Email Marketing in Retail: A Guide for Your Store (2024)

Got a retail business and want to increase sales? Learn how email marketing is helping small businesses grow and how to use it today.

Email marketing is the fastest way to accelerate your retail business. 

A 2024 survey found that nearly half (48%) of B2C businesses use email marketing in their strategies—and 92% find this tactic to be either very or somewhat successful. It’s the best way to encourage sales, showcase your products, and build connections with new and existing customers that pay off over time.

But email marketing doesn’t mean just sending out a regular newsletter that shouts about your product’s best features. Email marketing covers newsletters, e-receipts, segmentation, and automation.And with access to more data than ever, it’s becoming increasingly important for retailers to up their email game. 

So, how do you build your list and send emails that encourage subscribers to buy? This guide will walk you through how to start using email in your retail business today.

What is retail email marketing?

Email marketing in retail refers to a business’s use of email to reach potential customers and turn them into paying ones. Retail email marketing includes acquisition and retention tactics to sell, educate, and build loyalty with a subscriber list. 

Retailers can use email marketing to:

• Keep in touch with customers
• Provide information about new products
• Send post-purchase emails, like receipts
• Email carts to in-store shoppers that aren’t ready to buy just yet
• Collect feedback 

There may be a lot of hype about social media, likes, and shares, but email tops the charts in comparison to channels like social media and organic search. Not to say Instagram isn’t important for your business, but if you want an easy and direct way to reach people, email is your go-to strategy.

Email marketing for retailers—why it still matters

There’s no doubt email is effective for any type of business, but here’s why this classic marketing tactic is still beneficial to retailers today. 

Increase sales and marketing ROI

Marketing emails are estimated to have reached 4.3 billion users in 2023—a figure that’s expected to grow to 4.89 billion users in 2027. Given its popularity, it’s no surprise that the return on investment (ROI) is huge. For every $1 spent, email marketing generates an average of $36 in ROI—as much as $45 for retailers.

In short: a well-crafted retail email marketing strategy can earn more revenue. Email is unique in that it can help drive your first sale, but also can drive more long-term value from repeat customers. 

Build stronger relationships with customers

Social media networks and search engines can help customers find you online, but email is the best way to nurture and strengthen relationships over time. It gives you a direct communication channel with your customer base—something that alternative marketing channels can’t guarantee.

Email gives you the ability to nurture relationships with features like:

• Personalizedcommunications. Email service providers make it easy to segment your list based on criteria like interests and purchase history. Tailor subject lines, content, and deals to each subscriber and make each email more meaningful.
• Automation. Automated emails can range from thank you emails to welcome messages and order confirmations. You can automate any message that sends once a specific trigger is met.
• Customerloyaltyprograms. Email makes it easy to connect with loyal customers and send special promotions. You can easily link your in-store rewards to email so everyone gets the benefits of shopping with your store. 
• Encourage repeat purchases. Email plays a massive role in encouraging customers to shop more with you. Repeat customers are more profitable, which means you’ll spend less on acquisition and more on growing your business.

Owned marketing channel

Email is an owned digital marketing channel. This means you control the content and distribution. Compared to other marketing channels like SEO or social, email is less vulnerable to sudden updates or algorithm changes imposed by third parties.

Organic reach on social platforms like Facebook and Instagram continue to decline, and ranking in search is also getting more challenging. If your content isn’t backed by ad dollars on those channels, fewer people will see it. 

With email, you can reach your audience directly, and it’s easy to measure the impact of your strategy. You can check email metrics like open rates, click rates, and downloads to see how successful your email among highly targeted audiences to a greater extent than website traffic or social media analytics alone. 

Types of retail email marketing campaigns

Now that we know the benefits of email for retailers, let’s look at the different types of email campaigns you can send.

• Newsletters
• Welcome emails
• Product announcements
• Offers and promotions
• Email carts
• Post-purchase emails
• Cart abandonment
• Event promotion
• Seasonal campaigns
• Birthdays and special occasions
• Transactional emails

Newsletters

Email newsletters are a type of campaign sent to a subscriber list. They’re an informational email people sign up for from your brand. They’re sent regularly, be it bi-weekly, monthly, or quarterly. 

Newsletters are great because they keep your retail business top of mind. They contain content like guides, blog posts, news, reviews, recommendations, tips, and announcements.

You can tailor content to the season, like a November issue featuring holiday gift guides for different budgets, a calendar of upcoming store events and promotions, and customer testimonials showcasing your most popular gift items. You could also include a special section highlighting limited-time holiday deals or exclusive subscriber-only discounts for early bird shoppers.

Welcome emails

A welcome email is the first email you send to a user after they’ve joined your list. They’re the ideal format to extend an invitation to your store. 

Based on the Klaviyo benchmark data analysis from 2023, which examined over 143,000 email flows, welcome emails generate an average of $2.65 in revenue per recipient (RPR). This makes welcome emails the second-highest performing automated email flow, trailing only abandoned cart emails which average $3.65 RPR. 

This doesn’t need to be a singular email. You can also implement a welcome drip sequence of several emails that includes:

1. The initial welcome email
2. A discount offer or special promotion for new subscribers 
3. Personalized product recommendations based on products they’ve viewed online 
4. Best-selling products among similar subscribers or customers
5. Directions to their nearest store

The entire sequence can give users a complete look at your brand and continue to highlight your brick-and-mortar locations with a very visible link to your store locator.

Product announcements

A product announcement email is a message sent to tell subscribers about new or changed products in your store. Retailers send these emails to hype upcoming releases or events.

You can also use this type of retail email to announce in-store services or even new locations, showcasing photos of the storefront and highlighting its location and in-store offerings. 

Offers and promotions

As many as 40% of email users want to receive discounts from brands. For our purposes, we’ll talk about offers, promotions, sales, and other in-store campaigns that you’re sharing with your audience using email. This could be promo codes, freebies, special access, discounts, or anything else you use to drive a sale.

You could make these offers redeemable in-store only so you’re using email to drive foot traffic to your physical location.

Email carts 

With an email cart, you can create a personalized cart link that you’ll send directly to your customer. This link displays a summary of the customer’s cart and lets in-store shoppers complete their purchase online.

Get into the habit of building these customized carts inside Shopify POS for on-the-fence shoppers that would otherwise leave your retail store without buying. Not only can you use this customer data to offer personalized product recommendations later down the line, but automated email carts give shoppers a simpler way to buy—makes it easy to purchase the same item online without having to return to a physical location. 

Create custom carts and email links to your customers inside Shopify POS.

Post-purchase emails

Post-purchase emails are more than just email receipts. Effective post-purchase email drips may include things like helpful content to make the most of a purchase, related product recommendations, or even solicitations for feedback.

Retailers can use post-purchase email drips to highlight products the user has indicated interest in, as well as complementary products. Perhaps you send an invitation to shop in-store during special hours or rewards users with a free gift with their next in-store purchase.

This approach can not only increase the chances of these customers returning to your store, but also bolster the perception of your store as helpful and useful in customers’ lives.

Cart abandonment

Think about all the times you’ve added stuff to an online shopping cart in your life. Did you buy every product, every time? If not, you likely got a few emails from the brand to come back to checkout. It offers a discount or free shipping to encourage the sale. 

These are called cart abandonment emails. They are used in ecommerce to get people back to checkout to buy the things in their cart. 

Considering over 88% of online orders are abandoned, these emails are a great way to recover lost revenue for your online store. Email service provider Klaviyo estimates that one abandoned cart email can receive up to $3.65 per recipient, on average. 

Event promotion

If you host in-store events, registration and attendance give you two new trigger events against which to plan email drip campaigns. This can be helpful not only in making sure event registrants actually attend but also in nurturing the customer-brand relationship.

Include your branding, high-quality imagery of your store, or product recommendations in this type of retail email. You might include a link to a blog post about must-have products to convert attendees post-event.

Seasonal campaigns

Seasonal email campaigns are a fun way to engage with customers during national events. If your first thought is Christmas or Black Friday, you are correct. These are times of the year you’re likely to see a surge in sales. But you can also send these emails for other events and seasons throughout the year. 

Retailers can market their products at any special point throughout the year. It can be anything from summer season to Valentine’s Day, or even Penguin Awareness Day if it aligns with your business. The goal is to create fun, captivating emails around these topics to encourage sales in your store.

Birthdays and special occasions 

Customer milestones make for great reasons to offer a discount to your customers. Plus, it’s personal in that it recognizes their birthday or nurtures your relationship by celebrating their anniversary of being a customer. 

Rather than sending a simple “Happy Birthday” email, gift customers a unique code for a 25% discount on a product. Remember to provide value to your customers—don’t wish them a happy birthday just for the sake of it.

Transactional emails

Transactional emails are triggered after a user takes a specific action. They contain information unique to the receiver, like their order number or payment method. Retailers can use events like in-store signups, in-store purchases, in-store returns, and event registrations to trigger transactional emails. 

How to collect customer emails for retail marketing

To unlock email marketing’s full potential, you’ll need a list of email subscribers. Fortunately, it’s easier to convince someone to give you their email address than it is to make a sale. Let’s look at a few ways to grow your email list, even if you have zero subscribers.

Encourage customers to sign-up in-store

Your point-of-sale (POS) system is much more than a cash register. Of course you can take payments and do in-store exchanges. But did you know you can also gather data, like name, customer profiles, and email address? 

Shopify POS is a great way to collect email addresses and bridge the gap between online and retail storefronts. You can collect customer emails on your POS interface and sync it with marketing automation tools without leaving your POS system.

Take it from LIVELY, a bra retailer based in New York City that uses Shopify POS to nurture customer relationships after initial discovery. Owner Michelle Cordeiro Grant has grown its community and customer lifetime value by capturing names and emails in Shopify POS. Customers discover the brand by walking past the store. They come in for a fitting and learn their measurements. Then Michelle gets their contact information and puts them into the same sales funnel they use for their online store. 

“Most of our in-store customers become repeat customers online,” says Michelle. “It’s much easier to repeat a purchase online once you’ve come in, done a fit, and know your bra size.” 

LIVELY uses Shopify POS to collect customer emails in-store.

Offer email receipts

Most retailers give little thought to the not-so-glamorous post-purchase receipt, yet it’s a smart way to capture email addresses and create a good customer experience. 

Shopify POS can automatically send email receipts after a successful in-store payment or even when you make a refund. You’ll only need to ask for a customer’s email address during checkout. After you see the Payment successful screen on your POS, you just need to: 

1. Tap Email receipt
2. Have the customer enter their email address
3. Tap Send

It’s a good idea to remind customers they will join your email list with an automated welcome email that sends immediately after registration. You don’t want to send unwanted messages and annoy people if they weren’t expecting promo emails. 

Run email-exclusive promotions 

Promotional emails are a great way to grow your retail business. You can entice subscribers with special offers, deals, and promotions to create revenue all year long. Running these promos only through email gives people a reason to sign up. 

You want to be strategic about your promotional emails. Consider these popular options: 

• Send customized offers to specific groups. Don’t send the same message to your entire email list. Segment it and send relevant deals to specific groups, such as VIPs or new subscribers. 
• Run seasonal promotions. Whether it’s birthdays or summertime promos, take advantage of special seasons to send deals and discounts to your list. 
• Include offers in welcome emails. After someone becomes a subscriber or customers, send them a special offer. You can embed a unique promo code in the email they can use in-store or online. 

Once you decide which emails to send, you’ll need to create them. 

📌 Pro tip: Shopify Email has ready-made templates that automatically pull your branding and products from your inventory. You can get started fast and send campaigns in minutes. Plus, everything is done in your Shopify dashboard, so you can send, manage, and analyze all your campaigns in one place. 

Add pop-ups to your online store 

Turn website visitors into email subscribers with a pop-up sign up form that offers something in exchange for their email address. Most often, this is a percentage off their first purchase, but you can experiment with incentives like:

• Free delivery or in-store pickup 
• Exclusive bundles
• Early access to flash sales
• Entry into a competition (e.g. $200 gift card to spend in-store)

Retail email marketing tips

Automate email campaigns

Email marketing automation lets you send targeted messages at certain times or based on specific actions, like a sign-up or a purchase. Retailers use these triggered emails, or drip campaigns, to build personalized relationships with existing and new customers. 

Automation is the most effective way to do email marketing because you can “set it and forget it” and keep your brand top of mind. Every time a drip campaign is sent, it comes from a backlog of pre-written emails. 

Some must-have automated campaigns to include are:

• Welcome emails to introduce new subscribers to the brand
• Curation emails to showcase bestsellers to specific customer groups
• Discount emails to send deals to people on the fence about buying something 
• Abandoned cart emails to send friendly reminders to shoppers who left items in their shopping cart 
• Transactional emails like order confirmations and shipping notifications to give customers peace of mind and set expectations for delivery 
• Win back emails to target subscribers who haven’t been active with your brand

Email automation sounds tough, but with the right tools in place, you can schedule campaigns in no time and see more revenue for your business. The Shopify Email app provides ready-made designs for your campaigns—so you can send beautiful, professional emails that get results.

Create customer segments

Segmentation refers to dividing email subscribers into smaller groups based on specific criteria. It’s often used as a personalization tactic to send more relevant emails. You can segment subscribers based on geographic location, interests, purchase history, customer status, and so much more.

Here are some of the top segments you can create:

• Demographics. This includes characteristics such as age, gender, location, and more. For example, if you sell body care products, you’ll benefit from knowing the gender of your subscriber. It can help you send relevant soap or cream recommendations. 
• Sign-up source. If someone joins in-store or at an event, you may want to send them a follow-up discount to shop online. 
• Interests and preferences. Ask customers what their interests are related to your products, then send highly targeted campaigns based on their answers. 
• Purchase history. Send this group different types of emails, such as discounts, product recommendations, or refills. It keeps your campaigns fresh and relevant, which can lead to lower unsubscribe rates and higher purchase rates.
• Inactivity. If repeat customers don’t buy something for a period of time, you can automatically follow up with them to encourage a sale.

📌 Pro tip: Creating these segments requires good customer tracking across your entire business. Shopify POS syncs your in-store orders and online customer profiles. You can use this data to build detailed customer segments and send relevant campaigns to people, no matter where they interact with your business. 

We identified the segment in Shopify, created a discount, communicated with them in a way that was very personalized, and we saw about 30% of those people convert.

Alex Dashefsky, co-founder of Airsign

Manage customer segments without leaving Shopify.

Use personalization

More than half (52%) of businesses personalize their email marketing efforts—it’s the third-most used tactic to achieve email results.

But personalization in email is a lot more than auto-populating the user’s name in the subject line. Edit your content based on subscriber data and specific actions or trigger events. Using various data points about users, you can auto-fill users’ preferences and include them in the automated email.

You might reference past purchases, current interests, location, and even gender to create a personalized email that’s more likely to convert. Doing so could increase engagement throughout the drip campaign and deliver a more catered experience.

Make emails mobile friendly

Mobile-friendly email design is no longer a nice-to-have—it’s necessary. About 61% of people open emails primarily with their mobile devices. 

To optimize your email marketing strategy, consider the following tips:

• Look at the most popular email clients for your audience. Determine the email clients your subscribers use, then test your emails in their top 3-5 clients and optimize your design specifically for those platforms' requirements (like testing fonts, image display, responsive breakpoints, CTAs, and spacing in each).
• Determine which devices your audience uses. Where are people reading your emails? If most use phones, design for smaller screens with larger fonts (minimum 14px), bigger tap targets (44x44px buttons), single-column layouts, and shorter paragraphs that don't require horizontal scrolling.
• Learn if your audience prefers Dark Mode. If you find that your audience reads emails on Apple devices, especially the iPhone, you’ll want to consider a Dark Mode experience for your email marketing strategy. 

Make unsubscribing easy

Every email you send should let people unsubscribe from your list. It’s not only an email marketing best practice—it’s required by law under the CAN-SPAM Act. 

Retailers will often include an unsubscribe link at the bottom of an email. But if you want to make it easier for people to unsubscribe, you can put a link in the header too. 

It might seem counterintuitive to encourage unsubscribes, but ultimately, an engaged email list is more valuable than a large one. By making unsubscribing easy, you're focusing your efforts on subscribers who are genuinely interested in your brand. This leads to better engagement rates, improved deliverability, and more effective marketing overall.

Combine email with SMS

Email and SMS marketing strategies can, and should, go hand-in-hand for your retail store. Use your emails to get SMS signups, and use SMS to drive email opt-ins. 

Similar to email marketing, you can use SMS marketing to enhance your customer profiles with data like tags, relationship length, purchase history, and account status. These tools can help you segment lists for personalized campaigns. 

Optimize the subject line 

The subject line is the first thing subscribers see, and it determines whether or not they actually open the email to view its contents. 

Optimize your subject lines to increase your open rate. Ideas include: 

• Personalize the subject line with the recipient’s first name, recent purchase history, or relevant sales message. 
• Test out using emojis to see if it boosts open rates.
• Include numbers—7 tips, 25% off, buy 2 get 1 free, etc. 

Don’t forget about the teaser text—the line that goes under or next to the subject line, and often at the top of the email, depending on which platform your subscribers are using. 

📌 Pro tip: Shopify Magic is your ultimate communication assistant. It knows the best time to send correspondence and how to generate subject lines and copy, so you’re never starting from scratch.

 

Track email performance 

Once you’ve set up and launched your email drip campaign, keep an eye on its performance. Over time, you’ll be able to see trends that can provide insights into your business, as well as ways to segment the campaign even further.

When analyzing your email drip campaigns, pay special attention to the following benchmarks:

• Open rate. This metric simply tells you the rate at which the email is being opened. It’s a good idea to compare these numbers to the actual subject lines to see why they’re successful, and always A/B test your subject line when possible.
• Clicks and click-through rate. While the open rate is important, arguably more important is how many people are actually clicking through your emails or taking the desired call-to-action (CTA). For example, if you’re trying to attract customers to your antique store to check out your new vintage finds, ask customers in-store what brought them in, and train associates to make note of those who comment on your emails.
• Conversion rates. Are people buying products through your emails? If not, adjust your strategy to get more sales. 
• Unsubscribes. Consider not only the number of unsubscribes and the unsubscribe rate but also the point at which these unsubscribes are happening. Did you send too many emails? Have they been sent too frequently? Are they relevant to your list?

With Shopify Email, for example, you can create, send, and track campaigns all within Shopify. This includes the ability to track results like click-through rates, products added to cart, and purchases.

Monitor email performance within Shopify.

Retail email marketing examples

Now that you know the tips and tricks, let’s look at some retail email examples to inspire your next campaign. 

Methodical Coffee

Methodical Coffee is a café and coffee retailer in Greenville, South Carolina. The small business did an amazing job creating buzz around its Black Friday & Small Business Saturday Sale with this email campaign. It marketed its sales above the fold, giving people the option to use the discount online or in-store. 

The coffee retailer also highlights other seasonal sales, which helps people discover exciting sales faster, and builds loyalty.

Warby Parker

Though Warby Parker has a thriving ecommerce presence, it also uses email to promote its retail shop locations. This email announces the opening of their new store at SanTan Village in Gilbert (2162 E. Williams Field Rd.), featuring a clean, blue-themed design with modern geometric shapes. 

The message invites locals to explore their full range of eyewear and accessories while highlighting the availability of in-store eye exams from an independent optometrist. It concludes with clear calls-to-action, social media links, and customer service information (888.492.7297), maintaining a professional and approachable brand voice throughout.

Cowboy

Cowboy, an e-bike retailer with locations around the world, uses email to promote its unique program. It allows shoppers to test out the bikes themselves before making a purchase. 

While it offers the convenience of bringing the bikes to the shoppers without requiring them to visit the store, Cowboy also specifically highlights its physical retail locations. There’s a section in the email inviting subscribers to visit a shop to test out a bike or enjoy a drink in the brand’s retail environment. 

Make emails work for your retail store 

An email marketing plan isn’t just a nice-to-have. Retailers need email to help meet their business goals, be it to generate leads, drive foot traffic, or encourage sales. 

Start testing the retail email campaigns above today to make sure you don’t leave money on the table. It’ll put your marketing efforts to good use and increase your bottom line over time.

Retail email marketing FAQ

What are the 7 best email marketing strategies?

1. Automate email campaigns
2. Create customer segments
3. Use personalization
4. Make emails mobile friendly
5. Make unsubscribing easy
6. Combine email with SMS
7. Optimize the subject line

How can I use email in retail communication?

• Announce new products or collections to existing customers.
• Send promotional offers such as discounts, sales, or free in-store pickup.
• Provide personalized recommendations based on purchase history.
• Send email receipts
• Offer loyalty rewards for repeat customers or exclusive deals for subscribers.
• Send abandoned cart reminders to encourage customers to complete their purchases.
• Collect feedback through surveys or reviews after a purchase.
• Share engaging content like style guides, tips, or trends related to your products.

What is the right email format for retail?

An effective email format for retail typically includes:

• Subject line: Something eye-catching to encourage opens.
• Header: Your company logo and a clear headline that catches attention.
• Body: A concise message highlighting the purpose of the email.
• Call to action (CTA): A prominent CTA button or link that directs recipients to take action (e.g., "Shop Now," "Claim Offer").
• Footer: Include essential details like contact information, store location, social media links, and an option to unsubscribe.