Email marketing
In this article:
How to collect newsletter subscribers
How to remove subscribers from your newsletter
How to include a product page link
Recipient types and email lists
How to customize marketing emails
How to analyze your campaign statistics
Importing email addresses (not available)
Integrating 3rd party email marketing
What's Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a powerful tool that allows you to notify your buyers and subscribers about new product launches, special deals, product file updates, and more. With this feature, you can send custom emails with links and images to your selected audience. You can target specific product buyers or send emails to all buyers and subscribers.
Important! Email Marketing is not included with the Sell Downloads app on Wix.com or the Free plan on Sellfy.com.
Email Marketing and GDPR
Note: When sending emails to customers, your mailing list should comply with GDPR. This means only sending emails to customers that gave their consent. At the checkout, your buyers are able to choose whether they want to receive future email communications from you. If they didn't opt in to receive your newsletters, they won't be included in your email marketing list on Sellfy, even if they bought a product.
Here's where your customers will be able to click to opt-in to receive news and offers from you:
How to collect newsletter subscribers
You can collect subscribers is by adding the Newsletter subscription module to one or all of your store pages. You can also collect newsletter subscribers by enabling the Newsletter subscription checkbox so customers can opt-in to receive updates from you. Once the customer has subscribed and confirmed their subscription by email, they will be added to your subscriber list!
Here's how to enable or disable the Newsletter checkbox for your checkout page:
- Go to the Store settings > Customize store
- Under Built-in pages click Checkout
- Turn the toggle switch on or off > Publish
How to remove subscribers from your newsletter
You may want to remove a single subscriber from your newsletter if the customer has made purchases in your store using two different email addresses. In order to not be sending your newsletter to the same customer by including both email addresses, you can unsubscribe one of them in your account.
To do this:
- Log into your Sellfy account
- Go to Customers > search for the email address
- Remove the customer's email by clicking Unsubscribe from all lists
Email campaign templates
You can choose between 4 customizable email templates:
- Product Launch - let your fans know you've launched a new product after you've uploaded it.
- Product Discount - let your fans know you're offering discounts.
- Product Update - update your buyers about changes to existing products they've bought. This is useful if, for example, you've uploaded an updated version of a product file.
- Custom Message - make the email anything you want.
How to include a product page link
If you're creating a campaign to inform customers about a Product Update, you'll be able to include a link to the product page.
The Product Discount, Product Launch, and Custom Message campaigns do not currently include a product page link. But, providing your recipient with a direct link to the product you're emailing about makes it more convenient for them and might help increase sales.
You can add a link to the product you're launching, discounting or wanting to upsell manually when creating the email campaign. To do this you need to include a clickable image in the body of the email that will take customers to the specific product/store page.
Note: We recommend sending a test email to see if the product page was linked correctly before sending the campaign to customers.
Here's how to do it:
- Log in to your Sellfy account
- Go to Marketing > Email Marketing
- Select a campaign (we're using the Product Launch campaign as an example here)
- Add an image of the relevant product in the email body
- Click the image to select it (as shown in the first image below)
- Click on the link icon in the top bar of the message editor
- Copy-paste the link into the URL bar
- Click Ok > Save
- Send a test email to your own inbox to make sure the link is working
To copy-paste the product page link in the Purchase Email, go to the product page and copy the URL from the address bar.
Recipient types and email lists
Recipients are grouped in several different ways.
- Buyers - these are buyers who opted in to receive emails from you at the checkout. Due to GDPR, you can only send emails to buyers who checked the opt-in box.
- Newsletter subscribers - these are your fans who haven't bought a product but they have entered their email in the 'Subscribe to my newsletter' block on your store.
- Buyers and newsletter subscribers - these are all buyers and subscribers combined.
- Specific product buyers - you can select those who bought specific products from you.
These specific product buyers will be grouped by which item or items they've purchased. You can then target different groups or cross-sections of your customers to maximize your marketing strategies. You'll be able to see how many emails lists a customer is included in by visiting the Customers section or your store.
Marketing email customization
Make your emails engaging with the rich text editor, which allows you to:
- add images
- add clickable links
- edit HTML code
- add a horizontal line
- present text in bullet points
How to send a test email
Before you send a bunch of emails to your buyers or subscribers, you can test it by sending an email to yourself first. The test email will be sent to your account email address.
Note: emails with special characters in the Subject line are more likely to be marked as spam.
To send a test email:
- Log in to your Dashboard
- Navigate to Marketing > Email marketing
- Create the email
- Click Send test email
It may take a few moments for the email to arrive. If it doesn't arrive, check if your account email address is correct and look into your spam folder.
Email campaign status
- Delivered - it is normal for this number to not be 100% due to email bounces, incorrect or fake recipient email addresses and unsubscribing.
- Open rate - it's the number of recipients who opened the email. The open rate will depend on whether the email is delivered to the main inbox or social/promotions/spam folders. Customers may not be checking the other folders, which can make the open rate lower.
- Click rate - it's the number of recipients who clicked on links in your email content.
How to analyze your campaign statistics
Email Marketing is still one of the most effective strategies for businesses today. In fact, according to the Digital Agency Network, Emai Marketing is "40 times more effective than Social Media". You can read more about this here.
However, for Email Marketing to yield results, it must be done right. So, when analyzing the effectiveness of any campaign, it's important to understand the statistics we provide you with.
In your Email Marketing section, you'll find statistics about each campaign that you send out.
You will see the data for the following metrics:
Delivered
The average for the Delivery rate greatly depends on the number of valid email addresses. The delivery rate does not give you insight into the effectiveness of your campaign.
Open rate
An Open rate ranging from 17% - 27% falls within the industry standards. Having your subscribers opening your email is the first important step to read your content and take action. There are a number of ways in which you can increase the open rate of your emails. Read here to find out more.
Click rate
A Click rate between 2 - 3% is considered a standard average in the industry. The click rate is displayed only if you include a link to a separate page; for example if you're sending a campaign about a Product Launch and are linking your product page in your email. This rate then relates to the (unique) number of times the link in your email has been clicked.
Click-through rate
The CTR is indicative of how many people clicked the link in your email compared to how many recipients the email was delivered.
Click-to-open rate
Note: The CTOR is the most insightful metric and decisive indicator in understanding whether or not your audience found the content of your email relevant and valuable.
A CTOR rate above 20% is generally considered good within the Email Marketing industry.
Exporting email lists
In your Sellfy account, you have the option to export different email lists based on recipients.
All lists are available for download in CSV format and require Microsoft Excel (PC), Numbers (Mac), or other software designed to read CSV files.
You can export, for example:
- All buyers (recipient list will contain customer emails of all buyers that have purchased products in your store)
- Buyers of any particular product that you are selling (recipient list will contain emails of customers that have purchased the relevant product only)
- Newsletter subscribers (store visitors that have subscribed to your newsletter via the Newsletter subscription form, if you're using a Sellfy-based store)
- All buyers and Newsletter subscribers
Important! Make sure that you are always complying with GDPR guidelines when using customer emails for marketing purposes.
To export an email list, you can follow these steps:
- Log in to your Sellfy account > Marketing
- Click Export > Select recipient list from the dropdown menu
- Click Request report > Download
All lists will indicate how many recipients they contain (as shown in the image below).
If you require more detailed buyer data or respective order details, you may request an Order export instead.
Importing email addresses
It's not currently possible to automatically import email addresses from another platform. However, we may be able to manually facilitate this service for you. To find out more please email us at [email protected].
Note: If you're switching to Sellfy from another platform, we'll import your email list free of charge when signing up for our Premium package. If you select the Starter or Business plan, there may be a migration fee depending on the size of your email list.
Integrating 3rd party email marketing
You can set up an integration with other email marketing services with the help of Zapier. We currently support integrations with:
- MailChimp
- ConvertKit
- ActiveCampaign
- AWeber
- MailerLite
- Mad Mimi
- GetResponse
- Drip
Here are the instructions on how to connect your Sellfy account with Zapier
Here's a more comprehensive list of integrations we provide with Zapier