the information they need, helps them get to know your brand better, and increases the chances of conversion.

It gives your products more exposure

One of the basic laws of marketing is that the more a customer is exposed to a product, the likelier they are to buy it. A regular newsletter provides you with the perfect outlet to showcase your products.

A newsletter can help you bring a potential customer closer to the end of your sales funnel and even ultimately convince them to make the purchase.

It helps you keep in touch with your existing and potential customers.

Sending a newsletter regularly will help you open a direct communication channel with your existing customers (between purchases) and potential customers.

Regular communication lets you keep them up-to-date on news about your business, products, and deals. Any time they plan to buy something from your e-commerce site, you’ll give them the perfect reason to remember it.

It gives you more conversion opportunities

In terms of return on investment, a newsletter is much more likely to generate sales for your e-commerce than other types of communication or ads on social media. This is because you are communicating directly with customers who have shown interest in your brand and products by subscribing to your newsletter.

Now it’s up to you to effectively spark your customers’ curiosity and desire to buy, presenting your selling points to them, responding to their needs, and giving them convincing reasons to buy on your website.

You can communicate with a personalized approach

You might not want to communicate with your existing customers the same way you communicate with prospective customers. Customizing your newsletter and sending varied content based on their position in your sales funnel is a key part of your strategy to “nudge” them to the next step and generate sales.

An e-commerce newsletter can be customized in many ways, including using the specific name of the user. You can create different email lists based on particular user features, such as funnel position, demographic info, language, and more.

How to create a newsletter for your online store

If you’ve gotten this far, we must have convinced you to finally create a newsletter for your e-commerce! So now that you’ve understood the main reasons to do it, it’s time to act. 

How can you create a newsletter for your e-commerce business? Of course, at this point, the most important thing is to choose the email marketing software that best suits you. There are many options, and each comes with its own pros and cons.

We’ll talk about a few of our favorites here.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is likely the most widely used email marketing software for e-commerce because it incorporates the features most businesses need, without being overly complicated or confusing.

With Mailchimp you can schedule campaigns, conduct A/B tests on your content, and see reports on open, click-through and unsubscribe rates, just to name a few.

Mailchimp’s free plan includes up to 2,000 contacts and up to 10,000 deliveries a month. Its platform is one of the easiest to use because of its convenient drag-and-drop feature that allows you to easily customize your emails.

Sendinblue

Sendinblue is an email marketing solution primarily for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Some of its key features are broad automation options, an integrated CRM platform, and excellent functions for creating professional templates.

One of the major strengths of Sendinblue is definitely the option to customize transactional emails, i.e. automated emails sent to users to confirm a transaction or a certain action tied to their account. This is incredibly useful for e-commerce.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is actually software for customer experience automation, but it also offers numerous email marketing features. It is especially great for automation because it offers hundreds of predefined automations that will help you customize your campaigns based on each user type.

ActiveCampaign will help you create all the custom automations you need. The interface is easy to use and intuitive, and includes many resources for any questions that could crop up during the newsletter creation process.

How to organize your newsletter’s template

Since we’ve already talked about the software and benefits surrounding newsletters, let’s talk about the design. What is the best way to organize your e-commerce newsletter template?

The truth is that there is no one-size-fits-all answer but you should focus on a few central factors, including:

• Personalization: If a newsletter subscriber feels a personal touch, they’ll be more willing to read what you have to say.
• Preview: The preview is the summary text that comes right after the subject in the mailbox. Using it to its full potential can dramatically increase open and click-through rates.
• Responsiveness: Every marketer understands that everything should be optimized for mobile devices, including email newsletter designs. Single-column designs are the easiest solution.
• Visual hierarchy: This concept encourages the reader to interact with the content in a particular way based on its design. These are natural tendencies in how users digest content, so a well-planned visual hierarchy should influence what they perceive as most important.
• CTAs: Creating effective call-to-actions is fundamental to generating sales and conversions from your e-commerce newsletters. Your CTAs should be suitably integrated into the design of your emails.

Examples of newsletters for e-commerce

If you’re a newbie in creating e-commerce newsletters, it’s natural that you don’t know where to start. There are many things to take into account and the possibilities surrounding design are almost endless.

Experience plays a key role here. When you’re starting out and don’t have old emails to draw on, everything will be harder.

This is why it’s important to take inspiration from what other businesses are doing. A good tip is to take a look at newsletters sent by other e-commerce businesses and analyze which style best suits your business.

An excellent site to find examples is ReallyGoodEmails. You’ll find hundreds of templates and examples of newsletters organized by category, industry, and product type.

We hope that diving deeper into e-commerce newsletters has been useful and gives you the nudge you need to use this powerful tool for your online store.