Shopify Email Marketing: The Store Owner’s Guide
You’ve been running your Shopify store for a while now. Orders are steady, and your customers seem happy, but your younger competitors have been thriving faster.
You see their sleek email newsletters every time you open your inbox. The polished designs and engaging content make you wonder if you could do the same.
But what if it falls flat? What if it irritates your customers? What if setting it up is challenging?
With everything standing in the way, it’s easy to feel discouraged. But with the right guidance, you can master Shopify email marketing and supercharge your store’s potential.
Does Shopify Have Email Marketing?
To set up email marketing on Shopify, you have two options: Shopify Email or a third-party email marketing tool.
If you’re new to email marketing, start with Shopify Email. It’s simple, affordable, and seamlessly integrated with Shopify. But if you need more advanced features, you can always go for a third-party tool. We’ll give you three solid options later on.
How Does Shopify Email Work?
Shopify Plus can send up to 10,000 emails for free each month through Shopify Email. The plugin lets you create, send, and track email campaigns from your Shopify dashboard.
These are the top features to expect from Shopify Email:
- Subscriber management: Shopify Email automatically syncs with your customer list. You can segment your audience based on their behavior and preferences to send targeted emails.
- Email templates with automatic branding: Shopify’s pre-built templates automatically pull your logo, product images, and store colors. This way, your emails will look consistent, and you’ll save time on design.
- Integrated checkout button: Let customers purchase products directly from the email using express checkout buttons. The interactive email experience helps increase your conversion rates.
- Automation and workflows: You can choose from ready-to-use email automation templates for different scenarios, such as welcome messages, win-back campaigns, and upsells. Alternatively, you can set up custom email workflows based on various triggers and customer actions.
- Email copywriting assistant: The platform’s AI assistant, Shopify Magic, helps you create compelling subject lines and email content quickly. To use it, you need to describe your desired content and choose a writing tone.
- Text personalization: You can personalize your email’s subject line, body text, and preheader by adding your customer’s first name, last name, city, and more. This makes your emails feel more personal and improves engagement.
How Much Does Shopify Email Cost?
All paying users can use Shopify Email and send up to 10,000 emails for free. Beyond that, the cost per email goes down as you send more. The table below shows the pricing details:
| Emails Sent per Month | Cost per 1,000 Emails |
|---|---|
| Up to 10,000 emails | Free |
| 10,001 – 300,000 emails | 1 USD |
| 300,001 – 750,000 emails | 0.65 USD |
| Over 750,000 emails | 0.55 USD |
What to Look for in a Shopify Email Marketing Solution?
As an e-commerce store, 20-25 percent of your revenue should come from email marketing. However, if you’re serious about this channel, there’s no limit on how much it can bring you.
As your business grows, you might find that Shopify Email no longer meets all your needs. You might need advanced features, like in-depth e-commerce analytics or dynamic content personalization.
When considering alternatives, look for a solution that checks the boxes below.
High Deliverability Rates
Your email deliverability rates show how many of your emails reach the primary inbox compared to how many you send. For example, if you have a 98% deliverability rate and send 1,000 emails, 20 of those emails either go to the spam folder or don’t reach the recipient at all.
What does your email marketing software have to do with your deliverability?
Three key things:
- IP reputation,
- Monitoring sender behavior,
- Supporting deliverability best practices.
Each ESP has a set of shared IP addresses for all their users. If someone sends spam or engages in cold emailing, it affects everyone using that IP and reduces the platform’s overall deliverability rate.
It’s the ESP’s job to keep an eye on high unsubscribe rates and spam complaints to maintain good deliverability.
Your ESP should also help you follow best practices for email deliverability. For example, at Campaign Refinery, we ask our clients to set up domain authentication protocols right from the start. However, many ESPs still only require minimal DKIM authentication, even after updates to Google’s policies in 2024.
Robust Email Automation Tools
E-commerce email marketing can’t work without automation. Shoppers expect instant confirmation emails after checkout, and new subscribers anticipate welcome emails. Without automation, you risk losing their attention.
For automated Shopify email marketing, your platform should at least run these automation scenarios:
- Drip campaigns: A drip campaign sends a series of emails at specific intervals, with each one building on the last. They guide your leads through the sales funnel until they’re ready to buy.
- Lead nurture campaigns: Nurture campaigns also aim to convert leads, but the emails are triggered by user behavior instead of set dates.
- Triggered emails: Sometimes, you need to respond to user actions with specific emails, like a thank-you email after a purchase or a reminder email for an abandoned cart.
Flexible Segmentation
Your audience is diverse, with different shoppers interested in various products at different stages of their customer journey. Some are considering their first purchase, some are loyal customers, and others might not be ready to buy at all.
An email segmentation strategy helps you divide your audience into groups based on similar interests or behaviors.
Shopify already offers a powerful visual segmentation builder. It includes predefined strategies based on past purchases and interactions, and it lets you create segments from scratch using filters.
While creating segments is easy with Shopify, managing them quickly becomes a pain. So, for more flexibility, we recommend using a Shopify email marketing tool with a tag-based engine.
There are three reasons for this:
- You can update subscriber tags in real-time. It’s easy to add or remove subscribers to and from segments based on their interactions.
- A tag-based approach eliminates the need for multiple lists. You don’t have to keep a static list for every segment.
- Tags simplify subscriber management. Instead of adding subscribers to multiple lists, you maintain a single entity.
At Campaign Refinery, we’ve engineered a cutting-edge tag-based segmentation engine for unlimited segmentation possibilities. Plus, our new feature, Audience Groups, lets you target multiple non-overlapping segments simultaneously. This feature helps you achieve higher conversion rates more efficiently.
Dynamic Personalization
Email personalization in Shopify Email only works with text. You can customize the subject line, preview text, and body text. However, you can’t include dynamic content like personalized product recommendations.
Dynamic content lets you automatically adjust your emails based on each customer’s interests or past behavior. And you’re not limited to text — you can personalize entire content blocks.
This has three important advantages for an e-commerce store:
- It boosts engagement because the content matches each customer’s preferences.
- It increases sales since personalized recommendations are more likely to lead to purchases.
- It saves time because you set up the process once and the software generates the content for each customer.
Advanced Reporting
With Shopify Email, you get the basic email marketing metrics:
- Emails sent,
- Open rate,
- Click rate,
- Sessions,
- Delivery rate,
- Bounce rate,
- Unsubscribe rate,
- Spam rate.
You can also see how your email marketing affects your sales. Shopify Email shows you total orders, total sales, and average order value from your email campaigns.
So, if you’re searching for an alternative email marketing tool for Shopify, you need one that goes beyond basic metrics and provides a full view of your store’s performance.
These are the top four features we recommend:
- Pre-built dashboards: Ready-to-use campaign report templates make it easy to explore different scenarios without switching between multiple reports. For example, a sales funnel dashboard can help you identify where you lose the most leads.
- Trend analytics: Analyzing data over long periods helps you spot trends and understand customer behaviors. You can identify sales opportunities and anticipate market demand by recognizing seasonality patterns.
- A/B testing: With A/B testing, you can experiment with different versions of your emails to see which one performs better. It’s a straightforward way to continuously improve your engagement rates, content, and overall email strategy.
- ROI attribution: You need to understand how much profit you’re making compared to your email marketing costs. This helps you make informed decisions about your marketing budget and strategies.
3 Best Shopify Email Marketing Solutions
If you decide that Shopify’s native email marketing features don’t meet your requirements, there are many other email marketing solutions out there to try. Let’s take a quick look at our top picks.
Campaign Refinery — Elite Deliverability
Campaign Refinery specializes in high-deliverability email marketing for high-volume senders. At large scale, small increases in deliverability, even just a tenth of a percent, can mean thousands more subscribers see your emails.
So, if you run a large Shopify store and are worried about your emails reaching the primary inbox, Campaign Refinery is the platform to choose. Plus, you won’t have to compromise on other email marketing features to achieve this.
Key Features:
- Pay-per-email pricing with unlimited contacts.
- Advanced tag-based segmentation and Audience Groups.
- A flexible Branch & Rule builder for any automation scenario.
- Engagement gamification to reward subscribers who interact with your messages.
- Automatic list cleaning to weed out harmful addresses, including spam traps and bots.
Klaviyo — Customer Data Platform for E-Commerce
Klaviyo is a customer data platform (CDP) designed for large-scale Shopify stores with diverse products and customer bases. It helps you collect and centralize all your customer information to spot opportunities and increase your revenue.
Klaviyo also offers tools for segmenting your audience, personalizing your messages, and automating targeted marketing campaigns.
Key Features:
- AI assistant to help you design flows and create email or SMS content.
- Predictive analytics for next purchase date, spending potential, and churn risk.
- Support for multi-channel marketing across email, SMS, and push notifications.
- Shows real-time revenue data for each automation, campaign, segment, and channel.
Drip — Email Automation for Mid-Sized Stores
If you run a smaller operation but still count on automation, Drip could be a decent Klaviyo alternative for your Shopify email marketing. You can set up goals, triggers, and rules easily. Drip’s user-friendly interface makes it less daunting than Klaviyo. It’s also cheaper, though it has fewer features and lower deliverability rates compared to Campaign Refinery and Klaviyo.
Key Features:
- User segmentation based on interactions with emails and your Shopify store.
- Works with other e-commerce platforms, such as WooCommerce.
- Offers straightforward pricing with a single tier.
- Includes a migration service.
4 Must-Have Shopify Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing for Shopify isn’t just about sending promotions and order confirmations. If you plan for the entire customer lifecycle, you can boost sales, increase customer retention, and grow your business.
Let’s cover the four types of campaigns to maximize your email marketing impact.
Welcome Emails
A welcome email is your first interaction with new subscribers. It confirms their successful signup and typically has the highest open rates in email marketing — over 83%. So, it’s your best opportunity to short-circuit the customer journey and get leads to convert.
To make your welcome emails effective, follow these tips:
- Introduce your brand and mission.
- Highlight what makes you different.
- Include a special offer for first-time buyers.
- Mention how often subscribers can expect to hear from you — for example, weekly.
This welcome email from Bokksu features a clean, eye-catching design. It prominently displays the product in the center and includes a call-to-action before the user needs to scroll down. The engaging and friendly tone helps establish trust, while the discount and free shipping encourage the first purchase.
Abandoned Cart Emails
Like any Shopify store owner, you’ve definitely felt the sting of an abandoned cart. Despite your best efforts, over 70 percent of potential customers stop one step before crossing the finish line.
Abandoned cart emails tackle the most common causes shoppers drop off at the last minute: forgetfulness and doubt.
If a user gets distracted before finishing their purchase, an email can remind them of the items left in their cart. Including an incentive, like a discount, can help overcome inertia. If doubt is the issue, your email should directly address their concerns.
Follow these tips to handle the most common reasons people abandon their carts:
- Include testimonials from happy customers.
- Explain your return policy to ease their mind.
- Help the customer calculate the extra costs (shipping, fees, tax) upfront.
- Highlight the health benefits, effectiveness, and durability of your products.
The example below keeps the message simple and evokes anticipation with the word “almost” in the heading. The email shows the items in the customer’s cart and their price. It offers free delivery and a 10 percent discount for first-time customers. Finally, the badges at the bottom address concerns about ingredients and origin.
Re-engagement Campaigns
Re-engagement emails are a great way to reconnect with inactive audiences. Reminding former customers about your business can bring some of them back and boost your revenue.
What’s more, re-engagement campaigns help you identify subscribers who are no longer interested in your content. If someone doesn’t respond to these emails, you can remove them from your list. This improves your engagement metrics and email deliverability.
To create an effective re-engagement email:
- Use curiosity or humor in the subject line.
- Include a section for customized email preferences.
- Show empathy and acknowledge the cluttered inbox.
- Introduce a fresh angle to differentiate your re-engagement emails from regular ones.
The re-engagement email below executes these tips perfectly.
Post-Purchase Sequence
When a customer buys something from your Shopify store, you’ll first send them a confirmation email. But don’t stop there if you want to keep the connection strong.
A post-purchase sequence keeps the conversation going and strengthens your relationship with the customer.
We recommend this sequence:
- Send a thank you email with a discount code for next time and suggest related products. Clearly explain how the customer can get assistance if they need it.
- Follow up with useful info like how to use the product or care instructions.
- Ask for feedback to check if they’re happy with their purchase. You can make this email interactive.
- If your product needs regular upkeep, remind them when it’s time and suggest products they might need.
This post-purchase thank-you email from Crate & Barrel ticks all the right boxes.
Shopify Email Marketing Success Without Stress
Imagine your Shopify store not only catching up with your competitors but surpassing them with ease.
With Campaign Refinery, that vision becomes a reality.
Our platform seamlessly integrates with Shopify and gives your emails maximum visibility.
No more second-guessing or stressing over email marketing. Our intuitive tools make it simple to create, send, and track your email campaigns, so you can focus on what you do best — growing your business.
Stop stressing over setup and start seeing results. Apply to join Campaign Refinery today!
