Best practices for Shopify Email
Sending marketing emails to your customers is a great way to increase traffic to your store. Increasing the number of visitors to your store can increase your chances of making a sale. Consider the following best practices to help keep your customers engaged with your content, and interested in visiting your store.
In addition to following these best practices when creating Shopify Email campaigns, refer to Email delivery and deliverability to ensure that your email campaigns successfully reach your customer's inboxes.
On this page
What to include in email campaigns
- The types of emails that you send to customers could include announcements about new products or sales that are taking place in your store. If you’re having trouble figuring out what kind of content to send to your customers, then review what types of emails you’re subscribed to, note anything that stands out, and decide what aligns with your store brand. For more ideas, refer to the Email Marketing section of the Shopify Blog.
- If you haven't sent an email campaign to your subscribers before, then create a welcome email to introduce yourself and to start building a relationship with your customers. In your welcome email, you can let customers know who you are, advertise your store, feature one of your most popular products to remind customers why they love your brand already, or help them discover something new. You can also create a unique subscriber customer segment on the Customers page to email only recent subscribers.
- The purpose of your email campaign is to get subscribers to visit your store. Include at least one link that lets subscribers click through to your store.
- Include links to your store's social media sites. This helps customers know where they can stay in touch with your brand beyond email.
When to send email campaigns
- Keep your subscribers engaged by emailing them at least one time a month. Some businesses keep a calendar of the types of emails or updates to send. Having a schedule for your emails helps to make sure that your readers can regularly find new content and reminds them to visit your store. Be careful not to communicate too often with your customers because this can cause them to lose interest.
- Before you send an email message to your subscribers, send a test email to yourself so that you can verify that link destinations and discount details are correct.
Designing emails
Planning the look and feel of your emails helps to make sure that they match the rest of your brand. Use similar colors, fonts, and logos to ones that you use in your store. The goal is to make sure that when readers open your email, they can tell it’s from your business.
Use a custom sender email address when sending emails to your subscribers to help with more deliverability and brand recognition. Learn more about changing your sender email address.
If you add images, then they should relate to what you sell in your store. Shopify automatically pulls in product images and collection images, but you can also add images that help inform readers the journey your store is on. If you're looking for stock photography to use in your emails or for your online store, then burst.shopify.com is a great place to start.
However, because some email clients deactivate images in their emails, you should avoid using images to display text that's critical to your email. For example, don't advertise a sale only by using an image that includes the text "50% off" because the image might be blocked by a customer's email client.
For any images you use, make sure to include alt text. Alt text is important for keeping your emails accessible for all audiences. The goal of an email is to guide readers to your store, so it’s also good practice to include a link for any images you add to help readers navigate to the relevant content on your store.
Template branding
You can use template branding to customize and apply default styles to all your Shopify Email campaign templates. By default, template branding matches the Brand settings, and your store name from the Store details section of your General settings of your Shopify admin.
You can customize individual emails to differ from the template branding. For example, you might want your email branding to differ for a short-term campaign or for a holiday-themed campaign.
Make changes to your default template branding
When you edit your store's template branding, the changes apply to all email templates that you use in the future. You can customize colors, fonts, and the logo or store name that display in your email headers. You might want to make changes to your template branding when you want your email campaigns to differ from your online store styles (for example, for seasonal campaigns).
Steps:
- From your Shopify admin, go to Apps > Email.
- Click Templates, and then Manage branding.
- Customize the template. The template preview on the page provides a sample email to check how colors and fonts might look.
- Click Save.
Tips for writing effective email content
When you're writing content for your email, try to become familiar with your intended audience, and create emails that appeal to them. For example, if you are writing for a younger audience, then you might want to adjust your language to engage with them.
To attract more engagement and improve conversion rates, include personalized text in your email body content. Personalization also makes your emails feel more tailored to the customer.
Keep any promotional or important information in the top section of your email. On mobile devices, it should be within the first two scrolls to help get the reader's attention. You might only have a few seconds to get the attention of readers, so make sure that the main information in your email is what's displayed first.
Try to keep emails under 200 words or about 20 lines. In some cases, if your email is too long, then an email provider might cut off your email so that only some of your content displays to readers. For example, Gmail cuts off emails with messages larger than 102 KB, and hides the rest of the content.
Avoid putting your content exclusively in capital letters or using excessive exclamation marks, and write for an 8th grade reading level. This helps make your emails accessible to a wide audience of readers.
Using the subject line to attract the attention of your subscribers
The first thing subscribers read when checking their inbox is your subject line and preview text. At that point, readers make a decision on whether to open your email or delete it. How you write your subject line and preview text can help influence that decision, and get readers to open the email.
Here are some things to consider:
- Create your email first, and then come up with a subject line and preview text as a last step. This helps make sure that your subject line and preview text are relevant to the email.
- Your subject line should be related to the content of the email, and compelling enough to get readers to open your email.
- Make sure to include preview text. Preview text is most effective when it encourages action from readers.
- Use a preview text that is different from, but complimentary to, your subject line. Both should let your readers know what the email is about. For example, you might have the subject line "Look at our new spring gear" followed by the preview text "Don't miss out on 10% off shorts, tanks, and more for the warm weather ahead."
- Keep your subject line between 3 to 6 words, or under 50 characters. This ensures that readers can still read the subject line when checking emails on a mobile device.
Including a mailing address in your emails
Depending on where you’re located, you might need to include a physical postal address in your promotional emails. The CAN-SPAM Act in the United States and the CASL legislation/PIPEDA in Canada are examples of these laws. The rules, regulations, and laws surrounding email marketing and spam, such as unsolicited emails sent in bulk, vary depending on your location. Make sure you're familiar with the laws in your region, state, and country before you begin an email marketing campaign.
By default, your store address is included in the footer of your emails. If you don’t feel comfortable sharing your store address in your emails, then you can rent a PO box from your local post office or UPS store to use as your mailing address. To change the mailing address in your emails, go to Settings > General in your Shopify admin and enter your PO box address as your store's address.
Additional resources
To learn more about email marketing, you can find detailed information in the following articles: