5 Benefits of Email Marketing for Ecommerce Businesses

Email might not be the flashiest marketing channel in the era of social media virality and Google Ads, but it remains one of the most effective. In fact, according to the 2025 Litmus State of Email report, 35% of companies surveyed see a return on investment (ROI) of 36:1 or more from their email marketing programs.

Shopify merchants like Dapper Boi and Chandler Honey have seen revenues boosted thanks to email. Through precise audience segmentation and automated workflows, these businesses have turned email into a reliable revenue channel tailored to their specific needs.

Below, you’ll find the key benefits of email marketing, practical tips for maximizing those benefits, and examples of how real-world ecommerce stores use email campaigns to improve their bottom lines.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy that uses email to reach users who’ve shared their contact information in exchange for relevant content. Email messages can include seasonal promotions, product updates, educational content, and transactional information like order confirmations. The goal is to inform, engage, and encourage specific actions from your target audience, like website visits, referrals, and purchases.

Email marketing can consist of standalone email messages or broader email marketing campaigns designed to nurture customer relationships and loyalty over time.

For example, you can use email to personalize communication and meet customers where they are in the sales funnel. You might use automation to re-engage shoppers who’ve abandoned their cart by sending a targeted email sequence encouraging them to complete the purchase. Or, you might build trust with new customers through a welcome series with personalized greetings and information about what sets your brand apart. 

5 benefits of email marketing

1. Cost-effectiveness
2. Return on investment
3. Personalization
4. Engagement
5. Control

A combination of precision, profitability, and personal touch makes email a powerful marketing channel. Here are the five key benefits of email marketing:

1. Cost-effectiveness

Email falls under owned media—content published through any channel your business controls—rather than ad spend. Examples beyond email include social media, blogs, and websites. Paid media, on the other hand, requires spending money to get your message in front of an audience.

This distinction is what makes email marketing more affordable. At its most basic, you can draft and send an email for free, whereas methods like social media or digital display advertising require budgets for ad space. 

A 2025 CMO survey by Gartner found that email marketing represents just 7.4% of the average business’s total marketing budget, compared to 13.9% for paid search advertising and 12.2% for paid social. The CMO survey goes on to show that despite ranking low on spend, email performs as well as paid channels like search, display, and social advertising.

2. Return on investment

With email typically costing less than other marketing channels, it often delivers a remarkably high return on investment (ROI). The email marketing platform Litmus analyzed data from 500 marketing professionals and found that email marketing campaigns generate an average ROI of $36 for every dollar spent. By comparison, a good ROI for digital marketing campaigns is generally in the neighborhood of $2 to $5 for every dollar spent. Among business-to-consumer (B2C) brands specifically, HubSpot’s 2025 State of Marketing Report found email is the top channel for ROI, followed by paid social and content marketing.

3. Personalization

One advantage email has over other marketing channels like direct mail or print media is its personalization capabilities. Litmus’ State of Email Trends Report found that more than 90% of email marketing professionals say using segmentation to target messages improves campaign performance.

You might segment your audience based on demographics, geography, and behavioral data like purchase or browsing history, and then develop segmented campaigns and informative content that address each group’s specific needs. That could mean sending early-access discounts to loyal customers, recommending products based on past purchases, or sharing helpful guides related to your products—like a list of journaling prompts for someone who just bought a journal. 

4. Engagement

In email marketing, engagement is measured through key metrics like open rate (the percentage of people who open your email) and click-to-open rate (the percentage of people who click a link after opening).

MailerLite analyzed more than 3.6 million email marketing campaigns and found that the average open rate in 2025 exceeded 43%, with a click-to-open rate of 6.8%. Even in ecommerce, the benchmark open rate was about 32.7%. For perspective, the social platform with the highest engagement rate is TikTok, where average rates range from 6% to 10%.

5. Control

Email differs from other marketing channels because subscribers actively choose to receive messages through a website pop-up, social media call to action, or checkout opt-in. This opt-in nature creates a direct line to a list of subscribers who genuinely want your content. 

Unlike social media, where algorithms decide who sees your posts, or paid ads, where you’re constantly competing for attention, email gives you the control to decide when and how you reach your audience. This direct communication lets you nurture real relationships by delivering the right message at the right moment—no middleman required.

How to maximize the benefits of email marketing

1. Define your email goals and plans
2. Use an email platform
3. Build an email list
4. Segment your audience
5. Optimize for mobile
6. Maintain list hygiene

Before crafting messages, develop an email marketing strategy to guide the rules and intent for what gets sent, so individual emails aren’t created in isolation. These tips can help you make the most of your email marketing efforts:

1. Define your email goals and plans

Ideally, your strategy is informed by your business’s larger marketing strategy, which clarifies your value proposition, key messages, and target audience. You can then develop a more email-focused strategy with information like:

• Email goals. What do you want each email to accomplish? It could be to drive sales, generate leads, or nurture relationships with existing customers. Your goals determine your emails’ look and tone. A flash sale announcement, for example, might have a simplified design and straightforward language to emphasize the savings, while a newsletter might call for a more branded design and a professional tone. 

• Content types. Once your goals are clear, align your content to achieve them. For example, sales goals might inspire a holiday campaign or product launch, while informative newsletters can foster customer relationships. Defining your message and format keeps communication focused and prevents information overload.

• Cadence. Consistency helps build trust with your audience. Email best practice is to send at least one email per week, but that depends on your goals and the kind of content. For example, you might send a sale email out in the same week as a newsletter. Sending too frequently risks unsubscribes, but at least once a month keeps subscribers engaged. 

2. Use an email platform

An email system like Shopify Messaging or Klaviyo can minimize manual effort and save valuable time with email automation, data analysis, and customizable templates for polished, professional emails.

Automating workflows is the top email marketing tip Chandler Honey founder Tique Chandler shares with up-and-coming entrepreneurs. She’s integrated Flodesk with her Shopify store to automatically send email sequences in a timely manner after someone signs up for her newsletter. The series starts with an introduction to the brand, followed by recipes and other topics of interest. Each message builds on the last, “allowing me to do less work on the ecommerce side of things and letting my conversion rate be much better,” Tique explains. 

3. Build an email list

To get the most out of your email marketing, build a list of email subscribers who willingly opt in. While regulations like the CAN-SPAM Act don’t explicitly ban unsolicited emails, buying an email list can increase the risk of hitting someone’s spam filter and reaching people who aren’t interested in your brand. 

Email capture—collecting addresses from existing customers through your website or social channels—is a common approach to generate leads. This might include a newsletter sign-up at checkout, social posts offering discounts in exchange for email addresses, or a pop-up when you first visit a website. Shopify Forms, for example, lets you create pop-ups and inline forms that capture emails and automatically share them with your email platform.

Jacob Sappington, director of email strategy at marketing agency Homestead Studio, recommends a “micro yes” strategy to boost effectiveness.

“A micro yes is another page before you say enter your email. It’s as simple as asking something like, ‘Do you want 10% off?’" Jacob explains on Shopify Masters. “The main idea is that you’re asking a small leading question that they’re likely to say yes to.” This extra step helps ensure subscribers are genuinely interested, leading to better conversion rates.

4. Segment your audience

Customer segmentation involves grouping your audience based on characteristics like demographics, subscriber status, or behavioral data, such as how they interact with your store. Understanding each audience segment and creating tailored content accordingly can increase the likelihood that those people will open and engage with important messages.

For fashion brand Dapper Boi, audience segmentation has helped co-founder Vicky Shuang home in on the most relevant messaging for the best results. The company organizes customers according to criteria like current happenings, recent purchase activity, and past buying patterns. And, it pays off. Vicky says that email accounts for 54% of the brand’s sales.

5. Optimize for mobile

Optimizing for mobile devices is a non-negotiable in 2026. Some email marketing best practices for mobile include:

• Build messages with responsive designs that automatically adjust to various screen sizes.

• Write copy so it’s easily scannable.

• Ensure any buttons within emails are clearly clickable.

• Write clear subject lines with concise language. Aim for fewer than nine words—or 60 characters—to make sure they aren’t cut off.

Going mobile-first helped premium umbrella brand Original Duckhead reach better business outcomes, improving both revenue and conversion rates. “We used to design from the standpoint of looking from a computer screen, but that’s not how people shop anymore,” founder Morgan Cross says on the Shopify Masters podcast. 

6. Maintain list hygiene

Maintaining email list hygiene means regularly removing invalid addresses and managing inactive subscribers. The reason for this is simple: Maintaining a subscriber list of engaged customers lowers your risk of unread messages being marked as spam because recipients actually want to hear from you.

Here are several ways to maintain strong list hygiene:

• Use double opt-in. This two-step process ensures subscribers genuinely want your emails. They sign up through a landing page or form, then confirm through a link sent to their inbox.

• Clean your email list. Remove invalid email addresses, ideally every six months. Use a free tool like ZeroBounce to identify addresses that are no longer deliverable.

• Scrub your email list. Re-engage inactive subscribers (those who haven’t opened or clicked within a certain period) by segmenting them and sending targeted campaigns. A classic win-back campaign idea: Show them what they’ve missed with a highlight of your latest bestsellers. Remove addresses that still fail to engage. 

• Comply with regulations. In the US, the CAN-SPAM Act requires subscribers to have a clear and easy way to opt out of emails. If someone opts out, honor it as quickly as possible.

• Regularly review analytics. Use an email platform to monitor metrics like delivery rate, bounce rate, unsubscribes, and spam rate. Aim to keep a bounce rate of around 0.5% or lower to maintain your sender reputation, or how trustworthy your emails appear to inbox providers.