We know that email marketing is a critical tool that boosts the sales of e-commerce companies. For an email marketing strategy to work and hit the desired targets, several factors need to be considered, and advanced email personalization is one such factor.
Personalized emails can increase CTR by 139%. When we say “personalization,” we don’t mean including the subscriber’s name in the email subject line. Instead, we mean that every email our subscribers receive should be an individual experience creatively designed and thought out, especially for each subscriber.
The goal is for the user to perceive the content as more personal and exciting.
- Subject lines and personalized content inside emails
Being familiar with our database is essential. This means knowing how our subscribers interact with us, their purchase frequency, interests, whether or not they open messages, what type of campaigns engage them, what products they purchase, etc. We just have to know how to interpret the results correctly and come up with strategies that reinforce the message
we’re going to send.
Currently, in email marketing, we can personalize the subject line of our email fundamentally by using the subscriber’s name so that the subscriber sees their name and feels recognized by the brand. To ensure it works or to determine which one works better, we can create an A/B test with different email subject lines, focusing on the personalization of the subscriber’s name. An example of a beverage e-commerce company would be as follows:
- Test A: Name, get your favorite glasses and goblets
- Test B: Name, glasses, and goblets now available starting today
Test A is much more personal, beckoning users to check which glasses and goblets are their favorite. Ideally, when the email is opened, the content inside would be personalized (since that’s what the subject line indicates). Being familiar with each subscriber and their most recent purchases
would enable us to show the glasses and goblets that subscriber has purchased the most or clicked on the most in previous messages they’ve received or while visiting our website.
For one-off campaigns involving specific products from our e-commerce company, we can address the user in a personalized fashion using that product by showing it to them as the loyal customer that they are and thus using the campaign to build their loyalty even further or reward them with a gift or discount.
For greater agility, we can use a single email with several modules, each showing a different product or a discount code associated with a particular product.
We can show the suitable module to each subscriber according to their interests, which we know from our database and from that subscriber’s previous purchases.
We can also leverage our data and use our subscribers’ locations to send them personalized email marketing campaigns about events or news near them. For campaigns involving prizes or sweepstakes, users may have earned a certain number of entries, so we can use email to tell each subscriber how many entries they’ve gotten.
- Activity-based emails
By drawing on accurate, helpful, and relevant information from our database, we can ultimately build our customers’ loyalty by sending them an engaging, personalized monthly analysis, showing what purchases they’ve made, which products are their favorite, and which products they’ve tried for the first
time. We can also ask them what they’ve liked the most and the least, inviting them to provide feedback about their tastes and preferences and helping to build a complete database.
We can take this strategy even further by using rating questions or surveys embedded in emails to learn whether or not users are satisfied with what they’re getting in their inboxes. Star ratings and animated emojis help make email an interactive means of communication that enables users to express themselves.
- The urgency factor and relevant product information
The urgency factor can inspire users to need speed, a plus for e-commerce. And if used correctly, it will help increase clicks, including email marketing conversion clicks. For example, live countdown timers can be incorporated to show how much time is left before promotion ends. Suppose we want to make a product stand out or maximize its popularity. In that case, we may find it practical to show how many products are left in stock or how often a particular product has been clicked on using the data captured by the landing page.
- Product reviews
If we employ the strategies outlined above and invite customers to leave a comment when rating their experience with a particular product, we can compile their comments and reviews. We can then use these comments and reviews to run promotions and send our subscribers messages. Other subscribers’ comments can help establish excellent trustworthiness concerning a product, increasing our conversions.
- Use of AI
Advanced personalization is related to artificial intelligence. For instance, thanks to Send Time Optimization (STO), which uses AI, the subscriber will receive the email at an appropriate time. In other words, based on the record of all the emails the subscriber has received and what times the subscriber tends to open them, AI will develop a predictive model and identify the best time to send the email. This tool increases and improves the open email rate. The more emails an individual receives with STO enabled, the more extensive the AI record will be.
One thing every e-commerce company has in common is wanting to remind users who have left something in their online shopping cart without purchasing it. To do it right, the company should be able to remind the user of the exact products they’ve forgotten to ensure that the final purchase is made. This is where AI comes into play: capturing the user’s movements on the landing page and automatically sending emails to users who leave products in their shopping cart.
Welcome emails are a very similar example. Every time an individual agrees to get news or updates from a website, they would receive a welcome email from the brand. One incentive for signing up and agreeing to receive commercial messages from a brand is a discount on the first purchase on the brand’s website. We can communicate this information simultaneously as we welcome the individual to our website.
Implementing a good strategy for advanced email personalization will help us increase our email open and click-through rates to enhance and build our database relationship. We need an organized, tidy, and well-segmented database to accomplish this.
Learn how Globant can help your business make the most of artificial intelligence when developing your marketing strategies.
