Email Marketing for Wholesale: What Brands Get Wrong and How to Fix It

Brands spend significant time and energy crafting beautiful, high-converting emails for their direct-to-consumer (DTC) audiences. These emails are often full of bold creative, catchy headlines, and storytelling-driven copy, perfect for nurturing a relationship with individual shoppers.

But here's the problem: those same emails are often sent to wholesale customers, or independent retailers and buyers, without any adaptation for their wants and needs. 

This is a common and costly oversight since your DTC customer and your wholesale customer are not the same, and your email strategy should reflect that.

While your DTC customer might be excited by lifestyle imagery and long-form content about your brand’s story, your wholesale customer is focused on business: buying, restocking, and keeping shelves full.

Retail buyers have limited time and attention as they:

• Work with dozens (sometimes hundreds) of brands.

• Juggle inventory, staffing, merchandising, and marketing all at once.

• Are often small business owners wearing multiple hats.

The more friction you introduce into the buying process, the more likely buyers are to skip your email, or worse, skip placing an order.

Why Your DTC Emails Aren’t as Effective for Wholesale

Many brands fall into the trap of using the same polished templates they send to consumers when reaching out to retail buyers. These templates may look impressive, but they often bury the most important information retailers need: how and where to place their next order.

Wholesale buyers don’t need a flashy design. They need a clear, actionable way to order from you.

Here’s how most wholesale orders actually happen:  back-and-forth emails, straightforward links, and simple calls-to-action. So when you send an over-designed email with multiple buttons, embedded graphics, and paragraphs of copy, you’re adding unnecessary complexity while reducing your conversion rate.

5 Email Marketing Tips to Increase Wholesale Conversion 

If you want to boost wholesale reorders and make your brand a go-to among busy retailers, it’s time to rethink your email strategy. Here are five actionable tips to help you design emails that convert:

1. Keep Your Copy Minimal

Skip the brand storytelling and lifestyle descriptions. Retailers already know what you sell. They’re looking for availability, pricing, and simplicity. Don’t make it difficult for them to get this information, fast. 

Pro tip: A sentence or two is often all you need. Get straight to the point: “Restock our bestsellers below” or “Your favorite styles are back in stock.” 

2. Use Basic, On-Brand Design

Don’t overdo it with creative. Stick to your logo, brand colors, and clean formatting. The goal isn’t to wow, it’s to make ordering easy.

Think of your email as a functional tool, not a brand campaign. Less design equals faster load times, easier reading, and better mobile performance, all of which result in an increase in conversion (which should be your main goal). 

3. Prioritize Conversion Above All

This leads us to the next point, design your email with one goal: get the retailer to place an order. That means the call-to-action (CTA) should be clear, bold, and above the fold. Don’t make them scroll or guess what they should do next.

Avoid: Multiple links, multiple products, or marketing jargon that get in the way of the retailer placing an order.
Do: Use one strong CTA like “Click to Reorder in 2 Clicks” or “Edit and Place Order.” 

4. Let Them Order Right from the Email

Every extra step, from logging into a portal to navigating a B2B catalog, increases friction. If a retailer can place an order directly from the email itself, your conversion rates will jump (something that we’ve seen first-hand at Vanik).

We’ve optimized wholesale emails so buyers can reorder in just a few clicks, right from their inbox. No logins, no phone calls, no PDFs to download.

5. Reduce Friction by Avoiding Portals

Portals seem like a convenient solution, but they’re not designed for speed. Many buyers either don’t remember their passwords, find portals confusing, or don’t have time to manage a different login from all of the brands that they order from. The more streamlined your process, the more frequently they’ll place orders.

Bottom line: Meet retailers where they are, on email, and make it easy for them to act immediately.

What We’re Seeing at Vanik

At Vanik, we work with brands to power their wholesale reorder emails, and turn their emails into a functional ordering tool. We’re seeing reorder email conversion rates exceeding 15% because we design our emails with speed and conversion in mind.

We eliminate the friction most retailers face when reordering by enabling brands to send emails that let buyers reorder with just a few clicks. No logins, no long catalogs, no fancy designs, just fast, functional transactions.

Brands need to stop thinking of wholesale buyers as just another segment of their DTC list. Retailers are busy professionals who need efficiency, not aesthetics. If your goal is to increase reorders, your wholesale email marketing strategy needs to be designed specifically for that audience.

Start by simplifying your message, reducing design clutter, and optimizing every email for conversion, and you’ll quickly see the difference in conversion.

Interested  in seeing how Vanik helps brands simplify wholesale reorders? Get in touch with us and book a demo today.