As a one-person business, it can be tough for you to keep up with everything on your plate and making sure that you are running as effectively and efficiently as possible is vital to the growth of your business. Digital marketing is something that companies of all sizes neglect until there is simply no other option. Networking, social media interactions, and content creation lead the pack in terms of the things you should focus on if you are serious about succeeding in this field. One of the main aspects of digital marketing is email marketing. If you aren’t utilizing email marketing, or aren’t doing so as effectively as possible, then you could really be doing yourself a disservice in terms of how well your site is performing.
You might have heard that you can’t do email marketing if you’re using a Shopify store. That’s simply not true. In fact, email is a great marketing channel for your store. Email gives you the chance to get in front of your customers and tell them about new products, new deals, or any other information you think would be relevant enough to convince them to come back and make another purchase.
There are many different marketing services for Shopify store owners to use, and email marketing is an excellent choice for smaller businesses. Best email marketing software for Shopify stores are built with customer relationships in mind, so select one that includes upsells and signup incentives. Here we have reviewed some of the best newsletter software for Shopify which will help you to create a highly effective email campaign to stay in touch with your customers.
E-mail marketing is one of the most profitable online marketing strategies. With hundreds and billions of dollars being spent on internet advertising every year, email marketing is still considered one of most creative and cost-effective ways to promote your business. Due to its unique properties, email marketing allows you to connect with your leads and customers directly at their inboxes. It tells your business’s story in a nice way that helps build trust and likability among existing customers and draws new ones.
What Can the Best Email Marketing Services Do with Shopify?
Before we jump in, let’s quickly review what a good email marketing software should let you do with your ecommerce business, and more specifically, your Shopify store.
Must-have features are:
- Forms that integrate directly with Shopify – Ideally, any forms on your Shopify site would automatically connect up with your email marketing service as soon as you set up the integration, without any need to insert code on your site.
- Contact syncing – Contact details and purchase history of both existing and new customers should be able to go straight into your email tool. Many tools will automatically import all Shopify contacts, and set subscribe/unsubscribe status based on whether contacts opt-in at checkout.
- Segments – A good email tool should let you create segments of customers, based on purchase history. Some will go so far as to let you track which products customers have viewed (but not purchased), and let you create segments around this criteria. A handful of tools also create pre-built segments for you as soon as you import contacts from Shopify (e.g. first-time customers, repeat customers).
- Automated / triggered campaigns – An absolute must-have in an email marketing software, automated campaigns such as abandoned cart, order confirmations, cross-selling and upselling promotions, and recommended product emails will help you boost your store’s sales significantly.
- Reporting – So you know how successful each campaign is, your email marketing service should be able to report on how much revenue was generated by each individual email. All the tools we’ve listed below include this ecommerce reporting feature (with the exception of ConvertKit, who are working on building this capability).
- Easy to use email editor – An intuitive visual editor, such as one that lets you drag and drop text and images into your email, will help you to quickly and easily build out your emails. Some of the tools below also let you automatically add your Shopify products straight into your email.
Privy
Difficulty 🛠: Easy
Cost (out of 3 💰): 💰💰
Unique feature 💡: Ecommerce focused, packed with lead generation tools
Shopify App Store rating ⭐️: 4.6/5 (24,585 reviews)
Privy is the highest rated sales and email marketing app in the Shopify App Store. It’s used by over 400,000 merchants in 180 countries and has driven over $4 billion in sales.
Privy expands the boundaries of what email marketing solutions can do. Its suite of products include automation tools for email marketing, but also conversion and SMS.
With Privy, you get access to intent-driven pop-ups and banners, spin-to-win wheels, and embedded forms for email collection. All mobile friendly and customizable without any code.
Privy also provides features including:
- Support for custom storefronts
- Automated campaigns based on exit intent, cart abandonment, cart value, and website behavior
- Automated A/B testing to understand how to impact conversion rates
- Autoresponders and reminder messages to turn sign-ups into sales
- Ability to run cross-sell emails with Add to Cart buttons
- Lets you automate your email marketing with newsletters, abandoned carts, and purchase follow-up and customer winback emails
Privy is free for up to 100 contacts with unlimited pop-ups, dozens of targeting rules, and A/B testing. Paid plans start at $15 per month for all conversion and email tools.
Mailerlite
Difficulty 🛠: Beginner
Cost (out of 3 💰): Free
Unique feature 💡: Easy and affordable
Shopify App Store rating ⭐️: 3.5/5 (80 reviews)
MailerLite is a user-friendly email marketing platform. It lets you send emails your customers can’t help but click. Not only is it easy to use, it offers professional-class automation and integrations for fast-growing ecommerce businesses.
MailerLite also offers award-winning 24/7 support staffed by real people. You’ll never be left waiting for an email response when trying to set up a campaign.
MailerLite provides key features for Shopify merchants, including:
- A CRM to store all customer data from Shopify
- Automatic customer segment creation based on Shopify data, including first time customers, high-spending customers, and more
- Ability to track revenue and see how emails impact sales
- Easy product detail importing from Shopify, including images lines and text integrated into MailerLite’s drag-and-drop email editor
- Free landing page builder and pop-ups to grow your contact list and feature new products in your store
The best part? MailerLite is free to use. If you have a smaller budget and are completely new to email marketing, MailerLite is a good choice for you.
Klaviyo
Difficulty 🛠: Normal
Cost (out of 3 💰): 💰💰💰
Unique feature 💡: Built for ecommerce
Shopify App Store rating ⭐️: 4.2/5 (1,339 reviews)
Klaviyo is one of the few email marketing services designed specifically for ecommerce. It’s also the leading platform in the Shopify ecosystem, with over 50,000 stores using Klaviyo to send personalized emails, SMS messages, sign-up forms, and more.
Klaviyo provides an impressive set of features:
- Over 100 pre-built integrations with tools like Facebook, ShipStation, and Smile
- Free and flexible account options: Klaviyo is free forever until you have more than 250 contacts, then you can pay month-to-month based on the size of your contact list
- Pre-built forms, templates, and automations to get your campaigns running in minutes
- Ability to send personalized product recommendations and dynamic content based on past interactions with your brand
- Dynamic forms you can A/B test to optimize copy and improve lead form conversions
- Growth-focused reporting with email and SMS performance analytics you can see at a glance
As an ecommerce-first email provider, Klaviyo also supports paid social campaigns. You can quickly sync data to build Lookalike Audiences for Facebook and Instagrams ads to find more relevant customers for your business. Klaviyo users also get access to insider tips and support from the Klaviyo Community Forum.
Klaviyo is free for up to 250 contacts. Then the price is $20 per month, with no contracts or lock-ins.
Drip
If you want to be able to create automations around even the smallest actions taken by customers on your store (e.g. viewed a product, created/deleted a checkout, placed/cancelled an order), or around very specific data points (e.g. what brand they bought, or how much they spent), Drip is the tool for you. It’s for this reason that they call themselves the ‘Ecommerce CRM’ – they put a strong emphasis on enabling communications at every point of the individual customer’s journey.
They also offer an integration with Facebook Customer Audiences, meaning you can combine targeted Facebook ads with your Shopify automated campaigns.
Pricing:
- Up to 500 contacts: $19/month
- Up to 1000 contacts: $29/month
- Up to 2,500 contacts: $39/month
- Up to 5,000 contacts: $89/month
- Up to 10,000 emails per month: $154/month
What we liked: The integration process is super easy (you don’t even need to insert any tracking code in your store to enable the web tracking). Plus, creating automations in Drip is straightforward (and with their colorful workflow editor, kind of fun, too). You can make automations as simple or as complex as you like, with options to include actions, parallel paths, decisions and more within the workflow. Or you can simply choose from one of their pre-built templates – these include cart abandonment, coupon welcome series and campaigns to win back ‘at-risk’ customers. You can also send SMS to your customers.
Plus, we really liked that the documentation they offer around how the integration works is more detailed than that of other providers – this was super helpful.
What could be improved: Be sure to keep a close eye on your subscriber numbers, as you’ll automatically get bumped up to the next plan if you go over the limit, and remember that customers who get synced over from Shopify will go towards your contact limit. Also, there isn’t a huge range of email templates available – there are just 18.
Who we would recommend Drip to: We’d recommend Drip to those interested in their impressively clever segmentation and automation features.
Sendinblue
Another top tool for budget-conscious Shopify ecommerce owners is Sendinblue. Though there are many email marketing apps, this one stands out as a feature-rich service that offers excellent value for money. Originally a transactional email provider, Sendinblue has expanded into the multichannel space by offering SMS in addition to email. Not to mention, some seriously impressive features including landing pages, automations, Facebook ads, live chat, and lead scoring.
Pricing:
- Up to 9,000 emails a month: $0 (maximum 300 emails daily)
- Up to 10,000 emails a month: $25/month
- Up to 40,000 emails a month: $32/month
- Up to 60,000 emails a month: $45/month
What we liked: Sendinblue have built in some very smart ecommerce features. For example, you can display conditional email content based on certain attributes (e.g. a special offer if someone is an existing customer or not). And thanks to their transactional messaging features, you can also send emails and SMS like payment confirmations, order summaries and shipping notifications (via SMTP). Order data also gets exported from Shopify to Sendinblue, meaning you can view this information on individual contact records, and create segments and automations around this information. you can also integrate store products with email using the drag-and-drop builder.
What could be improved: To be able to use advanced features like dynamic content and lists (for example, to add items purchased into an order confirmation email), you need to generate a bit of code, which may take a bit of practice to get used to. Not a huge deal, but the interface is a little dull compared to some of the other more modern-looking email tools.
Who we would recommend Sendinblue to: Don’t let its impressive feature set fool you – Sendinblue offers some of the cheapest plans for Shopify store owners and is a decent option if you want to run your email marketing on a budget.
Omnisend
Omnisend has 4.8 rating by 3497 reviewers on Shopify. It offers driving more sales to your store through various email marketing features as below:
Features:
- Welcome emails, confirmation emails, post-purchase emails
- Abandoned cart recovery
- Segmentation
- Signup boxes and pop-ups
- Customizable landing pages
Pricing:
- Free Trial: 15.000 monthly emails
- Standard: $16/m 15.000 monthly emails + more features
- Pro: $99/m 15.000 monthly emails, standard features+ more
- Enterprise: Custom pricing, unlimited emails, Pro features + more
Consistent Cart-Abandoned Cart
Consistent Cart has a 4.8 rating by 3489 reviewers on Shopify.
Features:
- Abandoned cart campaigns
- Add to cart pop-up
- Activity monitor
- Cart syncing across devices
- Sales pop integration
Pricing:
- Free Trial for 14 days
- Pro: Starting from $29/m
Shopify Email Marketing App
Shopify launched their own email marketing app in November 2019 and are offering it for free with all plans. It allows you to send a total of 2,500 emails per month for free. If you surpass that number, then you’ll be charged $1 USD for every 1,000 emails sent.
You might think that this would be a convenient solution to your email marketing, but remember that Shopify specializes in website creation and not email newsletters. We checked out their email builder and found that it was pretty limited; there are only a few basic templates to choose from and the customization options (font, content blocks and button styles) don’t allow for much creative freedom at all. Shopify email templates Shopify email builder
It is convenient that you can easily add your products to your email with one click, but you can also do that with tools such as Onmisend, which comes with many more features.
What about automations? Shopify turns on abandoned checkout emails by default. If you want to set up other triggered automations then Shopify prompts you to use Omnisend or SmartrMail.
Conclusion
E-mail marketing is still considered to be one of the best ways to promote businesses, brands and products. It is a known fact that consumer’s attention is shifting from standard businesses advertisements. Email marketing allows you to reach target audience directly in the inbox, therefore they’ve already expressed their interest to make themselves a part of the email marketing campaign.
Email marketing is the best channel to grow your store and boost sales. With the right tool, you can turn your store visitors into subscribers and build an audience of loyal customers.