Email Marketing for eCommerce: What Actually Works for Long-Term Growth?

[antonycolins2]

Hey everyone, I’ve been digging deeper into email marketing for eCommerce lately and I’m trying to understand what actually works right now in terms of long-term growth, not just quick wins.
A lot of people say email should be responsible for 20–30% of total revenue, but in reality I see very different numbers depending on the niche and strategy. Some stores rely heavily on basic flows like welcome and abandoned cart, while others build complex automation with segmentation, personalization, and lifecycle campaigns.
So I’m curious — what does your current setup look like?
Are you mostly focused on flows or campaigns?
How deep do you go with segmentation and personalization?
And at what point did you realize it makes sense to scale email marketing seriously (or even outsource it)?
Would really appreciate hearing real numbers, strategies, and what actually worked for you vs what didn’t.

 

[chirag jain]

Hey,

Good questions—honestly most people overcomplicate this.

From what we’re seeing with email traffic (especially in lead gen), simple flows still do most of the heavy lifting:

• Welcome + intro sequence (sets trust)
• Daily/regular campaign sends (main revenue driver)
• Light segmentation based on engagement

Deep personalization helps, but only once volume is there. For most publishers, consistency + clean lists outperform complex setups.

We’re working closely with email publishers in US insurance & home services, and the ones focusing on engagement + simple messaging are getting the best EPC right now.

If you're testing or planning to scale email traffic, happy to share what’s converting well currently

 

[DoubleImpactPR]

Having spent 8 Years with an email list management Company (MailValueProfits).

These days - in an age where the attention span is shorter than ever, and people often doom scroll, they may easily end up signing up for a service that they may like from the ads, without returning to actually activate or walk through / starting to actually using it.

One should always take it that whoever signs up for your site / service, may easily get overwhelmed, distracted etc.

So in order to onboard him for actually using the service, follow ups and notifications are a must.

This would be a subtle combination of the sign up process and the transactional emails design (incl. automations).

When it comes to promotional emails - these may be the best to keep separate from one's transactional email setup.

As long as you market your own product to your own subscribers - your mailing setup may be inter-usable.

But in case you'd be looking for an upsell - the best may be to have one setup for in-house mailing, and one separate setup for external offers mailing.

There may be separate rules for these depending on your provider.

Now to the questions:

So I’m curious — what does your current setup look like?

That's a bit of a tools of the trade question, but for transactional emails what we found as working - may be to go with any of the big brands (such as SendGrid or Mailgun for example) - these are likely to get you high deliverability at a decent price. A backup is a must.

For promotional emails / upsells this is a bit more sophisticated, one may require a warm-up solution plus a more complex / solid setup (either in-house server or a third party ESP) - I could recommend a solution if I knew more about the product / volume / GEO's etc..

Are you mostly focused on flows or campaigns?

Both are equally important - flow is what converts the traffic or keeps the traffic engaged, campaign is what (ideally in harmony) connects the right audience and the right offer.

How deep do you go with segmentation and personalization?

This is highly dependent on how much data one gets with the email list alone.

The most basic segments of course are the GEO (offer and language), gender, active / inactive account.

Certain product customers in general work with other complementary offers (one can ask around and test).

What is extremely useful is to keep track of users that actually initially registered, but didn't became fully active, and at what point of the process they got stuck (to increase the conversion to one's own product).

And at what point did you realize it makes sense to scale email marketing seriously (or even outsource it)?

We ran a big international dating network with in-house offers and saw the potential with emailing with our own in-house offers. So the logical step was to also upsell and market to the (mostly inactive) users. And later to plug-in also three party email lists ( 200 + clients Worldwide managed).

The delivery ratio took a major hit after the Google update / restrictions in December 2021 - lot of mass mailers took a major hit, many some never recovered and decided to close shop.

It took months and in some cases years of tweaking and testing all sorts of solutions and setup combinations in order to recover the previous delivery rates per GEO / inbox provider etc.

Dec 2021 - 2023 / 4 was the toughest period, but also the ultimate learning curve. Mailing is more complex ever since.

If there's anyone interested in some first-hand tested tips in order to improve their deliverability or returns from mailing, hit me up - I may have a hint or two.