A Quick Guide To Starting a Shopify Newsletter
Email marketing shopify Newsletter can be highly lucrative, and it has an average return on investment (ROI) of $36 for every dollar you spend. But since you’re here after reading the post’s title, we trust you already know how excellent email marketing can be.
Shopify users now have this excellent feature to create a newsletter for their subscribers. In this article, we’ll give you an overview of what you need to do to start sending one to your readers.
So without further ado, let’s get started.
What Is a Shopify Newsletter and Why Should You Have One?
A Shopify newsletter is a marketing campaign where you send informative or promotional content to your readers.
The goal of a newsletter is to create long-term relationships with customers instead of promotional emails where you focus on a specific product and short-term conversions.
This helps give regular reminders to your customers or potential leads about your offers. You can use these emails to tell your brand story, provide updates on products, provide information on using specific items, promote bestsellers, celebrate milestones, share success stories and much more.
Shopify offers this feature to its paid account members. Otherwise, you need to install third-party apps and plugins to send newsletters.
Newsletters demand constant effort from your end, and you can’t reproduce them as you do with welcome emails or abandoned cart emails.
But these can generate a high ROI since you’re not paying per click or view as you do with ads.
Only the most interested customers in your business and offer opt for email. Hence it’s an ideal place for brand awareness and product promotion. Emails have a 4.16% conversion rate instead of 0.48% of social media.
How to Start a Shopify Newsletter: A Guide
Here’s a simple guide on how to start a Shopify newsletter in 2022:
1. Gather Your Email List
You need an email list to begin sending your newsletter. For that, you can use newsletter signup forms, pop-ups on product pages or home page and use strong CTAs at the end to encourage more signups.
You need to get customers to opt-in for the newsletter. Because you legally can’t send marketing materials without the recipient’s approval.
You can add the newsletter signup option at checkout as well. To do that, go to your store settings —> checkout —> click on show an option to subscribe at checkout in your email marketing section.
Your customers will then see a message inviting them to join your email list. If your store is in Germany, then you’ll need to have your customers confirm their subscription.
Some other countries also require this double opt-in from customers. So check your Shopify store guidelines depending on your location.
All free Shopify themes have a newsletter signup option that you can activate from your admin portal.
2. Manage and Grow Your Subscribers
Once you have the emails, you need to manage them in the admin portal. You can segment the emails according to interests, locations, age and other information that customers willingly shared at signup.
Tailored newsletters can have better results. Statistics show that segmented emails can have a 30% higher open rate and 50% higher click-through rate as compared to unsegmented emails.
You can create filters for email newsletters by going to admin—> customers —> find filters that apply or go more filters. Here, you’ll have categories such as language, date of order, location and more.
You can view all your email newsletters subscribers in admin —> customers —> email subscribers.
3. Create Compelling Newsletters With Strong CTAs
Your newsletter can’t be boring, repetitive or too dull. It needs to add value to your customers’ day or otherwise, you won’t succeed in your goals for which you started the newsletter.
So provide the information that the audience wants to read. This is where email segmentation helps. You can send information regarding how your products can be used to the customers who recently purchased from your store.
Or you can include a few great reviews of past customers when you’re sending the newsletter to potential customers. And you can include promotional offers in just about all of your newsletters.
You can use templates to speed up the process. That’ll help you stay consistent with your layout and the categories of content to include.
But remember, don’t reuse the content unless it’s a product description or some general information. Keep your information fresh and the content attractive.
4. Work on Your Newsletter Design
This includes your logo, colors, content style, CTAs, social media buttons or highlights of the week. Keep the same pattern throughout the newsletters because it’s convenient for you and also helps your customers know what to expect from your newsletters every week or month.
5. Provide Informative Content Along With Promotions
Customers appreciate informative content regarding your business or industry.
So you should include that in addition to promotions. The type of content depends on your audience and business. So include what you prefer and more importantly, what your customers prefer.
6. Add Email Marketing Tools in Your Shopify Store
Add Shopify email app to your admin portal. You can use third-party apps or download plugins to install in your store. All these can help you set up a newsletter campaign.
If you’re using a third-party app or software to gather the email list then you’ll need to sync it in your Shopify store before sending the newsletter.
Shopify allows you to create up to 5 campaigns a week. That totals 2,500 emails a month. The perks of using Shopify’s native feature is that you get access to templates, metrics and you can conveniently import products from your store to the newsletter.
If you don’t know how to set up apps or custom plugins, then perhaps you can take the help of professional Shopify ecommerce development services.
7. A/B Testing and Asking for Feedback
No marketing campaign is complete without A/B testing. So you need to check your metrics to see how your newsletter is being received.
Try sending the newsletter at different times of the day and watch the open rates. Change the layout and the content slightly to see if the click-through rates change.
Similarly, you can readjust your filters to improve your results. Test different formats of the newsletter until you find the one that helps you reach your goals.
8. Check Your Metrics
Metrics play an important role in your Shopify newsletter campaign. Observe your email open rates and click-through rates. Use those to see if you need to make changes.
9. Create a Schedule
Your readers should know when to expect the newsletter from your Shopify store. A schedule can help you stay consistent with your emails. You can choose to send your newsletter weekly, monthly, or make it seasonal.
The schedule depends on your industry and what your newsletter offers.
For example, a skincare brand can send a monthly newsletter on product updates, information on how to use the different creams and so on. But it can also create an informative seasonal newsletter to inform the readers about how they can take care of their skin during different seasons.
Your Next Steps
Creating a Shopify newsletter is easy. But keeping it going and providing great content that your readers will enjoy is the hard part.
Follow these simple steps to get started with a Shopify newsletter for your store. This form of marketing is gaining traction for all the good reasons and you shouldn’t miss out on that.