Growing Your Online Store’s Sales with Less Time and Effort

Let’s face it—if you’re an online merchant running a WordPress-based store, it’s likely powered by WooCommerce. And let’s be real, managing a WooCommerce store is no walk in the park.

As a store owner or marketer, your time is probably stretched thin across a myriad of daily tasks. With the ever-expanding list of marketing channels to focus on, growing sales can feel like an uphill battle.

So, how can you sustainably boost your store’s sales while still having time for all the other essential tasks that keep your business running smoothly?

Thankfully, there is one time-tested channel for growing sales, and that’s email marketing. The beauty of email is that it’s an opt-in channel. People choose to receive your marketing messages, making them more receptive to your content.   

This is why, on average, US store owners who use Omnisend generate $72 for every $1 spent on email marketing. But not all email is created equal. There’s an email marketing secret weapon that allows brands to grow sales with less effort — all while reducing paid retargeting costs. 

The secret is behavior-based automated emails. In 2023, automated emails generated 41% of all email marketing orders while accounting for only 2% of emails sent. The reason they perform so well is because they’re behavior-based, meaning they only send to people who take a specific action, such as abandoning a shopping cart, making them hyper-relevant. Think of it as automated segmentation. 

Spending only a few minutes to implement only a few automated emails can significantly increase your store’s sales. Here are four automated emails every store owner should be sending and why.  

1. Welcome emails. Welcome emails are sent to new email subscribers, such as when they opt-in via an email signup popup on your website. Welcome emails have a 58% better open rate, a 225% better click rate, and a conversion rate 39x better than scheduled marketing emails. In fact, welcome messages convert the second-best of any email marketing message. 
   
   One reason these messages should be considered a must, beyond the fact they increase sales, is that they complement your paid marketing efforts — which are often the reason for your store’s traffic. Having a popup on your website that captures contact information like email address, and then triggers a welcome message that continues the engagement can minimize the need for paid retargeting and help reduce your overall customer acquisition costs.   

2. Abandonment cart emails. Abandoned cart emails are sent to shoppers who placed items in their carts but failed to complete their purchase. While every ecommerce store deals with abandoned carts their usual means of recovering lost sales is with expensive retargeting ads, often on social media. Email is more effective and much less costly. 
   
   Abandoned cart emails have an 85% better open rate, 280% better click rate, and a conversion rate 36x better than scheduled marketing emails. Better yet, nearly half of the people who click on abandoned cart emails go on to complete their purchase. The more abandoned carts are reclaimed via email marketing, the fewer third-party retargeting costs need to be incurred.  

3. Browse abandonment emails. Browse abandonment emails target online window shoppers — those who view products on your site but leave before they place items in their carts. Year over year, brands are increasing their use of them to bring would-be shoppers back to their sites.
   
   Like other automated messages, browser abandonment emails are more effective than campaign emails, featuring a 60% better open rate, 3x better click rate, and an 11x better conversion rate. These messages serve the perfect role of re-engaging shoppers at a point in the shopping journey that consumers often fall off — post-website visit and purchase. 

4. Back-in-stock emails. Messages alerting shoppers when out-of-stock items they were once shopping for come back in stock. These messages naturally combine the sense of urgency, fear of loss, and social proof to create a marketing trifecta that screams, “Hurry up and buy.”
   
   This helps explain why back-in-stock emails have the highest open, click, and conversion rate of any message. In fact, these messages convert two times better than cart abandonment emails. Utilizing back-in-stock emails means you’ll never need to worry about out-of-stock products again, and selling them when they are restocked will be even easier.

You’ve heard the proverbial ‘right message at the right time for the right consumer’ a hundred times, but this is exactly what behavior-based automated emails are. They target shoppers at critical, high-intent stages of their shopping journeys, from initial discovery through post-purchase, and that’s why they outperform all other types of emails and channels. WooCommerce store owners looking to sell more with less effort need to make automated messages a featured part of their email marketing strategy. 

Greg Zakowicz, Ecommerce Expert, Omnisend

With nearly 20 years of experience in DTC marketing, Greg Zakowicz is a veteran marketer and Ecommerce Expert at Omnisend, an email & SMS marketing platform with over 100,000 customers. www.Omnisend.com