Shopify Unveils D2C Merchant Email Feature

Need to Know

• Shopify has released its Shopify Email feature early, allowing merchants to manage email marketing campaigns form a single place in their Shopify portal.
• Merchants can create, send, and track emails that integrate with their existing design and products.
• Email marketing is extremely important for retailers as it is one of the few customer communication channels they can completely own.
• 56% of consumers say they open at least half of the emails they receive, and 59% of buyers prefer emails from brands over any other channel.
• Shopify is making Shopify Email free to merchants until October 1, 2020.

Analysis

Email is an extremely important resource for retailers to connect with shoppers. Promotions, updates, personalized rewards, and more all come through email, allowing merchants to truly connect with consumers. While social media and other communication channels are important, email reigns supreme in retail.

That’s why Shopify has moved up the release of its Shopify Email feature, allowing merchants to control the creation and tracking of email marketing campaigns. In order to provide more relief to retailers during the COVID-19 pandemic, Shopify is also making the feature free to all merchants until October 1, 2020.

The feature will roll out to all merchants across 20 languages in the coming weeks.

Shopify Email exists alongside other marketing campaigns within Shopify, meaning any email campaigns that get created have the ability to match the design of other shop efforts. Intelligent templates will pull a store’s logo, colors, and products to populate a campaign, and other pre-built templates are simple to customize and tweak.

The new feature also comes with analytics reports that showcase trends and key insights about how each email performs, such as clickthroughs and open rates. Merchants will always own the data they create and access in Shopify Email.

“Email marketing makes it easier to not only drive new sales but to nurture ongoing customer relationships and encourage repeat purchases—all through a channel that isn’t subject to the whims of another platform,” the company wrote in a blog post.

Email is important to customers—56% of consumers say they open at least half of the emails they receive, while 59% of buyers prefer emails from brands over any other channel.

Shopify will continue to add features to Shopify Email, including the ability to schedule emails, more purpose-built templates, and more.

With Shopify Email, the online retail giant is taking aim at other well-known email marketing companies such as Mailchimp while continuing its push to bring every feature in-house and develop a robust collection of apps and platforms.