Email marketing can be such a rich source of new customer buying and one of your most cost-efficient marketing strategies. The challenge with email marketing as with any other type of marketing is that it takes real effort — planning and creativity — to have a system that is almost effortless, yet effective.

While I do like working with more sophisticated systems such as Active Campaign and MailChimp, there’s an email automation system for Shopify stores that deserves to be considered. It’s not as powerful or flexible as the higher-end systems, but for anyone using Shopify and wants email automation to be stupid-simple, Seguno is the way to go.

Seguno is also one of the few apps in the marketing space that fully embraces the Shopify user experience. It’s sometimes difficult to realize where Shopify leaves off and Seguno begins. Which is a good thing. When Shopify add-ons depart widely from the Shopify user interface, it can be challenging and disconcerting.

Seguno packs a lot of features into its efficient interface. I like the UI not just because it uses the Shopify UI system, but because Seguno has really thought out the workflow and layout to make it easy to use. Any app can have a pretty interface; it takes dedication to make it easy and logical.

For anyone who has modified their theme in Shopify, the Seguno Content panel makes a lot of sense. You can easily style and arrange various templates for emailing featured products and collections or recent blog posts.

And, of course, you can send newsletters to subscribers, which works very much as you would expect.

The real power part of Seguno, which they have recently enhanced, is email automation. Transactional emails, in contrast to newsletters, are emails that can be sent to any customer who engages with your store, whether it’s a purchase or an abandoned shopping cart. While recipients can unsubscribe from an automation, you don’t need advanced permission to send transactional emails.

With Seguno you can set up extremely robust email automations for welcoming a new customer, reminding customers of a discount, thanking a customer for a purchase, or reminding abandoned shopping cart customers to return and finish their purchase. You can also set up automations based on customer tags.

Automations are multi-step emails that are sent over a period of time-based on some conditions, such as an abandoned shopping cart or no purchases for the last 6 months. With automations, your imagination can go crazy! I know, I build automations all the time for all kinds of purposes, not just in e-commerce, either.

Seguno’s system is built specifically for Shopify ecommerce. It is not a CRM system for building leads, although you can do some automations for people who subscribe to receive emails. Like more sophisticated systems, there is no buying pipeline or the like.

But, what it does is make Shopify emails really quite simple, yet powerful. Much more powerful than Shopify’s native email system, and much easier to manage and use than even MailChimp, which I generally like for its simplicity.

I recommend Seguno Email Automation for anyone on Shopify, especially for SMB’s looking for a solid system that’s easy to manage.