Store emails: welcome, post-purchase, repeat purchase

Between campaigns, an online store keeps writing to its customers without anyone pressing “send”. One email goes out when someone signs up, another when the parcel is delivered, a third when it would be time to come back. Done well, these messages work for years without anyone thinking about them. Done badly, or never done, they leave the cheapest resource in online retail asleep: the customers you already have.

This guide is for teams that want to put these automated sends in order. It complements our guide to abandoned cart reminders, which covers the message sent before the purchase; this one is about all the others.

Three emails, three moments

The principle fits on one line: write when the customer has a reason to read. Platforms have built it in, and Shopify for example offers ready-to-use automation templates, from welcome to customer winback by way of the first-purchase upsell. In the order of the relationship:

1. Sign-up

   The welcome email, within minutes, keeps the promise made on the form.

2. The order

   Confirmation and shipping updates, service messages the customer expects.

3. Delivery

   The post-purchase email helps them use the product, then asks for a review.

4. Repeat purchase

   At the natural renewal delay, or when a product they looked at is back in stock.

Who are you allowed to write to?

The rule depends on the message. The CNIL, the French data protection authority, separates marketing, which pushes to buy, from messages that serve the order. For marketing, its page on electronic communications to prospects and customers sets out the principle, prior consent, and its exception:

Three practical consequences:

• The welcome goes to someone who has just signed up: their consent is what allows it.
• Order confirmation and tracking are service messages. The same page warns that they “must not be used to conceal promotional content”: slipping a heavy promotion into the shipping email turns it into marketing.
• Repeat-purchase emails to an existing customer remain possible without fresh consent for similar products, provided they could object at purchase and can do so in every message.

Rules differ from country to country; outside France, check the local framework before reusing this one.

The welcome: keep the form’s promise

The welcome email is the most expected of all, because the reader has just asked to receive it. Its content follows from what the form announced: if sign-up promised early access to new products, the first email shows one; if it promised a discount, it gives it, with no hidden condition.

What else it can contain: what sets the store apart, how delivery and returns work, where to find help. What it should avoid: five sales emails in five days, which turns a sign-up into an unsubscribe. One well-made send, then a second a few days later if the first was opened, is enough to start.

Post-purchase: help before you sell

The email that follows delivery has two jobs, in this order.

• Help them use the product: care, assembly, size, tips. A customer who knows how to wash their plush toy does not send it back because it pilled; part of the avoidable returns are decided here, as our article on the hidden cost of returns shows.
• Ask for a review, once the product is in hand, from every buyer and not only the happy ones: our article on customer reviews explains why filtering is forbidden, and how to then display those reviews on a product page that converts.

The upsell comes after, and only if it serves the purchase: a product that goes with it, not the whole catalogue.

Repeat purchase: at the right moment, not on a fixed date

The repurchase delay depends on the product. A consumable is renewed at a pace you can read in your order history; a gift is bought again for occasions rather than wear. Two triggers work for almost every store:

• The observed delay between two orders from your repeat customers, read in your own data rather than assumed.
• A restock or a new product in a range the customer looked at or bought.

The second makes use of data the store already has. It assumes accurate stock: a “back in stock” email for a product still sold out does more harm than good, a risk covered in our article on inventory sync.

To put that 3.2% in context, Shopify’s help states that most stores show between 20 and 40% returning customers. It is one of the five numbers to track every week, and the one these emails move. To decide who receives what, our article on segmentation shows how to send less and sell more.

Landing in the inbox, not in spam

An automated email goes out unreviewed, for months: it must be technically flawless. Google publishes the rules it applies to senders who send a lot to Gmail:

Above that threshold, the same page requires domain authentication (SPF, DKIM and DMARC) and, for marketing messages, one-click unsubscribe plus a visible link in the body. These settings are worth making below the threshold too: they are done once, and they also protect order emails, which often leave from the same domain. Subject lines, frequency and tracking are covered in our guide to running an email campaign.

Native or app: the same calculation as elsewhere

Store platforms offer these basic automations. A specialised email suite brings finer segmentation and testing, at the price of one more subscription. The calculation in our article on the cost of Shopify apps applies: what it brings in, measured, against what it costs. What is native also depends on the platform, as our Shopify or Medusa comparison shows, and what can be automated around the store more broadly is in our guide to marketing automation.

What these emails bring back to the store

An email sends people to a page: it is only worth what that page is worth. The repeat-purchase link leads to a product page whose details must be right, on a store that loads fast, which our article on store speed puts into sales terms. A returning customer often looks for a specific product, and our guide to site search helps them find it; finally they pay, with fees described in our article on real payment fees.

Loyal customers count for the other channels too: one who comes back by email does not cost a Google Shopping campaign click (its product data is prepared with our Google Shopping and marketplaces guide), nor the commission of a marketplace like Amazon. For a store open abroad, every email comes in the customer’s language, one of the points in our article on the multilingual, multicurrency store. When the catalogue is large, email content draws on product pages enriched at scale, the subject of our guide to a catalogue enriched with AI under control. The other decisions about a store are gathered in our ecommerce section.

If your customers buy once and never come back, our ecommerce support starts with your data: who gave consent, who has already bought, and what your current emails really bring in.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. Shopify, marketing automation (new tab)shopify.com
2. CNIL, electronic communications to prospects and customers (new tab)cnil.fr
3. Shopify Help, analytics field definitions (new tab)help.shopify.com