Email Marketing in Retail: Tips, Examples & Templates (2025)

Email marketing is the fastest way to accelerate your retail business. It helps encourage sales, showcase your products, and build connections with new and existing customers that pay off over time.

But email marketing doesn’t mean just sending out a regular newsletter that shouts about your product’s best features. Email marketing covers newsletters, e-receipts, segmentation, and automation. And with access to more customer data than ever, it’s becoming increasingly important for retailers to up their email game. 

So, how do you build your list and send retail emails that encourage subscribers to buy? This guide will walk you through how to start using email in your retail business today.

What is retail email marketing?

Email marketing in retail is a strategy where businesses use email to reach potential customers in their inboxes and turn them into paying ones. Retail email marketing includes acquisition and customer retention tactics to sell, educate, and build loyalty with a subscriber list. 

Retailers can use email marketing to:

• Keep in touch with shoppers throughout the retail customer journey.
• Provide information about new products.
• Send post-purchase emails, like receipts.
• Email carts to in-store shoppers that aren’t ready to buy just yet.
• Collect customer feedback.

Importance of email marketing in retail

There may be a lot of hype about social media, likes, and shares, but email tops the charts in comparison to channels like social media and organic search. This is not to say that Instagram isn't important for your business, but if you want an easy and direct way to reach people, email is your go-to strategy.

Increase sales and marketing ROI

By 2027, it’s estimated that 4.89 billion people will have an email account. Given its popularity, it’s no surprise that the return on investment (ROI) of email marketing in retail is huge. For every $1 spent, email marketing generates an average of $36 in ROI.

In short, a well-crafted retail email marketing strategy can earn more revenue. Email is unique in that it can help drive your first sale, but also can drive more long-term value from repeat customers. 

Build stronger relationships with customers

Social media networks and search engines can help customers find you online, but email is the best way to nurture and strengthen relationships over time. It gives you a direct communication channel with your customer base—something that alternative marketing channels can’t guarantee.

Email also gives you the ability to nurture relationships with features like:

• Personalized communications. Segment your list based on criteria like interests and purchase history. Tailor subject lines, content, and deals to each subscriber and make each email more meaningful.
• Customer loyalty programs. Email makes it easy to connect with loyal customers and send special promotions. You can easily link your in-store rewards to email so everyone gets the benefits of shopping with your store. 
• Encourage repeat purchases. Email plays a massive role in encouraging customers to shop more with you. Repeat customers are more profitable, which means you’ll spend less on acquisition and more on growing your business.

Owned marketing channel

Compared to other marketing channels like SEO or social, email is less vulnerable to sudden updates or algorithm changes imposed by third parties.

You can reach your audience directly (without paying an advertising network to do so), and it’s easy to measure the impact of your strategy. Check email metrics like open rates, click rates, and downloads to see how successful your email is among highly targeted audiences to a greater extent than website traffic or social media analytics alone. 

Types of retail email marketing campaigns

Now that we know the benefits of email for physical and online retailers, let’s look at the different types of email campaigns you can send.

• Newsletters
• Welcome emails
• Product announcements
• Offers and promotions
• Email carts
• Post-purchase emails
• Cart abandonment
• Event promotion
• Seasonal campaigns
• Birthdays and special occasions
• Transactional emails

Newsletters

Email newsletters are informational emails that people sign up to receive from your brand. They’re sent regularly, be it bi-weekly, monthly, or quarterly. 

Newsletters are great because they keep your retail business top of mind. They contain content like guides, blog posts, news, reviews, recommendations, tips, and announcements.

You can tailor content to the season, like a November issue featuring holiday gift guides for different budgets, a calendar of upcoming store events and promotions, and customer testimonials showcasing your most popular gift items. You could also include a special section highlighting limited-time holiday deals or exclusive subscriber-only discounts for early bird shoppers.

Welcome emails

A welcome email is the first email you send to a user after they’ve joined your list. They’re the ideal format to extend an invitation to your store. 

This doesn’t need to be a singular email. You can also implement a welcome drip sequence of several emails that includes:

1. The initial welcome email
2. A discount offer or special promotion for new customers 
3. Personalized product recommendations based on products they’ve viewed online 
4. Best-selling products among similar subscribers or customers
5. Directions to their nearest store

The entire sequence can give users a complete look at your brand and continue to highlight your brick-and-mortar locations with a very visible link to your store locator.

Product announcements

A product announcement email is a message sent to tell subscribers about new or changed products in your store. Retailers send these emails to hype upcoming releases or events.

You can also use this type of retail email to announce in-store services or even new physical retail locations, showcasing photos of the storefront and highlighting its location and in-store offerings. 

Offers and promotions

Promo codes, freebies, special access, and discounts give prospective customers a reason to subscribe to your retail mailing list. Showcase them on pop-up forms, and consider making email offers redeemable in-store only to drive foot traffic to your physical location.

Email carts 

With an email cart, you can create a personalized cart link that you’ll send directly to your customer. This link displays a summary of the customer’s cart and lets in-store shoppers complete their purchases online.

Get into the habit of building these customized carts inside Shopify POS for on-the-fence shoppers who otherwise leave your retail store without buying. Not only can you use this customer data to offer personalized product recommendations later down the line, but automated email carts give online shoppers a simpler way to buy—this makes it easy to purchase the same item online without having to return to a physical location. 

Post-purchase emails

Post-purchase emails are more than just email receipts. Effective post-purchase email drips may include things like helpful content to make the most of a purchase, related product recommendations, or even solicitations for feedback.

Retailers can use post-purchase email drips to highlight products the user has indicated interest in, as well as complementary products. Perhaps you can send an invitation to shop in-store during special hours or reward users with a free gift for their next in-store purchase.

Cart abandonment

Think about all the times you’ve added stuff to an online shopping cart in your life. Did you buy every product, every time? If not, you likely got a few emails from the brand to come back to checkout. It offers a discount or free shipping to encourage the sale. 

These are called cart abandonment emails. They are used in ecommerce to get people back to checkout to buy the things in their cart. 

Considering over 70% of online carts are abandoned, these emails are a great way to recover lost revenue for your online store. Email service provider Klaviyo estimates that one abandoned cart email can receive up to $3.65 per recipient, on average. 

Seasonal campaigns

Seasonal email campaigns are a fun way to engage with customers during national events, such as Christmas or Black Friday—times of the year you’re likely to see a surge in sales. 

Retailers can market their products at any special point throughout the year. It can be anything from summer season to Valentine’s Day, or even Penguin Awareness Day if it aligns with your business. The goal is to create fun, captivating emails around these topics to encourage sales in your store.

Event promotion

If you host in-store events, registration and attendance give you two new trigger events against which to plan email drip campaigns. This can be helpful not only in making sure event registrants actually attend but also in nurturing the customer-brand relationship.

Include your branding, high-quality imagery of your store, or product recommendations in this type of retail email. You might include a link to a blog post about must-have products to convert attendees post-event.

Birthdays and special occasions 

Customer milestones make for great reasons to offer a discount to your customers. Plus, it’s personal in that it recognizes their birthday or nurtures your relationship by celebrating their anniversary of being a customer. 

Rather than sending a simple “Happy Birthday” email, gift customers a unique code for a 20% discount on a product. Remember to provide value to your customers—don’t wish them a happy birthday just for the sake of it.

Transactional emails

Transactional emails are triggered after a user takes a specific action. They contain information unique to the receiver, like their order number or payment method. Retailers can use events like in-store signups, in-store purchases, in-store returns, and event registrations to trigger transactional emails. 

How to collect email addresses for retail marketing

To unlock email marketing’s full potential, you’ll need a list of email subscribers. Fortunately, it’s easier to convince someone to give you their email address than it is to make a sale. Let’s look at a few ways to grow your email list, even if you have zero subscribers.

Encourage customers to sign-up in-store

Your point-of-sale (POS) system is much more than a cash register. You can also gather data—like name, customer profiles, and email address—and sync it with email marketing automation tools. 

Take it from LIVELY, a bra retailer based in New York City that uses Shopify POS to nurture customer relationships after initial discovery. 

Owner Michelle Cordeiro Grant has grown its community and customer lifetime value by capturing names and emails in Shopify POS. Customers discover the brand by walking past the store. They come in for a fitting and learn their measurements. Then Michelle gets their contact information and puts them into the same sales funnel they use for their online store. 

“Most of our in-store customers become repeat customers online,” says Michelle. “It’s much easier to repeat a purchase online once you’ve come in, done a fit, and know your bra size.” 

💡Tip: Email capture in Shopify POS can match customer details with a Shop Pay account at checkout. Customers can get digital receipts and opt-into marketing—something that when Sculpted by Aimee implemented, increased email capture by 275% across its network of retail stores.

Offer email receipts

Most retailers give little thought to the not-so-glamorous post-purchase receipt, yet it’s a smart way to capture email addresses and create a good customer experience. 

Shopify POS can automatically send email receipts after a successful in-store payment or even when you make a refund. You’ll only need to ask for a customer’s email address during checkout. After you see the Payment Successful screen on your POS, you just need to: 

1. Tap Email receipt
2. Have the customer enter their email address
3. Tap Send

It’s a good idea to remind customers they will join your email list with an automated welcome email that is sent immediately after registration. You don’t want to send unwanted marketing messages and annoy people if they weren’t expecting promo emails. 

Use QR codes in-store

QR codes divert customers to a landing page when they scan the code using their smartphone camera. Add them to your retail signage—be that window displays or in-store banners—to promote your email exclusive offers and direct retail shoppers towards your email opt-in form built with Shopify Forms.

Send email carts

If a customer visits your store but is on the fence about making a purchase, use Shopify POS to send them an email cart. This contains a list of the items they viewed in-store with the option to checkout later—so you can capture customer email addresses even if shoppers don’t convert during their visit. 

Home furnishings brand Jenni Kaye, for example, creates custom quotes for interior design clients inside Shopify POS. “We can print or email PDF quotes for interior designers right from the POS that are really easy for them to pass along to their clients,” says Sam Mella, the brand’s director of home experience.

Run email-exclusive promotions 

Entice subscribers with special offers, deals, and promotions to create revenue all year long. Running these promos only through email can encourage in-store customers to sign up. 

Consider these popular options: 

• Send customized offers to specific groups. Don’t send the same message to your entire email list. Segment it and send relevant deals to specific groups, such as VIPs or new subscribers. 
• Run seasonal promotions. Whether it’s birthdays or summertime promos, take advantage of special seasons to send deals and discounts to your list. 
• Include offers in welcome emails. After someone becomes a subscriber or customer, send them a special offer. You can embed a unique promo code in the email that they can use in-store or online. 

💡Tip:Shopify Email has ready-made templates that automatically pull your branding, products, and discounts from your Shopify admin. You can get started fast and send campaigns in minutes. 

Add pop-ups to your online store 

Turn website visitors into email subscribers with a pop-up sign-up form that offers something in exchange for their email address. Most often, this is a percentage off their first purchase, but you can experiment with incentives like:

• Free delivery or in-store pickup 
• Exclusive bundles
• Early access to flash sales
• Entry into a competition (e.g., $200 gift card to spend in-store)

Encourage referrals from existing subscribers

You can shout about how great your marketing emails are, but it’s even more convincing if it comes from other happy subscribers. An email referral program does that: it incentivizes existing subscribers to get their friends to sign up in exchange for a reward, be that a free gift or discount for every subscriber they refer.

Retail email marketing tips

Automate email campaigns

Automation is the most effective way to do email marketing because you can “set it and forget it” and keep your brand top of mind. Every time a drip campaign is sent, it comes from a backlog of pre-written emails. 

Some must-have automated campaigns to include are:

• Welcome emails to introduce new subscribers to the brand.
• Curation emails to showcase bestsellers to specific customer groups.
• Discount emails to send deals to people on the fence about buying something.
• Abandoned cart emails to send friendly reminders to shoppers who left items in their shopping cart.
• Transactional emails like order confirmations and shipping notifications give customers peace of mind and set expectations for delivery. 
• Win back emails to target subscribers who haven’t been active with your brand.

💡Tip: UseShopify Flow to define triggers that customers must make in order to receive an automated retail email. 

Create customer segments

Segmentation refers to dividing email subscribers into smaller groups based on specific criteria. It’s often used as a personalization tactic to send more relevant emails. You can segment subscribers based on their:

• Demographics. This includes characteristics such as age, gender, location, and more. For example, if you sell body care products, you’ll benefit from knowing the gender of your subscriber. It can help you send relevant soap or cream recommendations. 
• Sign-up source. If someone joins in-store or at an event, you may want to send them a follow-up discount to shop online. 
• Interests and preferences. Ask customers what their interests are related to your products, then send targeted messages based on their answers. 
• Purchase history. Send this group different types of emails, such as discounts, product recommendations, or refills. It keeps your campaigns fresh and relevant, which can lead to lower unsubscribe rates and higher purchase rates.
• Inactivity. If repeat customers don’t buy something for a period of time, you can automatically follow up with them to encourage a sale.

💡Tip: Shopify POS syncs every piece of customer data you’ve collected to a unified profile. Use this data to build detailed customer segments and send relevant campaigns to people, no matter where they interact with your business. 

Personalize your retail emails

Personalization in email is a lot more than auto-populating the user’s name in the subject line. Edit your content based on subscriber data and specific actions or trigger events. Using various data points about users, you can auto-fill users’ preferences and include them in the automated email.

You might reference past purchases, current interests, location, and even gender to create a personalized email marketing campaign that’s more likely to convert. Doing so could increase engagement throughout the drip campaign and deliver a more catered experience.

“We see merchants doing some really smart things with this information,” says Nick Binder, Senior Director, Product Marketing at Klaviyo. “They're building segments based on different behavioral patterns, like who shopped in-store versus online. Then they're using Klaviyo’s predictive analytics and AI to understand who their most loyal shoppers are, or where there are risks of churn, to prioritize effectively.”

Optimize for all devices

Mobile-friendly email design is no longer a nice-to-have—it’s necessary. About 81% of emails are opened on a mobile device. 

To optimize your email marketing strategy, consider the following tips:

• Determine the email clients your subscribers use. Test your emails in their top 3-5 clients and optimize your design specifically for those platforms' requirements (like testing fonts, image display, responsive breakpoints, CTAs, and spacing in each).
• Determine which devices your audience uses. Where are people reading your emails? If most use phones, design for smaller screens with larger fonts (minimum 14px), bigger tap targets (44x44px buttons), single-column layouts, and shorter paragraphs that don't require horizontal scrolling.
• Learn if your audience prefers Dark Mode. If you find that your audience reads emails on Apple devices, especially the iPhone, you’ll want to consider a Dark Mode experience for your retail email marketing strategy. 

Use one clear call to action

What should people do when they open your email? Whether the goal is to buy a product or register for an event, be clear about what you want from your subscribers—and stick to one call to action. Too many options can deter customers from doing anything.

Make unsubscribing easy

Every email you send should let people unsubscribe from your list. It’s not only an email marketing best practice—it’s required by law under the CAN-SPAM Act.

It might seem counterintuitive to encourage unsubscribes, but ultimately, an engaged email list is more valuable than a large one. By making unsubscribing easy, you're focusing your efforts on subscribers who are genuinely interested in your brand. This leads to better engagement rates, improved deliverability, and more effective marketing overall.

Combine email with SMS

Email and SMS marketing strategies can, and should, go hand-in-hand for your retail brand. Use your emails to get SMS signups, and use SMS to drive email opt-ins. 

Similar to email marketing, you can use SMS marketing to enhance your customer profiles with data like tags, relationship length, purchase history, and account status. These tools can help you segment lists for personalized campaigns. 

Optimize the subject line 

The subject line is the first thing subscribers see, and it determines whether or not they actually open the email to view its contents. 

Optimize your subject lines to increase your open rate. Ideas include: 

• Write personalized subject lines with the recipient’s first name, recent purchase history, or relevant sales message. 
• Test out using emojis to see if it boosts open rates.
• Include numbers—7 tips, 25% off, buy 2 get 1 free, etc. 

Don’t forget about the teaser text—the line that goes under or next to the subject line, and often at the top of the email, depending on which platform your subscribers are using. 

💡Tip: Shopify Magic is your ultimate communication assistant. It knows the best time to send correspondence and how to generate subject lines and copy, so you’re never starting from scratch.

Track email performance 

Once you’ve set up and launched your email drip campaign, keep an eye on its performance. Over time, you’ll be able to see trends that can provide insights into your business, as well as ways to segment the campaign even further.

Pay special attention to the following benchmarks:

• Open rate. Compare these numbers to the actual subject lines to see why they’re successful, and always A/B test your subject line when possible.
• Clicks and click-through rate. How many people are actually clicking through your emails or taking the desired call-to-action (CTA)? 
• Conversion rates. Are people buying products through your emails? If not, adjust your strategy to get more sales. 
• Unsubscribes. Consider not only the number of unsubscribes and the unsubscribe rate but also the point at which these unsubscribes are happening. Did you send too many emails? Have they been sent too frequently? Are they relevant to your list?

With Shopify Analytics, for example, you can track how email campaigns influence sales across every integrated sales channel. Monitor metrics like click-through rates, products added to cart, and purchases for every retail email campaign.

Retail email marketing examples

Now that you know the tips and tricks, let’s look at some retail email examples to inspire your next campaign. 

Little Words Project

Retail associates at Little Words Project found that asking for a customer’s name and email address at checkout elongated lines and added unnecessary friction. With Shopify POS email capture, however, if a customer’s payment details match with an account, this information gets automatically surfaced at checkout. If the customer didn’t yet have a Shop account, they could quickly enter their email address and opt into marketing.

“Email capture is a recent dashboard that we've added, and we pull the information from Shopify,” says its VP of retail, Sam Sisca. “This email data is flowing into our marketing programs and the larger Little Words Project ecosystem. So customers are getting our promotional emails and announcements about new launches and events coming up at stores close to them.”

The rollout of this Shopify POS feature has proven lucrative for Little Words Project. They’ve increased in-store email capture rates by up to 95% at some locations, while experiencing a 33% increase in POS orders with a customer email and marketing opt-in across all stores.

The Conran Shop

The Conran Shop uses the Klaviyo POS integration to automate email campaigns based on customer data unified in its Shopify dashboard. Its marketing team can get a real-time video of each individual shopper, which feeds back to Klaviyo’s automated workflows for greater email personalization. The result? A 23% increase in email marketing revenue.

“The opportunity to welcome customers through the door, and use Shopify POS, not only to take sales, but also to capture customer details into our workflows with newsletters, personalized offers and assisted shopping experiences is really important to us,” says its digital director Richard Voyce.

Sculpted by Aimee

Award-winning makeup brand Sculpted by Aimee found that omnichannel shoppers—those who make purchases both online and in-store—have three to four times higher lifetime value compared to those who exclusively shop online. 

In an attempt to get consumers to shop across multiple channels, its retail team uses personalized marketing campaigns to stay in touch with in-store customers after they exit a store using email capture in Shopify POS.

“We explain the benefits, such as getting access to rewards and other exclusive offers, and we make sure they know they can opt-out at any time,” says head of ecommerce Kevin Clarke. “It's a simple process and also ensures we stay compliant with GDPR regulations."

Sculpted by Aimee has since experienced a 275% increase in email capture across its network of stores. It now has a unified customer database complete with loyalty program integration and personalized marketing capabilities—all without interrupting the checkout flow by asking customers to share their email addresses in-store.

Make emails work for your retail store 

Retailers need email to help meet their business goals, be it to generate leads, drive foot traffic, or encourage sales. Start testing the retail email campaigns above today to make sure you don’t leave money on the table. It’ll put your marketing efforts to good use and increase your bottom line over time.

Shopify POS has everything you need to manage email marketing efforts for your store. From segmenting subscribers based on first-party data in their unified customer profile to automated workflows, you can do it all without leaving your Shopify dashboard.