Ecommerce Email Marketing Automation: 8 Strategies to Drive Conversions
I recently came across a report from Litmus stating that 62% of marketing teams take two weeks or more to build a single email.
Ummm… that’s a lot of effort—but interestingly, it’s effort well spent.
The same report reveals that 41% of marketing leaders consider email marketing the most effective channel for their business.
It’s fair to say that streamlining bits and pieces of this ecommerce marketing strategy where possible can help you maximize its potential and ROI.
Tapping into ecommerce email marketing automation can make that happen.
It’s a gift that will keep on giving, provided you set up workflows strategically and fine-tune them when needed.
What is Ecommerce Email Marketing Automation?
Email marketing automation, also email automation, is the process of delivering personalized messages to the right person at the right time, following a specific action or an exhibited behavior.
This strategy lets your brand send targeted emails when your customer is most likely to engage—all with effort as light as a feather.
You also get to run effective campaigns on autopilot, which Omnisend reported could generate up to:
- 84% higher open rates
- 341% higher click-through rates
- 2,270% higher conversion rates.
With numbers like these, it’s hard to ignore the impact email automation can have on your brand’s success.
But if you’re still not convinced, let’s go into detail how it can help your brand flourish.
Key Benefits of Email Marketing Automation for Ecommerce
To fully grasp how effective email automation is for ecommerce brands, we’ll zero in on one particular retailer, Headcovers Unlimited.
Headcovers Unlimited launched its online store in 1995, specializing in hats and wigs for cancer patients. Since then, the brand has moved through an industry where marketing strategies need to show a high degree of sensibility and rapport.
To do so, they refined their email marketing approach by identifying three key customer segments: first-time buyers, repeat customers, and gift purchasers.
This along with adopting automation for optimal timing and personalization resulted in meaningful customer engagement.
Danielle Yates, the founder, shared the following results with me:
- The return on investment for every dollar spent on email marketing is significantly higher than that for social media or paid search.
- Average order values increased from $115 to $157
- Customer retention reached 71% for email-engaged customers versus 43% for non-email customers.
- Cart recovery emails reclaimed approximately 22% of abandoned carts annually.
- Productivity improved with automated flows handling 65% of communication.
Customer satisfaction scores were 28% higher among email-engaged customers.
Impressive, right? Even more surprising, the brand achieved all these without relying on heavy discounts.
Let’s unpack how automation led to these outcomes and why it’s completely possible to replicate them for your brand:
Low effort and high ROI
Every dollar spent on email marketing results in an ROI of $36 to $42.
You get even more bang for your buck when you automate because once you set a campaign, you can 'forget' it until you want to improve it.
Higher customer retention
70% of surveyed customers view brands positively if they handle communications proactively.
Email marketing automation helps you track customer actions and send the right messages at the right time.
Whether sending a welcome email or an order confirmation email, automated touchpoints will keep your brand at the forefront when it counts.
Increased average order value (AOV)
Automating tailored promotional campaigns—like upsells, cross-sells, personalized discounts, and product recommendations—can motivate subscribers to spend more in each transaction.
Lower cart abandonment rates
Setting an automated reminder about your customers’ abandoned shopping carts can help with recovery.
This type of email flow has the highest revenue per recipient ($3.65) as it gives shoppers the nudge needed to complete the purchase.
Time savings for marketing teams
Oracle reports that marketing automation generally results in a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead.
Email marketing automation removes the cumbersome, repetitive tasks for your marketing team. With more free time, they can focus on strategic growth initiatives.
Personalized customer experience
Since automation considers customer behavior, preferences, and pertinent information like location and position in the buyer’s journey and marketing funnel, you can set automation triggers and create customized workflows.
All these benefits can help your brand scale efficiently and effectively, the same way email automation has done for Headcovers Unlimited.
You can reach more customers while giving them the personal touch needed to make your communications—and your brand—stick in their minds.
Want to up your email game? Check out our roundup of the best ecommerce email marketing courses to master campaigns that convert.
Even when you know a thing or two, some inspo can help, too. These email marketing case studies are the ultimate cheat sheet.
Essential Types of Automated Emails in Ecommerce
With automation, you can create customized journeys based on your subscribers' interactions, known as email flows.
Email flows have a dynamic nature and can follow various branching paths or conditional logic depending on the recipient's engagement (or lack thereof).
Here are some of the most crucial email flows your ecommerce should have in place, along with top reasons to automate them:
Welcome email series
Welcome emails are the first thing you need to send a new subscriber. And they shouldn’t be overlooked: They have an average of 64% open rate—nearly double the typical industry average of 34%.
Why automate your welcome emails?
When you automate your welcome email, you won’t disappoint 74% of new subscribers who eagerly wait for it once they join your list.
Automated emails can be personalized based on sign-up sources as well as preferences, boosting engagement right from the start.
Abandoned cart emails
Seventy percent of shopping carts fall by the wayside.
Translation: You could be making 70% more of what you’re earning right now.
To try to recoup these losses, an abandoned cart email reminder can catch customers' attention well.
This type of email flow reportedly enjoys up to a 23% click-through-rate.
Why automate abandoned cart emails?
It’s best practice to send abandoned cart emails more than once for maximum impact. Sending a three-part series reportedly generates $24.9 million, while a single email only generates $3.8 million.
And you need to time each one right—especially the first one. Research shows sending a reminder 30 minutes after the shopper leaves their cart yields the highest conversion rate.
Automating this email flow helps maximize your opportunity to recover lost sales.
Product recommendation emails
Product recommendations drive up to 31% of ecommerce revenue, and your email list is the perfect avenue for sending them.
After all, subscribers already care about what you have to say.
Why automate product recommendation emails?
Automating these emails allows you to leverage customer behavior to the fullest. This includes:
- Browsing behavior. Remind them of products they’ve viewed on your website.
- Past purchases. Suggest new products that complement items they’ve bought from you.
- Preferences. Highlight new arrivals or trending items that align with their interests or routines.
- Seasonal Trends. Automatically feature items based on seasonal demand.
Automation handles the heavy lifting here, helping you offer personalized, timely suggestions that encourage conversions and repeat purchases.
Post-purchase email series
Post-purchase emails take many forms.
An order confirmation, a shipping confirmation, a post-purchase incentive, and a feedback request are just a few examples.
Why automate post-purchase mails?
Creating a post-purchase email series can motivate a customer to shop with you again.
For example: Transactional emails like order confirmation are important messages that customers want to receive immediately to relieve their post-purchase anxiety.
Showing thoughtfulness pays off because it’s 7x more expensive to convince a new individual to shop with you than retain an existing customer.
Re-engagement email series
Re-engagement emails are meant to wake up sleepy subscribers and win back their attention. It’s necessary to them because email lists decay over time.
Recent research shows 25.74% of your subscribers disengage yearly.
Why automate re-engagement emails?
Re-engagement emails are typically sent in a sequence, 3+ emails recommended, the first email sent between 30 and 60 days after inactivity.
That’s hard to keep track of, so automating your win-back campaign ensures you won’t miss out on any opportunity to re-engage your audience.
Any initiative that hinges on precise timing and tailored responses thrives with email marketing automation.
Now that you know the most essential ecommerce email flows, let’s tackle the next big question: how do you optimize them to achieve the best results?
8 Strategies for Optimizing Your Email Automations
Creating effective email workflows is the key to email marketing automation success. To truly hit the mark, you’ll need to focus on a few critical areas.
Here are some expert-backed steps to ensure you’ve got all these bases covered:
1. Choose the right email marketing automation software
The foundation of email marketing automation is good software. It’s what takes your process from manual to effortless efficiency.
When it comes to optimizing automated email marketing campaigns, my top advice is to pick a platform that syncs well with your tech stack and aligns with your goals.
Finding the right tool starts by knowing exactly what your business needs.
When online-only gift shop Nifty Gifts more powerful email marketing automation, they decided to upgrade their software.
They set a budget and created a requirements checklist, prioritizing a user-friendly interface suitable for their two-member marketing team.
They settled on Drip due to its intuitive layout and were able to quickly and effortlessly customize automated emails like a welcome series, re-engagement campaigns, and birthday flows.
So make a list of what you need from your email service provider (ESP)—not just from an automation standpoint, but also considering other key factors such as integrations, scalability, and user-friendliness.
Once you’re happy with your list of goals and requirements, start your search.
If you’re clueless where to begin, our list of the best email marketing tools for ecommerce is the perfect resource:
2. Segment your email list for better personalization
Automating email marketing is more than just efficiency (i.e. sending as many messages as possible with minimal effort).
If you want to tap into its effectiveness—which I’m sure you do—segment your audience thoughtfully to help your messages land in inboxes where they’re welcome.
Segmentation is key for sending messages that feel like you’re speaking to just one person: the recipient.
Think more “Thank you for purchasing our collagen protein powder” than a generic “Thank you for shopping with us.”
A good email marketing platform will allow you to classify your subscribers by criteria like actions taken, referral source, preferences, and behavior.
You can also lean on your email marketing analytics and customer relationship management (CRM) software solutions.
These rich sources of data can show you patterns in relevant customer attributes, including demographics, purchase history, and activities, which you can use to create subscriber segments.
If you need a more robust CRM software to go with your new email marketing solution, check out our top picks here:
3. Set up automated workflows across buyer’s journey
When you honor your customer’s place in the buyer’s journey, you skip the sleazy salesman tactics.
You won’t sound pushy—you’ll sound like a wise advisor, offering the perfect solution at precisely the right moment.
This strategy works well for pet nutrition brand Bully Max:
Our email marketing strategy focuses on automation and targeted engagement, tailored to customer behavior and buying stages.
We set up automated workflows for several key actions, including onboarding, abandoned cart recovery, product recommendations, and re-engagement campaigns.
We use tools like Mailchimp, integrated with Zapier, to streamline and enhance our campaigns.
These workflows allow us to nurture potential customers automatically and keep existing customers engaged.
Building workflows is relatively easy with the right email marketing solution, but the process differs from platform to platform.
What these tools have in common is the importance of selecting key triggers to build basic workflows when starting out—a job that falls on the email marketer’s shoulders.
Here are some examples you can use for reference:
- Hit the subscribe button > Send a warm welcome email flow.
- Browsed a specific product category multiple times > Suggest related items or bestsellers.
- Added products to the cart but didn’t check out > Follow up with an abandoned cart email, maybe with a small incentive.
- Made a purchase > Send a post-purchase thank-you email and an order confirmation.
- Left a review or provided feedback > Thank them by offering a discount coupon for their next purchase.
Once there’s a steady stream, and you’ve gathered enough insights, it’s time to layer in more complexity.
For instance, you can expand your basic post-purchase workflow from a short thank-you email to an email series designed to upsell complementary products and request reviews.
With each layer you add, you can bring more value to your audience and generate more conversions for your brand.
4. Recover lost sales with cart abandonment campaigns
You already know that abandoned cart emails are one of the flows you can automate, but how do make sure they convert?
Email content is one area to focus on. Let’s dissect the above email example from Aura Bora to see why it’s effective:
Copy the following elements that make this cart abandonment email great:
- Incentive: Free shipping—and discounts—can persuade readers to take action, especially if the offer is time-sensitive.
- Product reminder: Adding the product in question incites fear of missing out. Plus, it feels more personal.
- Alternative course of action: If playing off free shipping and FOMO doesn’t work, adding another way to squash decision uncertainty (in this case, buying online) may do the trick.
Aside from writing excellent abandoned cart emails, you also need how to build a series of them.
One email works, but Klaviyo recommends making a three-part email sequence: a simple reminder, a follow-up email with a discount code, and a final one with alternative product recommendations.
Abandoned cart solutions can help you tailor your messages in this case.
For instance, Barilliance features real-time behavioral tracking and AI-powered recommendations, which are great for crafting personalized abandoned cart emails.
The following are other abandoned cart solutions that will help you re-engage drop-offs:
5. Leverage multichannel marketing to expand your reach
Email is already a powerful marketing engine, but when paired with the right channels, the results become exponentially greater.
Here are some examples:
- SMS marketing. Create cohesive campaigns in both email and SMS like Mixtiles did. Using Klaviyo, they’re able to create marketing automation flows (like abandoned cart) that pull 40% of their overall revenue from this combined strategy.
- An active blog. Notify subscribers of new blog posts they might like via email to get more eyeballs on them. Tools like ActiveCampaign support this automation feature.
- Social media marketing. You can use social media to gain access to relevant customer data points like gender, interests, and media habits, which you can leverage to further segment your subscribers and create personalized email messages.
A case study from Marketing Sherpa showed that this helped a clothing brand yield a 141% increase in revenue.
- Retargeting ads. Combining automated campaigns and retargeted campaigns yield positive results.
A Salesforce and Facebook study showed that sending a subscriber an email and later targeting them with Facebook ads rendered them 22% more likely to purchase.
- Push notifications. Many email marketing services integrate with push notification software so you can continue the conversion with your audience directly.
One example is Constant Contact’s partnership with Aimtell that lets brand send a web push notification every time a subscriber clicks on a particular email campaign.
Using the right email marketing automation tool, you can simplify the process of bridging these marketing strategies together, creating an omnichannel approach.
By doing so, you’ll be able to present consistent messaging to your audience wherever they are.
6. Use feedback loops and social proof to build trust
The days when businesses set the trends and dictate customer preferences are long gone.
With social media and review websites, consumers now have a level playing field—or even the upper hand.
Fifty-nine percent of consumers find user generated content (UGC) to be the most authentic form of content—3.9x more than branded content and 5.9x more than influencer content.
So how do you take advantage of this in your email marketing strategy? By automating campaigns that showcase positive reviews about your brand.
This strategy can ignite customer loyalty and entice new customers.
You can send them as a standalone email, like this example from Bored Cow, which features a snappy yet compelling review:
Or integrate snippets of UCG to bolster your existing email flows.
Just look at how Suds pulls out all the stops, combining a special discount and UGC to introduce a deep sense of FOMO in this abandoned cart email:
But here’s the thing: before you can send emails like these, you need excellent user reviews in your pocket. Build product review requests into your post-purchase email flow to jumpstart the loop.
Here’s a simple yet effective example from pet food brand Sundays:
Sundays delivers a one-two punch, asking for feedback and word of mouth referrals.
If they incentivized the feedback process, just as they’ve done for their referral program, their strategy would be unstoppable.
Start building those loops to showcase real experiences about your brand.
These real customer stories are far more impactful than anything you—or any influencer—could ever say.
7. Create high-quality content
You’ll always need high-quality content to get fruitful results from any email campaign, not just email automations.
Subject lines, product recommendations, image, and call-to-actions should all reflect what customers crave, which will increase conversions and click-throughs.
Leveraging real-time customer and product data can help in making them personalized, which 65% of marketers value when creating email content.
Email design is another factor to consider. Your emails should be mobile-friendly because they 41.6% of opens happen on mobile devices.
Here’s how DTC brand Primal Harvest’s welcome email looks on desktop and mobile:
Regardless of the device used, the product photo appears crisp and clear.
Plus, it’s hard tot miss the discount offer since the headline is direct and the CTA button is strategically placed right below it.
8. Test, track, and tweak your automation strategy
I can give you industry rules of thumb like:
Best send times: 10 AM, 9 AM, 8 AM, 1 PM, and 3 PM (according to CoSchedule research)
Best days to send: Tuesday and Wednesday
…but email automation strategy isn’t that cut and dry. What your audience responds to can be different.
Make sure to track key performance metrics, like click-through rates, open rates, and conversion rates, to evaluate how effective and well-received your automated campaigns are.
You’ll also need to test and adjust your automation strategy, including variations in content and other elements, to meet their expectations.
It’s critical to any email automation strategy.
For subject line testing, open rates can be used to determine results.
In-email testing performance can be assessed using click or conversion rates, although conversion rates may also be influenced by external factors like landing page usability.
As for figuring out the best send time, effectiveness can be evaluated using open and click rates.
I typically plan tests at the beginning of each month, analyze the results at the end, and document findings.
Email marketing tools often feature A/B testing capability to help you understand what type of message resonates best with each segment.
Omnisend, for example, helps you split-test your email and adapts the winning variation (one with the highest CTR) to send out.
Plus, it helps uncover rich insights you can take advantage of.
When performance apparel brand Kerrits used the platform to test out promotional emails, they discovered insights that helped them understand what drove conversions: free shipping offers.
Leveraging insights can help them boost their revenue and keep customers coming back for more.
Still stuck on how to write emails that actually convert? Check out these ecommerce email marketing examples and steal some winning ideas.
Send Smarter, Not Harder
Serving up a successful email automation strategy is like cooking a delicious meal.
You need quality ingredients (data) paired with regular taste tests (metrics tracking and A/B testing) to create a dish that your audience will gobble up every time.
And don’t forget to balance personalization when building workflows to engage shoppers wherever they are in their customer journey.
With the right approach and tools, you can achieve stellar email marketing results that brands like Headcovers Unlimited relish.
Looking to go further with your marketing efforts? These guides and software reviews are waiting for you:
- Ecommerce Marketing Tips: 13 Proven Strategies to Increase Sales & Reach
- 10 Marketing Dashboard Examples & What They Track
- How Digital Marketing Software Benefits Your Ecommerce Business?
- The 24 Best Ecommerce Marketing Tools to Grow Your Store in 2025
- 26 Types Of Marketing Software And What They Do
- 16 Best Digital Marketing Software Reviewed for 2025
- 20 Best Marketing Automation Software for Ecommerce Brands in 2025
The world of ecommerce moves fast—and so do you. Subscribe to our newsletter with the latest insights for ecommerce managers from leading experts in ecomm.
