How effective is email marketing on Shopify for abandoned carts?

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Topic summary

The original poster asks about using Shopify’s native email marketing tools for newsletters and automated campaigns (abandoned cart/browsing), specifically whether analytics show open rates, click rates, and individual customer page activity.

Native Shopify Email Capabilities:

  • Shopify provides built-in email campaign analytics tracking opens, clicks, orders, assists, and marketing funnels
  • Reports show which subscribers opened emails, clicked links, or experienced bounces
  • Data can be viewed and exported through Marketing > Recent Marketing > View Report
  • Official documentation and best practices guides are available

Alternative Perspectives:

  • One contributor challenges email marketing effectiveness, citing low single-digit success rates
  • Suggests email campaigns risk damaging brand relationships through irrelevant “spam”
  • Recommends “contextual marketing” via permission-based mobile messages for better customer retention

Third-Party Solutions:

  • Spreeflo app mentioned for automated, hyper-personalized email campaigns
  • Features include abandoned cart recovery, product recommendations, and AI-generated copy requiring only brief daily review
  • Positioned as time-saving for resource-constrained store owners

The discussion remains open with no definitive consensus on optimal approach.

Summarized with AI on November 2. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

Hello

I would like to know if anybody is using Shopify for email marketing, i.e.. to send newsletters and automated messages for example for abandoned carts or abandoned browsing. If so, can you get data in analytics about opening rates, clicking rates - both overall data and data for each customer? Also, for each subscriber to marketing communications can you also see their activities on the pages of the site?

Thank you.

Francesca

1 Like
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Read this discussion. May be this can help you here https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/promoting-marketing/create-teatime results-marketing/shopify-email/create-email. If yes then please mentioned me here.

3

Hey there, @Gallery545 !

Thanks for reaching out in our Community forums and for sharing your concern, I’d be happy to help.

I’m glad to hear that you’re looking to dive deeper into your email marketing analytics as this is a great way to use data to increase your overall conversion and customer experience. A report is generated for you after you send out an email campaign. You can identify which subscribers have opened the email, performed specific actions, or had the email bounce.

The four metrics are Orders, Assists, Performance, and Marketing funnels. All in which will help you identify key behaviors, including the number of unique recipients who opened the email, the total number of recipients who clicked on any link in your email, and will go over the specific behaviours from a customer on your site.

We have a handy guide here that goes into much more detail, but feel free to follow the steps below:

  1. In your Shopify admin, click Marketing.
  2. Under Recent marketing, click the email that you want to review the analytics for.
  3. In the CAMPAIGN SUMMARY section, click View report under the email preview.
  4. Optional: View or export specific data about which customers took specific actions:
    • To view a specific metric’s data, under Email engagement, click the metric.
    • To export a specific metric’s data, under Email engagement, click the metric, and then click Export.

In order to add some additional value to your campaigns, I suggest checking out our guide that covers 20 best practices to help you optimize your emails. This article includes tips to enhance your emails and help you develop an email marketing strategy that works.

All the best!

1 Like
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Hello @Gallery545

Although I haven’t personally tried the solution you suggested I would say this - there is a growing tendency to stay away from email marketing. Why? Hear me out.

If you look at the hit rate for email campaigns you will notice that the accepted rate of success is sometimes as low as single digits. Why are we happy with that result? Because email marketing is a shotgun approach that only works when it hits the person to whom it is relevant.

In fact, it is possible that email marketing can actually hurt your brand - think about it - if the success rate is so low then it means a whole lot of recipients have said NO to opening an email from you. And that means if you keep sending them similar irrelevant emails they are likely to start hating and not ever open another “spam email” from you - even if it is later very relevant to them. You’ve lost them!

The better way is to stay connected to your customers in an enduring relationship from the very first sale. By staying connected you will be able to create loyalty and bran affinity, Allowing you to create and send offers and alerts etc that are particularly relevant to them and not by email but directly to their mobile/tablet etc. as a permission-based message.

I am sure there might be other Apps like ours that also look at the whole Customer Retention / Engagement the way we do - with a new approach. look out for them as they are the future of e-commerce marketing - and it is referred to as Contextual Marketing.

This article may also shed some light.

Good luck!

5

Others have mentioned Shopify apps that help with executing email campaigns by hand. If you’re like me, who’s super stretched thin with handling logistics and product development, then I recommend you take a look at Spreeflo for email automation. Spreeflo looks at your customer segments and prepares hyper-personalised marketing emails for your customers. Every email is uniquely crafted for the customer. It’ll save you alot of time but also constantly be working in the background to help acquire new sales from your existing customers. It includes abandoned cart recovery, brand promotion, product recommendations, and discount code emails. I just spend several minutes on the app to review the generated email copies every day and am able to dispatch personalised emails to hundreds of customers.