Five essential emails you should send to your shopping app customers

Email campaigns are not just an essential part of mobile app marketing. They also play a key role in growing app engagement and retention.

One big reason app businesses ignore email campaigns is its perception. Many marketers prefer more direct and interactive mediums like social media and video content. Emails are considered too formal to generate real audience engagement that benefits the app.

This perception is naturally flawed. Emails still remain a great way to directly reach customers. Shopping apps can be the biggest beneficiaries of email marketing. You can directly funnel traffic to your shopping app with personalized email campaigns.  

With more and more businesses using online app builders to turn WordPress website to app, you need email campaigns to stand out and reach out to your customers.

It is always difficult in the beginning to nail down the emails you should be sending to customers. Beyond the basic messages like welcome and order completion emails, there is always confusion about the information you should send across to your customers.

This article covers five essential emails you should send to your shopping app customers.

#1 - Inactivity emails

A big reason to run email campaigns for your app is to generate engagement. App churn is a real challenge and emails can help you counter it with positive interaction and outreach.

Thus, the first email you should consider sending is to people who have been inactive. If a customer hasn’t used your shopping app for more than a month, there is a good chance it is headed towards churn.

Sending emails to inactive customers will help you stop the app churn to some extent. It is important to personalize these emails according to the general activity of the user. If a customer has previously bought a product, it is a good idea to offer special discounts on products from the same category.

Your aim with these emails should be to do everything possible to bring dormant customers back. Avoiding churn is crucial as acquiring another user to replace a leaving customer is much more expensive.

Segment dormant users into different cohorts and draft personalized emails for each. This way, you have a much better shot at stopping app churn and enhancing engagement simultaneously.

#2 - Cart abandonment

Cart abandonment emails are fairly common in the ecommerce space, and rightly so. App marketers would attest to the extreme effort it takes to bring a customer to the app checkout. Most customers are nurtured in a sales funnel for weeks and months with marketing messages until they are ready to make a purchase.

To then see customers abandon their cart is a very debilitating sight. All the effort you invest in bringing shoppers close to conversion essentially goes to waste.

Cart abandonment emails can help you reach out to such customers and ensure your extensive marketing efforts don’t go to waste.

Sending such emails is simple on a procedural level. You only have to shoot emails to customers who abandoned their carts. However, you must also think about why customers abandon their carts in the first place.

The real aim of sending these emails is making customers complete their purchase. You cannot hope to achieve this goal without understanding the reason why customers abandon the cart in the first place.

Generally, the reason behind cart abandonment is the overall bill. You can send your customers discount codes in this case to incentivize them to complete the purchase.

#3 - Complementary product emails

Shopping apps often send product recommendation emails to their customers. However, these recommendation are too random to pique the interest of an average customer.

Complementary products refer to sets of products that complement each other. Shoes and socks are a simple example of complementary products. As someone running a shopping app, you can make an educated guess that someone buying a pair of shoes would also be interested in buying multiple pairs of socks from time to time.

You can thus make your product recommendations much more accurate by imbibing the concept of complementary products. It is a much better way to generate engagement amongst your customers.

If you run a niche shopping app, it is also a good idea to add complementary product sets. This will help you scale your sales numbers as one sale can trickle down to multiple future purchases.

#4 - Major updates in app

You should always be first to inform your customers about major updates in your shopping app. Many shopping apps underestimate the tendency of shoppers to value new features and functions.

Sending feature release emails is a great idea to get a spike in app engagement and create a buzz. Additionally, you can also inform customers about the launch of a sales campaign or a change in the prices of your subscription plans. These emails are solely aimed at informing customers about a major change on your app.

#5 - Pacification emails 

You will always run into logistical problems while running an ecommerce app. Even though you can easily convert WooCommerce site to mobile app to make a shopping platform, there are other challenges that you may not anticipate. Dealing with disgruntled customers is one of them.

Online shoppers don’t have a lot of patience when an order is not completed smoothly. The last thing you want is for them to give you bad app ratings and reviews or worse uninstall your app.

The solution? Your first line of defence is a sound customer service system. Once the problem of a customer is resolved, reach out to the customer with a pacifying email apologizing for the inconvenience caused. This will help cool your equation with unhappy customers.

In conclusion

Sending emails is very important for maintaining a healthy level of app engagement. This piece covers five essential emails you should send to your shopping app customers. Managing app churn is a big challenge. Email campaigns are the ideal solution for this obstacle. The points made in the piece will set your app marketing and retention strategy in the right direction.