Far from being relegated to the growing pile of outdated marketing techniques, email marketing remains a firm favourite. In fact, 59 per cent of marketers say email is their biggest source of ROI.
But there’s something tainting this rosy picture of email marketing bliss – relevancy.
How many times have you opened an email newsletter from an eCommerce retailer or brand only to be met with products you have no interest in buying or links to content you don’t want to read? At best, you’ll close the email without clicking, hoping the next one will be more relevant. At worst, you’ll unsubscribe.
According to the DMA’s research, only 55 per cent of marketers think more than half of all the emails their business sends are relevant to the individual recipient. And only around one in seven people think more than half the emails they receive are useful to them.
Ecommerce retailers and brands should take note, as research shows almost one in three consumers get annoyed by Black Friday and Christmas marketing that isn’t relevant to them. Beyond seasonal marketing, 55 per cent of consumers have stated that they like email messages that contain relevant products and offers.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Marketers don’t have to accept their fate of alienating customers with irrelevant emails. The solution? Email personalisation. Email marketers often include personalisation, such as product recommendations in their triggered campaigns. But personalisation tends to be overlooked when it comes to regular newsletters and BAU emails. This is a huge missed opportunity.
In this post, Fresh Relevance take you through five tried and tested eCommerce email personalisation tactics to help boost your bulk newsletters and BAU emails.
1. Product recommendations
Here at Fresh Relevance, we’re big advocates of personalised product recommendations in eCommerce email marketing. That’s because we know they work. In fact, one eCommerce brand boosted their sales by 24 per cent by including personalised product recommendations in their email newsletters.
With many different types of product recommendations to choose from, it’s worth finding the solution that resonates most with your audience through A/B testing.
In this example, Timeout use their email newsletter to recommend products and experiences based on the recipient’s past browsing behaviour. This allows them to display a wide range of their offerings and harness the power of familiarity, as shoppers tend to prefer products they have seen multiple times.
Wilko use their newsletter to highlight the best offers in the customer’s favourite product category. This can be a particularly effective type of product recommendation when targeted at customers who have previously bought or browsed lower priced items.
2. Social proof
Social proof is a powerful conversion booster and should be incorporated into your email campaigns wherever possible. Well-placed social proof cues can increase urgency and encourage recipients to click through to your website. What’s more, including social proof in eCommerce email campaigns can lead to sales uplifts of 13 per cent.
Viovet uses social proof in their email newsletters, boosting the efficacy of their personalised product recommendations with popularity messaging alongside five star ratings and reviews. With over half of consumers claiming to look for star ratings when making a decision, this is a tactic worth adding. The results speak for themselves – Viovet have seen a 19 per cent increase in click throughs since implementing reviews and ratings into their email marketing.
3. Personalised banners
Your hero banner is the one and only chance you have to make a good first impression on your recipient. And since the human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text, it pays to use your banner wisely. Catch your recipient’s attention with a hero banner that caters to their interests and brand preferences, for example tailoring the imagery to their favourite brand or product category. Or try using contextual data to display weather-appropriate content.
In this example, Halfords use their banner to display a rain-splattered car window with relevant text when it’s raining in the recipient’s location, using the rest of the email to promote products such as wiper blades.
Thorntons personalises their hero banner by displaying the recipient’s name on a chocolate-shaped heart for their Valentine’s Day newsletter. Who wouldn’t be tempted to read on when the email starts in such a deliciously personal way?
4. Dynamic pricing
One surefire way to ensure your customer has a terrible experience is to promote out of date discounts in your marketing emails. But I’m willing to bet you want to provide your customers with an experience that keeps them coming back for more. So make sure you use real-time dynamic pricing in your emails promoting discounts and deals to avoid customer frustration.
FFX uses real-time dynamic pricing to serve their email recipients with live prices at the time of open, ensuring they only promote deals that are still available on the website. This tactic has paid off for FFX, as the inclusion of dynamic content into their bulk marketing emails has increased their click to open rate from three per cent to 25 per cent.
5. Countdown timers
Speaking of real-time dynamic content, countdown timers are another nifty tactic to increase recipient engagement. Countdown timers increase urgency, build excitement, and reduce click to purchase rates, making them a useful tool to have in your email marketing toolkit.
The Entertainer uses their countdown timer to highlight the approaching deadline for their flash sale, helping to speed up the purchase process and increase the desirability of their products by creating urgency.
Marketers shouldn’t have to resign themselves to a life of sending predominantly irrelevant emails. Instead, use our five email personalisation tactics to inject some relevance into your eCommerce marketing emails, and wow your recipients with engaging content that increases click through rates and boosts sales.
Eddy Swindell, CRO & Co-founder at Fresh Relevance, will be discussing this in more detail at our Digital Marketing Summit on 5 November. Brands can register here, and agencies can buy tickets here.