Shopify Rolls Outs Email Marketing for Merchants

Nine months after breaking up with Mailchimp, Shopify is moving on and saying hello to a new love: Shopify Email.

The ecommerce platform giant, which just reached 1 million merchants, is rolling out Shopify Email, its own email service provider (ESP) to select merchants; it will be more widely available next year.

It’s yet another way, following the announcement of the Shopify Fulfillment Network, that Shopify is tightening the reins on its platform and continuing to try and own its entire ecommerce stack.

“We knew that there was a couple of things incredibly important to get right: Get the barrier of entry down to zero and make it as easy as possible to use and make this a natural extension [of a merchant’s] store,” said Michael Perry, director of marketing technology at Shopify. “We wanted to take all the complexities out of it.”

With Shopify Email, merchants can run and track email marketing campaigns within Shopify, with custom templates and ready-made brand assets. The new tool measures KPIs such as email open and clickthrough rates, number of items added to carts and purchased. It also works with third-party marketing apps such as Seguno.

Additionally, tools like segmentation are automatically available with Shopify Email, giving merchants the ability to send marketing campaigns that target customers based on repeat purchases, location, abandoned carts and more.

To start, Shopify is rolling out Shopify Email as an early access phase to English-language customers for free, with plans to give all merchants access to it next year, and with no “concrete decision” on pricing—yet….[Read More]