You already know that email marketing is an essential part of your marketing toolbox. It can connect you with your audience, educate them about your products and services, and keep them engaged with your brand. 

Of course, there are intricacies and best practices with email marketing, and time-strapped or beginning email marketers sometimes struggle to get a strong start out of the gate. Others find it difficult to allot time to refining and optimizing their email marketing programs. Many ecommerce businesses are turning to an A.I.-enabled email marketing solution to save time, avoid some of the manual processes required by traditional email marketing solutions, and bring their email marketing to the next level.

For growing ecommerce businesses that have over 5,000 email subscribers, we’re introducing a new solution that helps you to use AI to send more personalized emails and sell more products, without investing more time.

What exactly is A.I.-enabled email marketing?

We’ve all heard of new and interesting ways artificial intelligence is being applied to everyday situations — such as self-driving cars and A.I.-powered personal assistants like Alexa. 

Artificial intelligence and machine learning can also be applied to email marketing. It can analyze customer data and use that analysis to make predictions and optimize messages and campaigns. Marketers can save time by handing some of their manual setup, analysis and optimization work over to an A.I.-enabled email marketing solution. 

A.I.-enabled email marketing solutions drive results for your business by:

• Analyzing customer data and predicting the best timing, message choice, and product recommendations for every individual customer
• Learning from the data over time and continuing to adjust predictions
• Providing insights that help marketers improve their planning and performance

Instead of spending time setting up rules and creating a series of email campaigns that may or may not be effective, marketers can shift their time and attention elsewhere, and then circle back to review learnings from the A.I.-optimized campaigns.

Picture this: There are two young, one-person men’s apparel businesses. Both have Shopify as their ecommerce platform and an email list of over 5,000 contacts. Both business owners know they need email marketing to grow their business, but they take different approaches, with one using traditional marketing and the other opting for an A.I.-enabled email marketing solution. It could look something like this:

ABC Co. Men’s apparel store using Shopify 5,000+ email contacts

XYZ Co. Men’s apparel store using Shopify 5,000+ email contacts

Uses an A.I.-enabled email marketing solution that integrates with Shopify Learns more about their customer data as part of the onboarding process with their email technology partner, and gains assistance with setting up the best campaigns for their business Harnesses the power of their customer data and A.I.-enabled predictive analytics to optimize email messages, down to each individual customer Adds creative assets such as subject lines, logos, and text to customize built-in templates that dynamically pull in product photos and details to send highly personalized email messages  Includes personalized incentives (For example, 10% off first purchase) that are predicted to be effective and at the lowest possible cost to the business Checks in on the reporting for insights into their customers and business Uses data from the email solution to instantly create lookalike audiences for better targeting on Facebook and other ad platforms

Uses a traditional email marketing solution and hires a marketing manager to manually create segments (segments are subsets of your email list that you want to market to differently) Marketing manager builds and tests email campaign effectiveness over time Marketing manager sends email messages that are limited in terms of personalization Marketing manager manually creates email campaign reports, and insights are limited

Every small business has its own unique needs, and it’s best to weigh your own situation before deciding on the best email marketing solution for your business. But if you’re already using a compatible ecommerce platform like Shopify, and you’ve amassed 5,000 email contacts or more, an A.I.-enabled email marketing solution like Ecommerce Pro might be your best bet for selling more products in less time.

What’s the best way to get started with A.I.-powered Ecommerce automation?

In a word, “playbooks.” Playbooks are pre-built, out-of-the-box features that get you up and running quickly. Constant Contact’s Ecommerce Pro offers 20 playbooks that are pre-configured to target customers according to their buying stage and a range of ecommerce situations. 

Here are the five email marketing playbooks to start with

When you get started with A.I.-powered ecommerce email marketing, here are the five playbooks you can start using right away to start sending more relevant emails that drive sales.

Top of the Funnel

Welcome new customers and let A.I. determine who to nurture versus who to push for a purchase, triggering the next most relevant content. If customers are spending a lot of time browsing products and adding items to their cart, they might receive a discount off their first purchase. If instead they quickly browsed a few pages, they might receive nurturing-type messages to draw them back to your website. 

Show Me the Money

Maximize your sales by capitalizing on those who are ready to buy… and by getting more users into that ready-to-buy state. These messages might promote a sale or include an offer for 10% off your purchase of $100 or more.

Trigger Happy

Target individual users based on their specific actions and events, such as cart-abandonment and browse-abandonment, birthdays and anniversaries, new product arrivals, and more. These messages might include reminders about items in their cart, or offer a special gift with purchase to celebrate their birthday. 

Saved by the (A.I.) Bell

Enable A.I. to win back customers who have left — or catch those at risk of leaving — by putting the right products and incentives in front of them at the right time. These messages might include discounts on items similar to past purchases, and high-value content to keep them engaged. 

A Nurturing Environment

Educate passive users about your brand so that when they’re ready to buy, they’ll buy from you. Then send a followup to hook them long-term. Staying top of mind with these customers might involve helpful product-related content and calls to action to engage with the brand on social media. 

What do I need to create to get started?

It goes without saying that a successful onboarding experience is a great first step. You will want to work with an email solution provider that offers live onboarding, tailored to your business’s needs. Look for a strong team of data scientists and ecommerce experts that can help you understand your data better, so you can work even more strategically.  

Pre-built email templates will help you get up and running quickly. The right A.I.-enabled solution will dynamically create and send email messages using these templates, your website content (product photos, prices) and additional content that you provide, such as subject lines and incentives you’re willing to offer, such as discounts or free shipping.

Here are some recommendations in terms of creative assets and content to develop ahead of time:

• Two to three email templates, for A/B testing
• Content about your brand – start with your “About Us” content
• Two to three hero images (these are the images that span the full width of your emails, right at the top)
• A list of subject lines to test (Fun fact: Ecommerce Pro stands apart with its ability to test up to 10 different subject lines!)
• A list of offers, such as 10% off your first order, or free gift with purchase

What’s exciting about an A.I.-enabled solution is that it learns from customer behavior, down to the individual level. You can rest assured that the platform is taking the content and creative assets you supply and personalizing messages for each customer based on things like optimal time of day to send the message, products of interest, and offers likely to convert into sales. 

What Ecommerce platforms work with Ecommerce Pro?

Are you a Shopify, Magento, or BigCommerce user with 5,000 contacts or more? Ecommerce Pro integrates with those platforms and many others to get all your data in one place. This means the A.I. engine has more data, and more kinds of data to analyze and use for campaign optimization. 

Playing to win with Ecommerce Pro

Armed with an A.I.-powered email marketing solution and the ease of playbooks, marketers can quickly and easily bring their email marketing to new levels, and ultimately, make more sales. 

The technology allows ecommerce businesses to speak more directly to their customers, learn more about them, and see the results in terms of revenue and customer retention. Keeping up with the latest in email marketing technology can help you continue to nurture customer relationships and grow your business. And best of all — once it’s set up, Ecommerce Pro requires less time from you than a traditional email marketing solution, empowering you to sell more and save time.

Schedule a demo now to see A.I.-enabled email marketing in action. 

Example images in this post come from customers of Retention Science, a Constant Contact company powering the Ecommerce Pro Package.

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