• by Bryan Karas , June 20, 2022

One of the biggest mistakes D2C brands make when flipping on the email marketing switch is not taking the time to set up foundational emails that can help nurture prospective customers toward purchase.

Foundational emails are automated campaigns that get sent when consumers meet specific behavior criteria, like signing up to receive your emails, abandoning the shopping cart, or browsing certain product pages before leaving your website.

Without foundational emails, you risk missing out on revenue that you could be getting if you were communicating with customers at the right moment.

According to a Campaign Monitor report, ROI from emails can be as much as $42 for every dollar spent. Unfortunately, only about 50% of all companies automate email campaigns.

If you don’t have any automated foundational email campaigns built yet, you could be leaving money on the table. Here are the first three kinds of emails you should create:

The welcome email. One of the most important foundational emails you should have built and ready to send.

The open rate on these emails is really high. A Campaign Monitor article puts the open rate on welcome emails at about 50%. To put that in perspective, it’s about 80% more effective than a standard newsletter email campaign.

According to a GetRespose email marketing benchmarks report, a well-executed welcome email can have 3X more clicks than other emails.

When building your welcome email, let your branding shine. Let subscribers know who you are, what makes your products different, what your products can do for them, and why they should buy now.

The abandoned cart email. This gets sent to a visitor to your website who made it all the way to checkout but decided not to complete the purchase.

Abandoned cart emails can have open rates as high as 45%, according to data shared by Moosend. Of the roughly 20% of subscribers who click on a link in an abandoned cart email, half end up going through with a purchase.

When building abandoned cart emails, use customer reviews and other types of user-generated content to build trust with would-be buyers.

The personalized promo email. These are emails that include special coupon codes that get created based on what you know about your customers.

The most common example of this is the birthday email. According to a report published by Experian, these emails tend to have higher open, engagement, and revenue rates than any other email campaign you send to a customer throughout the year.

When creating these emails, have fun and make the content all about your customer.

Want more ROI from your email marketing efforts? You can’t leave it all up to one-off campaigns. You have to be willing to put the time, energy, and creativity into building the foundation.