If you have an e-commerce business that you manage through Shopify, email marketing is a highly useful way of further growing your brand. You probably collect customer email addresses to a certain extent already, but what are the best ways of using this data to the benefit of your brand?
Email marketing not only introduces another revenue stream for your business, but it can also enhance customer retention and build stronger brand loyalty. In particular, the beehiiv system is geared towards growing your existing customer base, and being easily integrated within the Shopify platform.
In this Shopify newsletter guide, we’ll discuss key points around why beehiiv is the perfect partner for Shopify businesses, including reasons why a newsletter is vital for your brand, how beehiiv supports Shopify businesses, use cases for Shopify brands, and a step-by-step strategy for building a successful newsletter on beehiiv.
Table of Contents
Why Shopify Brands Need a Newsletter
There are some fundamental reasons why Shopify brands need a newsletter.
Firstly, email marketing consistently ranks as the marketing channel with the highest ROI (Return On Investment).
According to a recent Litmis Report, email marketing drives an average $36 for every $1 spent, providing an ROI of 3,500%. This is significantly higher than other marketing channels, with SEO producing an average ROI of 748% (Saga Pixel) and Social Media producing one of 250% (The Goat Agency).
If you’re not currently using email marketing as a part of your overall marketing strategy, it can be a quick way of increasing your ROI and improving your overall marketing efforts.
Secondly, regular newsletters can help combat several challenges that Shopify brands face including the following:
Rising Ad Costs: Advertising your business has never been more expensive, particularly with online spaces becoming more and more competitive. Email marketing provides an affordable way of reaching new and existing customers, with a trackable ROI.
Crowded Marketplaces: Online marketplaces have become crowded and competitive. Online newsletters provide Shopify brands with their own dedicated space to communicate with customers directly, removing noise from the competition and creating a more personal line of communication.
Reliance On Third-Party Platforms For Customer Communication: While plugins and third-party platforms can simplify connecting your brand with customers, they often come with reliability issues and frustrating bugs, making them less dependable for such a critical aspect of your business. In contrast, email marketing offers a reliable and dedicated channel to keep your customers informed about your brand’s latest updates. It’s a trustworthy solution that integrates seamlessly into your business strategy.
Increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Keep customers engaged with relevant updates and promotions, encouraging repeat purchases and fostering long-term loyalty.
Promote New Product Launches: Announce new products directly to your audience, driving interest and sales with targeted campaigns.
Strengthen Brand Loyalty: Build stronger relationships with your audience through consistent communication and valuable content.
Leverage Segmentation for Better Reach: Tailor your content to different customer segments, ensuring your messaging resonates more effectively.
Execute Abandoned Cart Follow-Ups: Recover lost sales by reminding customers of items they left behind, coupled with personalized incentives to complete their purchases.
There are also many benefits to owning an email list. We know that communicating regularly with your audience is key to customer retention, with 80% of small to medium-sized businesses saying that email marketing is the most important online tool for customer retention (OptinMonster).
We also know that email marketing is an excellent tool for remarketing. If you have customers you haven’t heard from in a while, sending them a quick email can help re-engage them. You could also set up an automated campaign specifically targeting customers who have abandoned their shopping carts, making it easy to bring them back to complete their purchase.
In short, Shopify brands need a newsletter because it solves a myriad of challenges that many e-commerce brands face, provides great ROI, and improves customer retention while creating other opportunities for remarketing and direct engagement.
How beehiiv Supports Shopify Brands
With so many newsletter tools available, how do you know which brand is best to support your Shopify business? This is where beehiiv comes in.
beehiiv has been proven again and again to be the best companion for Shopify businesses looking for a seamless email marketing integration tool. Let’s explore why this is the case and how beehiiv is beneficial for e-commerce email marketing.
Integrations
One of the key ways beehiiv supports Shopify brands is via their seamless integrations.
beehiiv provides the ability for users to sync their Shopify and beehiiv accounts to enable automated subscriber collection, via Magic Links, embedded sign-up forms, or transactional emails.
These tools can be embedded directly onto Shopify product pages for example, or even customer receipts. Once they’ve been embedded beehiiv does all the hard work, helping to grow your mailing list in the background while you focus on your other marketing efforts.
Other beehiiv integrations that help to support Shopify brands are A/B testing and Segmentation tools. These allow you to test different versions of content to produce the best results and target specific groups of people within your mailing lists to serve users with the most relevant content, thereby increasing engagement/conversion rates.
Growth Features
beehiiv has a wealth of growth features that can be hugely beneficial to Shopify brands.
Here are some of our hero features to assist e-commerce brands with growing their mailing lists:
beehiiv’s Boosts: Boosts allows you to grow your mailing list by paying for subscribers from other newsletters that may share an interest in yours. You can set your own price that you’re happy paying for new subscribers, and you’ll only be provided with active, engaged subscribers to ensure the best results.
Referral Program: beehiiv referrals lets you set up incentives for your subscribers, encouraging them to refer your newsletter to their friends and family. This helps to grow your mailing list while also building strong relationships with your most loyal customers.
Pop-Ups: Once you’ve integrated beehiiv within your Shopify store, you can set up beautifully designed pop-ups to collect customer email addresses. These pop-ups are unobtrusive, and can provide an opportunity to highlight the benefits of subscribing to your mailing list. You can even tailor these pop-ups so that they only show for specific groups of people, such as users who have already shown an interest in your website.
Monetization
Another way that beehiiv supports Shopify brands is through monetization.
beehiiv has created a multitude of ways that creators can make money from their email marketing efforts, a feature that sets them apart from other email marketing platforms out there.
These include:
beehiiv Ad Network: The beehiiv Ad Network allows you to embed recognizable, trusted brands within your newsletters to generate income from your email marketing. This also gives your newsletter credibility by including brand logos that your audience will recognize and feel at ease with.
Subscription-Based Newsletters: Using gated content within beehiiv can make your content more exclusive to your most dedicated subscribers, while also providing an extra revenue stream for your business.
beehiiv Boosts: beehiiv boosts are not only beneficial for growing your mailing list - you can also recommend your subscribers to other publications to make some extra money for your brand.
beehiiv Partner Program: The beehiiv Partner Program allows you to earn up to 60% commission simply by sharing beehiiv with your audience. You’ll receive a custom partner link when you sign up, as well as access to an extensive library of resources/assets to help you promote beehiiv and earn more commissions.
Newsletters are also an excellent opportunity to promote exclusive product launches, discounts, and affiliate opportunities directly through your newsletters for your subscribers.
Use Cases for Shopify Brands
There are several use cases for Shopify brands to take your email marketing to the next level.
The most successful email marketing campaigns promote a range of content, offering subscribers different opportunities to engage with your brand.
Here are some ideas for you to try out to keep your email marketing fresh and engaging:
Product Launches: Announce new arrivals and provide exclusive early access to subscribers via your email marketing campaigns.
Seasonal Campaigns: Drive sales during holidays with tailored newsletters for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or other peak seasons. You could include specific discount codes to more effectively measure results from these campaigns.
Content + Commerce: Create engaging newsletters with product education, behind-the-scenes content, and brand storytelling. It’s important to strike the right balance between sales content and informative pieces to build trust with your customers and show that you’re not solely focused on sales emails.
Abandoned Cart Series: Use automation to recover lost sales with personalized nudges. These can be highly successful in improving conversion rates and warming up potential customers who are already interested in your brand.
VIP Customer Clubs: Reward loyal customers with newsletter-exclusive perks or first access to sales to make them feel valued as a subscriber.
How Shopify Brands Like Enjoy Basketball Leverage beehiiv
Enjoy Basketball, a brand that merges basketball culture with commerce, exemplifies how to seamlessly integrate a Shopify store with a beehiiv newsletter.
Some Key Takeaways from Enjoy Basketball’s Strategy:
Content + Commerce Approach: Their newsletters blend basketball insights, behind-the-scenes stories, and product updates. This balance of value-driven content and commerce builds trust and keeps their audience engaged without feeling overly sales-focused.
Shopify Integration for Seamless Transactions: By integrating beehiiv with their Shopify store, Enjoy Basketball embeds links to product drops, exclusive collections, and time-sensitive discounts directly in their newsletters. This encourages immediate action and simplifies the buying journey.
Exclusive Drops via Email: To reward their subscribers, Enjoy Basketball often announces exclusive product drops or early access to collections through their newsletter.
Cody also shared how they’ve launched an e-commerce apparel brand by the same name, Enjoy Basketball, that drives revenue for the brand. Their recent collaboration with The ICEE Company featured custom-branded shirts, hoodies, basketball,s and collector’s cups, which all sold out in under 5 hours.
“We're really trying to build the strongest and best community for people that enjoy basketball. So we have apparel products and other sorts of social media assets that we're selling across in addition to monetizing the newsletter itself.”
Strategy for Building a Successful Newsletter
Below, we’ve detailed the key steps in a successful Shopify email marketing strategy.
These steps will guide you through the entire process, from signing up and managing subscriber lists to measuring your campaigns and optimizing them for the best results moving forward.
Step 1: Start with a free beehiiv plan to experiment with your content and build a core list. beehiiv’s free plan lets you experiment with different features to see which plan works best for your brand - sign up here for a free 30-day trial to get started.
Step 2: Segment subscribers based on Shopify purchase history or behaviors for tailored email campaigns. Drilling down into certain groups of users will allow you to provide subscribers with relevant content, which will ultimately lead to higher conversion rates and improved customer retention.
Step 3: Use beehiiv’s analytics to track performance. beehiiv’s 3D Analytics allows you to track metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions to better understand where your campaigns are working and where they need improvement.
Step 4: Leverage automation tools to create consistent touchpoints with minimal effort. For example, you could set up a welcome series for new Shopify customers to set a great first impression, or create Monthly product spotlights with personalized recommendations to improve engagement with existing customers.
Step 5: Upsell through your newsletter by showcasing complementary products or creating bundles. Nurturing your mailing list makes them excellent opportunities for further upselling, just remember to balance this with informative, fresh content to ensure not all emails are sales-based for your audience.
Keen to get started? Launch your Shopify newsletter with beehiiv today - you can start for free and scale as your list grows!
Our free plan includes audience segmentation, custom newsletters, and API access as standard, working seamlessly with your Shopify store for easy integration.
If you have any specific questions regarding a beehiiv Shopify integration, don’t hesitate to contact us via our Chatbot Assistant, Buzz - we’ll be happy to help!
