Is Shopify’s email marketing service all it’s cracked up to be?

Everyone in the world of ecommerce is excited to hear the news that ecommerce software provider, Shopify, has added an email marketing service to their offering (Mediapost Announcement). Including us here at Pure360. “Why?” you might ask. After all, “isn’t this stealing your bread and butter?” Well, no is the honest answer.

Don’t get me wrong, we relish competition here at Pure360. It’s what helps keep us at the top of our game and enables us to provide the best service, tech and value to our customers. Note that I’ve mentioned value here. Which leads me on to question what value lies within this new service for ecommerce brands?

I was recently at an email deliverability conference (very technical, but I won’t bore you with all that), and suffice to say that the opinion of us geeks in the Email Delivery/Martech arena is as follows: you wouldn’t expect Waitrose to start delivering your post as part of their service. And even if they did, you’d still go to the Post Office, because they’re the experts.

Broadly speaking, that’s the argument we’re making here.

Sure, whichever service you choose will pretty much send your email out immediately (nobody does instant email delivery and don’t let anyone tell you differently). And the reporting in both solutions will show you what happened with that email, such as opens, clicks, etc. So what’s the issue I have with it?

ESPs do what they do every day – that includes us here at Pure360. And we’re blimin’ good at it. We can get inbox placement and IP reputation management handled because we have the experience and the expertise to do it. And that’s what customers are looking for – the expertise and dedication to their email marketing needs. For someone to take responsibility for all that technical mumbo jumbo so you can focus on your day job.

The last thing you, as an ecommerce provider, need to deal with is someone ringing you up because the purchase advice email never arrived, or a batch of customers never received the notification that a product was out of stock. That puts your staff on the phone and not in a good way. You need peace of mind that the email will get delivered. Much like the courier firm you’ve entrusted to ship your packages to your loyal customers. You do not want to have to think about sending Mike out of the office with a van full of boxes when he should be doing invoices. Similarly, you don’t want Selina sat on the phone when she needs to be doing inventory and prepping the next line of products for sale.

And as a customer of yours, I wouldn’t expect anything different. After all, I bought from you because I trust you to do the right thing and be good at selling what you sell. So in summary, you need to trust the experts just as much as your customers need to trust you.