Not only is over 30% of a typical online store’s revenue attributable to personalized recommendations, but they can also increase your conversion rate by up to 26%.

In terms of your email marketing, including product recommendations can result in a 175% increase in click-through rate and a whopping 344% increase in time spent on your store.

So the effectiveness and importance of including product recommendations in your email campaigns are not in question. 

Instead, it’s how you can best make use of personalized product recommendations in your campaigns. 

That’s why we’ve put together this list of 5 places you should be recommending products in your emails.

The best places for personalized product recommendations

1) Welcome emails

Your welcome emails are usually the first campaign a customer will receive. They’re also among the most opened and read campaigns you’ll ever send. 

So with so many customers engaging with your welcome emails, you’ll want to make the most of the opportunity. 

And the best way to do this is by including some product recommendations. 

However, seeing as customers receiving your welcome email have likely only just started interacting with your store, chances are they don’t have extensive browsing or purchase histories that would usually inform relevant product recommendations. 

Luckily, SmartrMail lets you include different types of recommendations in your email. One of these options is to prefer your best-selling items when determining which product to recommend. 

You can then label these recommendations as ‘best sellers,’ ‘popular,’ or even ‘loved by everyone’ like Glossier has done in their welcome email below. 

2) Abandoned cart emails

After your welcome series, your cart abandonment emails are one of the most important campaigns. Both in terms of the extra sales they generate and the prime opportunity to recommended products.

While these emails focus on the product your customer has abandoned, you don’t want to put all your eggs in the one basket. 

Especially when some of the most common reasons customers abandon carts is because they have either already purchased the product elsewhere or are simply no longer interested in it. 

That’s why it’s important to cover your bases and include product recommendations in your abandoned cart emails as well. Just like Perigold has done in their abandoned cart email below.

3) Browse abandonment emails

Just like your abandoned cart emails, your browse abandonment emails are another prime opportunity to recommend products.

And for much the same reasons too. 

Just because someone was looking at a particular item, doesn’t mean they necessarily want it. There could’ve been something wrong with the particular variant or it just simply wasn’t their style. 

That’s why it’s important to include personalized product recommendations so that you still have an opportunity to make a sale. 

And even if your customer ends up purchasing the original product, they might also purchase one or two of your recommendations which will increase your average order values.

4) Sale emails

It’s not just email automations that make for great opportunities to recommend products. Any email newsletters and sale emails you send also lead themselves well to personalized recommendations.

All you need to do is include some specific product recommendations in your email below the main message. Like Breda has done in their email below.

For sale emails, you’ll obviously only want to recommend products that are actually on sale. You can do this in SmartrMail by creating a new product feed and then selecting it when adding your recommended product block.  

5) Win-back emails

Lastly, one other automation where you’ll definitely want to include product recommendations is your win-back campaign.

As their name suggests, your win-back emails attempt to re-engage customers who have gone cold and stopped purchasing from your store. 

And given that this is no easy task, you’ll want to make sure your win-back emails are the best they can be which means including product recommendations. 

Again, all you need to do is include a few personalized recommendations beneath your main message like in Birchbox’s email below. 

How to send personalized product recommendations in emails

It’s all very well and good to know where to include product recommendations. It’s another thing to know how to actually include the recommendations in your campaigns.

Thankfully SmartrMail makes it incredibly simple and easy to add recommendations to any email you send. 

All you have to do is drag a Recommended Product block into the email as you’re composing it. Or if you want to add recommendations to one of your existing automations, you just need to go in and edit the email to add a Recommended Product block. 

You can find more detailed instructions on adding Recommended Product blocks here.

Conclusion

Adding personalized product recommendations in your email campaigns is an incredibly powerful way to increase engagement and make more sales.

That’s why you should incorporate them as an essential part of your email marketing strategy. 

And the best way to start doing this is by including them in the places we’ve mentioned above. 

But you don’t need to stop there. Plenty of other automations like your cross-sell, and thank you emails will also benefit from personalized recommendations. 

Essentially, whenever you set up a new email automation or go to send a newsletter, you’ll want to be asking yourself if you think it’ll benefit from including some recommendations.

The post 5 Places to Include Product Recommendations in Your Emails appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

Jeff Bezos has made it no secret that the key to Amazon’s growth is their hyper charged recommendation engine and their constant implementation of machine learning in every part of their business. At a high level, terms like machine learning can scare smaller online retailers away – but broken down at a smaller scale every retailer regardless of size can implement Amazon’s recommendation strategies in their own marketing. Amazon’s recommendation engine is quite simple in theory. While Amazon needs machine learning to do it at scale, any retailer can utilize their upselling and cross-selling strategies with common sense, a few minutes of data analysis, and some handy apps.

In this post I’ll highlight each of Amazon’s recommendation strategies and show you how they implement them through on-site recommendations, email recommendations, and recommendations with Facebook Dynamic Product Ads.

On-site recommendations

Amazon’s on-site recommendations are undoubtedly a key to their success. The developers of this recommendation algorithm refer to it as ‘item-to-item collaborative filtering‘. Basically, this means that Amazon customers are provided with matches based on the items they interact with, rather than trends among similar customers.

Just engaging with a few products on Amazon.com is enough to trigger the site’s algorithm to start recommending products to customers. So I created an account with Amazon to test this out.

The first product I clicked on was the movie Moana. What can I say? I’m a Disney fan.

You don’t need to have a team of genius developers with fancy algorithms to create a tailored browsing experience for your customers. Here are some tips from Amazon that you can use to improve your e-commerce store’s on-site recommendations.

Tip 1: Recommend products your customers will enjoy.

On the same page as before, Amazon showed me some more movies that other customers had also watched.

By claiming that customers who saw Moana had also watched the other films shown, Amazon is cross-selling with social proof. We are led to believe that these other film titles are popular amongst those who watched Moana.

Even though I didn’t add Moana to my shopping cart, let alone actually purchase it, the algorithms figured out that I’m at least interested in the movie. Amazon then started recommending even more animated films to me when I navigated to the website’s home page.

These suggestions are a combination of new films (ones that I’ve probably never seen before), or movies that have proven to be hugely popular (Frozen, Beauty and the Beast, Tangled and Toy Story); they’re putting their best foot forward. Based on my engagement with Moana, I should be interested in at least one of these other movies.

Tip 2: Think laterally about the target audience of your product.

Most of the movies recommended to me are quite similar to Moana. They’re from Disney, or they’re at least animated. The exception is Jason Bourne, as shown above. Including this movie is actually pretty clever on their part.

Moana and most of the other films in this section are clearly targeted toward children, who probably don’t have their own Amazon accounts or the financial means to purchase these movies.

By recommending a film targeted toward adult audiences, Amazon is effectively giving parents their own option; after their kids have watched Moana, they can put them to bed and watch Jason Bourne afterwards. This is again evident when I navigate back to Amazon’s home page, where I was recommended Jack Reacher: Never Go Back.

Of course, it is important to know your target audience, but also think about who else might be paying for your products.

For example, you might be an e-commerce store that sells women’s jewellery. While your products should be appealing to your female customers, your on-site recommendations could also target their husbands or boyfriends who might be purchasing something as a gift.

Tip 3: Cross-sell with complementary products.

Amazon attempts to cross-sell by showing me products that are complementary to the item I’m currently viewing.

Amazon again uses social proof in this recommendation. They suggest that this iPod and the iPod case are “frequently bought together” by other customers. Whether this is true or not (the cynical side of me thinks that it’s maybe an effort to push sales for some more unpopular items), having this cross-sell there is putting the idea in the customer’s head. It could even result in the purchase of an extra product.

As a relatable offline example, I recently bought a pair of leather boots from Airflex. As the shop assistant was processing the order, she pointed to a tube of water repellant cream next to the counter. She suggested that I should buy it to treat my new shoes with, so they wouldn’t get ruined if I were to wear them in the rain. It’s cross-selling with relevant product recommendations like this that can increase your revenue.

If you’re using Shopify, we recommend the Also Bought app to make cross-sells easy.

Tip 4: Showcase similar items, so that customers can compare.

And what if I don’t like the particular product I’m looking at? Well Amazon takes it upon themselves to suggest similar products that I might be more interested in.

They provide a variety of similar products with slight differences, such as colour, price, design, and so forth. Amongst all these different iPods, there must be one that I like, and would be willing to purchase.

Tip 5: Upsell if there’s a new, better model.

Who wants a shabby old iPod, when they could have the newer, better model? Customers are always looking out for what’s trendy. Sure, people are often on the hunt for a bargain too, but you could potentially be making more money by showing them the newer (and more expensive) product.

If you’re using Shopify, we recommend Bold Upsell to get upsells set up quickly without any coding.

Tip 6: Remind customers of products that they’ve looked at.

Finally, the ‘Browsing history’ shows me items that I’ve clicked on. This works in two different ways. Firstly, it reminds me of products that I’ve recently looked at, and was probably interested in buying. Secondly, it makes it easy for me as a potential customer to quickly revisit these items. I don’t have to look through the history on my browser, or have to search for the product again.

Customers can easily find these items, making it more likely that they will go through with the purchase. Some people (myself included) have a Dory-like memory and need to be reminded of things. So at the very least, it reminds customers of the products they were interested in.

E-mail Product Recommendations

Amazon also makes recommendations through e-mail. If you’re unfamiliar with e-mail marketing, check out this introduction to email marketing for e-commerce. Continuing to recommend products to customers has a number of advantages.

Firstly, it can reinforce on-site recommendations for products that they’ve seen, or show them products that they might have missed or haven’t noticed before on your e-commerce store.

If your customer has already purchased an item, it’s also a good way of recommending some more complementary items they may be interested in. The added advantage of e-mail recommendations is that it’s a more direct one-to-one message that can reach your customers, whether or not they’re browsing your site. With relevant copy and products customers will engage with your messages and easily be drawn back to make a purchase.

Here are some more tips that can you take on board in the email marketing of your own e-commerce store.

Tip 1: Personalize your recommendation e-mails.

In this e-mail, Amazon personalizes both the recipient name and the recommended products in the body of the e-mail. I can’t stress the importance of personalizing e-mails to customers enough. When combined with personalized recommendations, this makes the customer feel like you understand them.

“Due to Amazon’s email recommendations, 1 board game purchase resulted in 3.” – Josh Reyes

It might be a good idea to use a more casual greeting, though. Something like ‘Hi’ or ‘Hey’ could make the address feel less automated, and more casual. Similarly, using just the customer’s given name, rather than their full name, could work to the same effect.

Tip 2: But be careful about personalizing your emails.

Even if your customer has purchased a product before, think about whether they would purchase it again. As shown above, a male customer may purchase a product as a gift for their girlfriend or wife. But this is probably going to be a once-off transaction, and they will probably be less inclined to buy a similar product after their purchase. Suggesting a similar product targeted towards men after the purchase has been made or after enough time has passed could have been more effective.

Tip 3: Show more social proof.

Referring to purchasing trends amongst other customers, and describing recommendations as “best selling” gives e-mail recipients social proof of these products. This suggests to them that these items are popular. People always want to fit in with the in-crowd. It should be also noted that these claims are not backed up in the email with things like customers’ ratings or comments.

This could be a good opportunity to highlight some positive feedback that your products have received, assuring customers that the product is high quality.

Recommendations with FaceBook Dynamic Product Ads

You may have noticed that after you’ve been browsing online, you’ll start seeing adverts for products you’ve looked at – on Amazon, in this case. Particularly on Facebook, these will appear both in your timeline, as well as on the side bar.

This merges both Amazon interest-based ads and Facebook dynamic ads in reinforcing on-site and e-mail recommendations for customers. Using Facebook dynamic adverts can help to promote products to customers who have already expressed interest on Amazon.

Amazon’s retargeting campaigns can be helpful in reminding customer of items they’ve forgotten about. In saying so, be careful you don’t cross the line into being creepy. Sometimes, I’ll see an advert online that’s so personalized that it includes my suburb or postcode and I get freaked out. You don’t want to do that to your customers.

But it makes no sense not to tap into Facebook as a tool for e-commerce; Facebook is the top social media platform, with 1.23 billion users scrolling through their timelines each day. Using social media for marketing is something that every e-commerce store should do, and Facebook dynamic ads are an easy way to do this.

Future predictions

It’s their ability to adapt to trends that has seen Amazon rise to the top.

Amazon’s net sales revenue for 2016 was 135.99 billion U.S. dollars – up from 107.01 billion the year before. Their revenue growth has been exponential; the company has managed to multiply their revenue almost thirteenfold over the last decade.

With the success of their on-site recommendations, e-mail marketing, and integration with social media, Amazon will continue integrating machine learning and artificial intelligence in every part of their business.

Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos discusses this in a letter to Amazon shareholders:

“At Amazon, we’ve been engaged in the practical application of machine learning for many years now. Some of this work is highly visible: our autonomous Prime Air delivery drones; the Amazon Go convenience store that uses machine vision to eliminate checkout lines; and Alexa,1 our cloud-based AI assistant. (We still struggle to keep Echo in stock, despite our best efforts. A high-quality problem, but a problem. We’re working on it.)”

But Bezos also hints at how the company uses machine learning behind the scenes. He discusses the use of machine learning in the website’s algorithms, making improvements in demand forecasting, product search ranking, product and deals recommendations, merchandising placements, fraud detection, translations, and so forth.

The company is also looking at lowering costs of machine learning and artificial intelligence. This means that other organizations might be able to access these in the future, and use them in their own business practices.

With all of this in mind, what are some of your own strategies in preparing your e-commerce store for the future? Are you providing on-site recommendations for your customers? Or are you using e-mail marketing or social media analytics? Leave a comment below.

The post How to Achieve Amazon-like Sales Growth with Product Recommendations appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

Here’s the thing: A lot of ecommerce store owners understand that they have to promote their store’s products to their customers. It’s only a natural part of digital marketing. Unfortunately, what so many of these owners fail to understand is the huge difference between simply general email newsletters and automated product recommendation emails, which are smart.

The latter is specifically targeted to your customers’ behaviors, ensuring relevance when you send them recommendations. This relevance will make all the difference with conversions.

Let’s take a closer look at when you should be using these awesome automated product recommendation emails.

What They Are

Before we get into the right times to use automated product recommendation emails, we should clarify exactly how they’re generated.

These special kinds of emails are generated by SmartrMail’s own platform, which allows you to create and design them based on your customers’ unique browsing behavior, email clicks and past purchase history. Our system’s customizability is quite deep, yet at the same time very straightforward, so it’s easy for anyone to learn and implement.

So, for instance, if one of your customers looked at neckties with gold patterning both in your online store and in previous emails sent by your store, an automated product recommendation email would include choices like these.

Learn more in our short explainer video.

In an Email Blast

Ecommerce-store owners are busy entrepreneurs! They have to attend to everything from making sure they have their products in stock to ensuring a conversion-friendly site design. In other words, not every owner will be able to send out a special email that features new or unique content and products to highlight.

This is a situation tailor-made for automated product recommendation emails!
You want to keep your subscribers constantly engaged, and one of the best ways of achieving this is with a regular (weekly or biweekly) email blast that features recommended products based on their browsing behavior, email clicks and purchase history.

Email blasts like this, specifically targeted and matched to relevancy, are ideal because they relate to your subscribers based on what’s personally important to them.

In Cart-Abandonment Situations

A sad fact of life in the ecommerce industry is the high rate of abandoned shopping carts. According to the highly regarded Baymard Institute (the web-usability research institute), the average online shopping cart abandonment rate is almost 70%—68.81%, to be exact!

What better time to add product recommendations than in cart-abandonment emails?
If you’re running an online store, you’ve likely had to deal with your fair share of abandoned shopping carts. If so, you’ve likely also already sent out cart-abandonment emails to remind people that they have something in their cart that they didn’t finish purchasing.

When you add automated product recommendations in the same email, you jump on an excellent opportunity to potentially also increase a customer’s order total, not to mention get him or her to finish the original purchase!

It’s kind of like two birds with one stone…

After Your Customers Have Made a Purchase!

The old saying haste makes waste does not apply with automated product recommendation emails. In fact, if you wait too long to follow up with product recommendations, you may very well lose out in sales your store could get.

An order confirmation or follow-up email (when the order is shipped or underway to its destination) is the ideal opportunity to display a few product recommendations. Product recommendations should be displayed as cross selling or upselling options.

For instance, if your customers have already purchased a new couch or sofa, then some very relevant product recommendations to show them in a follow-up email would be either expensive, leather sofas or some comfortable couch cushions or some nice coffee tables to complement their purchase.

The point is that the use of product recommendations after a purchase is key! This is the time when your customers are still in the buying mentality, so showing them these recommendations can very likely produce additional conversions.

When You’re Asking for Feedback of Some Kind

It’s very common for ecommerce stores to send emails to their customers to ask for feedback ranging from their customer-service experiences to how they found the checkout process and everything in between. Such surveys are also the perfect moment to float them some product recommendations.

Simply include another section within the email—after the section in which you ask for feedback, of course—where you show them recommendations. Again, these should only be relevant recommendations that pertain to your customers’ interests based on their shopping behaviors on your site and also their purchase history.

Psychologically, when you already have your customers’ attention because they’re filling out your store-related survey, their attention level will continue to be high when they’re looking at other content in the same email (read: your product recommendations).

Together With Lifecycle Emails

A lifecycle email is usually a message that you send by email to customers based on trying to attract them, sell to them, and then delight them with awesome experiences. This can include things like their birthday, anniversary or even following a recent purchase from your store. These kinds of emails are basically sent to show that your brand cares about them beyond just getting the sale.

Since customers are already used to these common forms of email communications, they’re also a great opportunity to insert some product recommendations.

In this scenario, you’re actually taking personalization and relevance to a more poignant level because the initial lifecycle email is highly personal, and then you finish off this type of email with specifically tailored product recommendations. The customer reading this email will be impressed with the extra touches of relevance to their life, which should earn their attention, and increase the likelihood of conversions based on the product recommendations.

The Timing Is Everything

Automated product recommendation emails work great all the time. The problem is that not every ecommerce-store owner knows when to use them or specifically how. When you send out these types of emails can make a big difference to sales and conversions. While email-blasting your shoppers with automated product recommendations does work, it’s important to also realize that this isn’t the only way to get these recommendations to them. It’s best not to over-rely on blasts, but implement all of these different strategies.

In 2017, e-commerce email marketing will to continue to shift away from simple mass email newsletters. You have to start understanding exactly who your base of customers are. This means carefully analyzing your customers’ email clicks, browsing behavior and, of course, past purchase history. While that might sound too advanced for any busy e-commerce store owner to do themselves. The great news is that SmartmMail’s advanced algorithms do the work for you, so that product recommendations are automatically emailed to the right customers or subscribers.

Our platform lets online-store owners put together a relevant and personalized email of this type with no hassle. So give it a try today!

The post Knowing When to Use Automated Product Recommendation Emails appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

Sure, it involves segmenting your email lists, so that you’re not just sending mass, bulk emails to everyone on your list—but that’s only part of the picture. Successful email personalization means tailoring the subject line and email content to your customers, based on data you’ve gathered from their shopping habits on your site and opt-in information that they share.

Simply put: If you’re not harnessing the power of email personalization, then your online store is missing out on a lot of potential conversions and, therefore, revenue. Don’t let that keep happening!

Consider these spectacular benefits of personalizing your emails to customers.

Outrageously Higher Conversion Rates

When we talk about conversion rates here, we don’t just mean a sale on your website. We mean the mini conversions that need to happen way before someone finally purchases from your site.

Numerous studies over the years confirm that personalization helps conversions a great deal in email marketing.

Take an Adestra July 2012 report that revealed:

Personalized subject lines have a 22.2% higher likelihood of being opened

An Experian survey from 2015 reported that:

Emails featuring personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to get opened

Clearly, if you’re not personalizing your subject lines with the names of your customers and news that’s relevant to them (like sales on products they care about), then you’ll lose out on conversions.

Moving on, let’s talk about unique open and click rates. According to another Experian study, this one from 2013:

• Personalized promotional emails produced 29% higher unique open rates
• Personalized promotional emails produced 41% higher unique click rates

Perhaps the most persuasive email-personalization stat is this one, where segmented and personalized campaigns generated a 760%-lift in email revenue. Think about that improvement for a second—that’s enormous!

So for more conversions in the sense of open and click rates, which also increase the likelihood of the ultimate conversion (read: purchases) farther down the sales funnel, personalize your emails.

Increasing Customer Retention

Another benefit of email personalization is the very positive effect it can have on reducing your customer churn — or the number or rate of customers who simply won’t interact with or buy your product or service anymore.

As an example, churn could be caused by your customers actually losing interest in your brand because you don’t engage them enough and therefore fail to continue to see the value in your offerings.

A customer who has been a long time purchaser from your store likely has different interests and preferences than someone buying from your store the first time. With all the data you’ve collected from them you should be sending them a curated collection of products based on their preferences, not just the same products you send to everyone else. 73 percent of consumers prefer to do business with online retailers who use personal information to make their shopping experience more relevant.

If you ignore the data and keep sending products that aren’t relevant, your customers interest and purchases are likely to drift away from your brand. But if you keep your product promotions fresh and personalize your selection, you can reduce churn and thereby increase customer retention.

It isn’t just product selection that needs to personalized. Sometimes, your customers will start an action on your site and not carry it through to completion—whether that’s abandoning a purchase altogether or perhaps failing to complete a task in a registration sequence. Such a situation is the perfect opportunity for a personalized triggered email that reminds or gently prods them to finish what they were doing.

The beauty of such triggered emails is twofold:

1. Your customer will complete whatever action they initially took on your site, which is a conversion for you
2. By responding to your personalized triggered email, your customer is providing you with integral data about their behavior, which you can use for even more detailed customer segmentation down the road

So when you send personalized emails, you reduce churn, find out more integral data about your customer, and come away with more information for future segmentation.

Ahead of the Curve

When it comes to digital marketing like email, it’s always best to anticipate where the tide is going. Understanding this will help you communicate with your customers more effectively than what many in your industry are currently doing. As a result, your ecommerce business will have better customer service than many of your competitors—greatly helping in giving you an advantage in your market.

Let’s take a look at sentiment, which is so important. According to an Econsultancy and Adestra Email Marketing Industry Census report from 2016, 78% of respondents think that all emails will be personalized in the next, five years. That’s huge!

When almost four out of five people in email marketing think that personalization will be the norm soon, that’s a key indicator of how your customers want your business to communicate with them. So don’t ignore such an important finding: Get ahead of the curve and begin implementing personalization, such as automated product recommendations, which our SmartMail platform will let you easily do.

Sure, the stats are depressing when it comes to how many retailers are currently personalizing their emails, with just 39% saying they do so, based on a survey.
But that’s where your opportunity lies: Get ahead of the curve today, and communicate with your customers relevantly and how they expect you to. You’ll see great results this way.

No Downside to Email Personalization

It’s rare when a form of digital marketing yields consistently awesome and powerful results, but email personalization is exactly such a reality. Too many businesses today already annoy and waste the time of their customers by sending them emails that are generic and not tailored to their interests and needs. As a result, such emails are often rightly marked as spam and denounced as bulk email newsletters.

That’s because such overly general emails have no value for your customers. What’s worse is some of these recipients will turn you off for good, and you’ll lose valuable customers all because you failed to send personalized emails.

Don’t let that happen to your brand. Instead, respect the usefulness of email personalization, and begin incorporating it into your customer communications. SmartrMail’s personalization is just the solution you’re looking for, so try it today!

The post The Greatest Benefits of Email Personalization for E-Commerce appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.