Good morning! Chase and Jimmy here 👋

New year, same mission: work smarter, not harder. Whether you're trying to get more out of your agency partnerships, fine-tuning your retention channels, or wondering why some emails hit while others flop, we’ve got you covered today.

If your email strategy still feels stuck in last year’s playbook, consider this your cue to shake things up. (It’s 2025, friends—time to level up!)

Customers expect more—personalization, relevance, and offers that actually feel tailored. Spray-and-pray blasts? Ghosted. This year, it’s all about smarter segmentation, bold CTAs, and emails that build trust instead of cluttering inboxes.

Let’s make 2025 the year your emails actually convert—because your audience deserves better, and so do your results.

But first, we’ve got a few other goodies to kick things off.

2024 taught us some hard lessons—but 2025? That’s yours to dominate.

Set yourself up for success and join Jimmy Kim, Chase Dimond, Greg Zakowicz, and Bernard Meyer for an insight-packed webinar. In just 90 minutes, you’ll walk away with:
✅ An honest review of 2024 trends and numbers
✅ Tactics to cut through the noise and crush 2025
✅ A case study on how email + social = $380K in 10 minutes

This isn’t just another webinar—it’s your roadmap to retention success in 2025.

🗓 Tuesday, Jan 28th | Virtual (and free!)

Register free right here!

💡 Knowledge Drop of The Week

🌶️ Do agencies actually suck? 🌶️

Join powerhouses Melanie Balke, Andrew Faris, Liam Veregin, Nate Lagos, and Jordan West as they spill the tea on agency vs. in-house growth.

From media buying hacks to setting crystal-clear expectations, they’re dishing out the good, the bad, and the messy—and leaving NO crumbs. Watch it here

6 Ways to Improve Your eCommerce Emails in 2025

Customers expect more from eCommerce emails in 2025.

They want personalization, relevance, and value – and they’re quick to tune out brands that miss the mark. If your emails feel disconnected, it’s time to rethink your strategy.

Luckily, you don’t have to start from scratch. A few simple tweaks are all it takes to create campaigns that grab attention, build trust, and convert.

Here are six ways to drive more results from your eCommerce emails 👇

1. Upsell and cross-sell to increase value

Want to know the easiest sale you’ll ever make? It’s to someone who just bought from your store and is still excited about their purchase.

With upselling and cross-selling emails, you're catching customers when they're most receptive to suggestions about similar items (cross-selling) or premium upgrades (upselling).

Here’s how to make these emails hit the mark:

• Personalize. Look at your customer’s buying behavior. If someone buys a high-end coffee maker, they clearly care about their morning brew. Don't show them basic paper filters. Recommend a premium stainless steel filter that matches their taste.

• Tell them exactly why they should buy. Use words like “premium” and “luxury” to draw attention to expensive products. More importantly, focus on how the add-on helps: “Add our ergonomic wrist support to your new mechanical keyboard. It's designed to prevent strain during those long coding sessions.”

We love this sleek upsell email from MOO:

They skip the hard sell and go straight to the benefit: rounded corners help you stand out. It’s a great example of how to make a minor feature upgrade sound like a smart business investment.

2. Use segmentation to personalize your emails

Personalization isn’t just about adding first names (though that's a start), but really tailoring your messages to what your customers care about.

Does it work? You bet. Stores that personalize their offers see 5-8x better returns than those sending generic emails to everyone.

Start with basic segmentation, such as by demographics or purchase history. You can also split your email list into groups based on:

• How often they shop

• When they last visited your store

• Which emails they open

Here’s a personalized email from Chewy we really like:

They show you exactly what you bought before and make it super easy to buy it again with one-click shop buttons – no digging through the site to find your pet's favorite food. That's how you make your customers' lives easier and drive repeat sales.

3. Add bold and actionable CTAs

Every email needs a clear next step, whether that’s checking out, visiting a product page or filling out a feedback form. Your call-to-action (CTA) is how your customers take that specific action. If they can’t find or understand your CTA, they simply won’t click.

Here are some email CTA tips to keep in mind:

• Use bold, contrasting buttons to grab attention

• Place them near the action you want customers to take (e.g. under product images)

• Keep the language specific: “Shop the Collection” or “Claim Your 20% Off”

Sundays for Dogs does a great job at adding hard-to-miss and actionable CTAs to their emails. Here’s an example:

When a subscriber opens this email, they know exactly what it’s about and what will happen when they click on the big, black button – they’ll be taken to Sundays’ Instagram page.

Bonus: Run A/B tests on your CTAs. Test different colors, button sizes, and text to see what gets the most clicks.

4. Balance email design with functionality

As an eCommerce business, you absolutely need great product photos. But poorly optimized emails can land you in the spam folder or worse – ignored entirely.

For example, Gmail will chop off any email bigger than 102 KB and hide parts of it behind a “View entire message” link.

Use an email marketing tool with MJML (Mail Jet Markup Language) templates (instead of HTML) to keep your emails sharp and responsive without getting clipped.

Here are some more tips to optimize your email design:

• Use high-quality images but keep file sizes small to prevent email clipping

• Balance visuals and text for a clean, professional look

• Stick to a single-column layout for easier mobile readability

Bonus: Check your emails on multiple devices before sending. Some tools let you preview your email on desktops and smartphones to help you stay consistent.

5. Perfect your timing with automated workflows

Automation helps you reach people with the right message at just the right time – at scale.

Here’s how it works in most email marketing tools:

• Identify specific actions or events to trigger emails, like when someone buys or abandons their cart, or when it's their birthday.

• Set up your workflows. Create your automation and configure the timing. Some emails need to go out right away (e.g. order confirmations), while others work better with a little wait (e.g. cross-sell offers).

• Track and optimize. Use real-time data to improve your automations. For example, if your post-purchase emails get more clicks at the 24-hour mark than at 3 days, consider speeding up all your follow-up campaigns.

Once you set this up, it runs on autopilot. Here’s how Altitude Sports sends an automated welcome email (with a discount!) to new subscribers after they sign up.

6. Recover lost sales with abandoned cart emails

People abandon carts for all kinds of reasons – distractions, price comparisons, shipping costs. But a well-timed reminder email can reel them back in.

Here are three ways to nail your abandoned cart emails:

• Add clear product images: Show exactly what they left behind. No generic photos or placeholders – use the specific items they chose.

• Make a compelling offer: Address common holdups like shipping times or return policies. Add social proof or a small discount to seal the deal.

• Perfect your CTA: Give them a clear, actionable button that takes them straight to checkout. The easier you make it, the more likely they'll complete their purchase.

We love this abandoned cart email from Chatter Salon.

They use FOMO without being pushy, show exactly what's waiting in your cart, and make checking out dead simple with two obvious CTA buttons.

Do more with your eCommerce emails

Sending generic eCommerce emails doesn’t cut it anymore, especially when your customers are bombarded with dozens of marketing emails daily.

Use the strategies above to make your emails stand out and get results. It’s often the small things we overlook that end up costing us thousands of dollars (and priceless time) in the long run. Pay attention to the details, keep tweaking, and you’ll see success in no time.

🔥 DTC Wins of The Week

Overnight success? We’d say so—Oats Overnight locks in national deal with Costco. Soon you can get your $1.50 hotdog AND high-protein oats in one stop. Now that’s what we call balance.

And that's a wrap for this week!

Big thanks for hanging out with Chase and me—hope you found some gems in here! If you did, share the love and pass ecomemailmarketer.com along to your favorite DTC marketer. Let’s get them in the loop for next week's insights! 🚀

Remember: Do shit you love and have an awesome weekend!

🤘 Jimmy Kim