I've always subscribed to my own email lists.
I do this to make sure the emails are sent out as they should. This is especially important when using any automation or behavioral emails.
Of all of the things that can break emails, automation is the top one for going unnoticed. The more of automation you use, the more you are "programming" your provider's email system and like any programming, you'll have bugs. Some will be caused by your automation, some will be the provider's fault.
Whatever the source, the bugs will end up hurting you and making your store look bad. Bugs will get your customers stuck, send them duplicate emails, cause them to miss out emails, send them the wrong content, etc. Combine that with SMS automation and you can see how much damage these bugs can cause.
Having yourself and your staff in your email lists are ways to detect some of those automation bugs. Some are going to even be bugs in the email provider's system.
You won't catch them all but the ones you do catch will help out your customers.
While it's easy to add yourself to your email administration directly, I recommend going through the routes a customer does. If you have an opt-in form, fill that out to get on the list. If you add customers when they order, place an order from your store.
It doesn't take much automation to attract and keep good customers either.
- a solid New Customer Welcome campaign,
- a way to add new customers,
- useful content, and
- a regular email schedule
That's all you need to get new customers on the track to become repeat customers. Pretty much every email provider has offered that ability for as long as I can recall (back to 2006ish when I got into email marketing). Some make it harder than it needs to be (not naming names).
Automation just adds complexity on top of that. Complexity that might or might not actually benefit your store more than the basic setup.
If you want to measure how your New Customer Welcome campaign performs, the Order Sequencing analysis in Repeat Customer Insights splits out customer's first order from their second, third, etc. It makes it clear how well new customers are coming back to buy again and how long it takes them.
Eric Davis
Segment your customers to find the diamonds in the rough
Not all customers are equal but it is difficult to dig through all of your data to find the best customers.
Repeat Customer Insights will automatically analyze your Shopify customers to find the best ones. With over 150 segments applied automatically, it gives your store the analytics power of the big stores but without requiring a data scientist on staff.