That’s why personalized product recommendations have been at the heart of SmartrMail from the very beginning and have helped thousands of merchants grow their sales.

But for too long the ability to utilize these recommendations have been limited to our product recommendation and abandoned cart emails. 

That’s why we’re excited to announce recommended product blocks.

What are recommended product blocks and what do they do?

Recommended product blocks let you add a personalized product into the body of any email newsletter or automation. 

They behave just like regular product blocks, but instead of having to choose a product yourself, SmartrMail will automatically include the product your customer is most likely to purchase.

This is achieved through our machine-learning powered recommendation engine that analyzes customer data from your online store to automatically determine the best product to recommend to each customer.

You can add recommended product blocks the same way you select any other type of block when composing a newsletter or automation.

You can also control which products can and cannot be recommended with product feeds. 

This lets you, for example, to only recommend products from your Mother’s Day collection in your Mother’s Day email.

How recommended product blocks can help your email marketing

Recommended product blocks open up a variety of new opportunities not only to improve the effectiveness of your email campaigns but also makes composing emails faster.

We know that personalized recommendations both increase the number of conversions from emails as well as the average order value. So not only do they result in more people purchasing from your store, but these customers are also sending more than they would’ve otherwise.

They can also help keep your automations fresh and customized for each individual subscriber. 

For example, instead of just creating a win-back automation that contains a generic “we miss you, come back” message, you can now personalize it with recommended products. 

You can then set this recommended product block to the pre-made ‘new arrivals’ product feed so it only recommends new products to entice customers back to your store. 

You’ll also be able to save time setting up campaigns by no longer needing to manually choose which products to include. 

This can be particularly useful with your cross-sell automations where instead of having to think about which products to cross-sell yourself, you can simply include a product recommendation block in the email. 

More possibilities are coming soon

While being able to recommend products from your product feeds in any newsletter or automation opens up plenty of opportunities, we’re working on even smarter product blocks. 

Soon you’ll be able to dynamical product blocks which will be able to display:

• Your customer’s last product purchased
• Products within the same last collection purchased
• Products with the same last variant purchased

We’ll keep you posted once these options are live! 

The post Send Smarter Emails with Recommended Product Blocks appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

By providing a personalized experience on your Shopify store, you can make the shopper eager to continue shopping from you. 

What is ecommerce personalization?

Ecommerce personalization allows merchants to display relevant offers, recommendations, and content to their visitors based on their browsing and order history, demographics, and other personal data.

For instance, you can enhance the shopping experience for a customer who is about to checkout by displaying a ‘Recently Viewed Products’ recommendation widget. By seeing other products they were interested in, you can nudge them to add more items to their cart. 

Importance of ecommerce personalization

Personalization has proven to positively impact ecommerce businesses. Brands that have personalized experiences have seen higher engagement, better customer experiences, higher customer acquisition, and increased conversion rates.

Personalization allows you to successfully lead shoppers from your storefront to checkout. On your Shopify store, shoppers can be nudged to continue shopping, with recommendations tailored to them or relevant messages that encourage them to checkout. 44% of consumers say that they will likely become repeat buyers after a personalized shopping experience with a particular online retailer. 

It isn’t just on-site personalization that customers are receptive to. Personalization in cart abandonment emails induces higher customer engagement rates and reduces cart abandonment rates by 10%-30%. 

What’s more, personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates than non-personal.

Types of ecommerce personalization

There are 3 broad types of ecommerce personalizations to help you identify the different ways you can personalize your Shopify store’s experience and communication for shoppers:

1. Context

Personalizing your store based on the context like which type of device, location, time of day, etc. For instance, you could send a notification during the weekend nudging shoppers to have a fun weekend. This also includes event-based promotions, localized languages, and currencies, etc.

2. Behavior

Using your shopper’s behavior, you can personalize your store experience and your store’s marketing to display relevant promotions and recommendations like ‘Recently Viewed Product’ recommendations and abandoned cart emails.

3. History

You can tap into your customer’s history to display personalized store experiences and messages. This would include transactional updates, loyalty program messages, and past email interactions.

Ecommerce personalization strategies

1. Localization

If you have a large customer base of Spanish or French speakers, you need to adapt your store’s language to these customers if you don’t want to lose them. Localizing your Shopify store to different kinds of customers is a crucial part of ecommerce personalization. If the experience you are providing is not optimized to a customer, they will end up abandoning your store completely.

When localizing your store’s experience, ensure that the language and the currency of the store are suited to your customers.

Apps like Geolocation allow you to cater to a global audience while providing local experiences. The app will recommend the right language and currency for your store visitors based on their details. This way, you won’t want to spend time worrying about unoptimized experiences to shoppers.

2. AI-powered product recommendation

The kind of recommendations that you show shoppers on your Shopify store is important. Irrelevant and vague product recommendations can lower your chances of converting interested visitors.

Take, for instance, Amazon. Amazon displays highly personalized recommendations to its shoppers, helping them find what they are looking for and nudging them to purchase faster. Due to this positive and convenient shopping experience, their shoppers come back to them time and again to shop. 35% of Amazon’s revenue is generated by its recommendation engine.

Set up personalized product recommendations using WISER. This Shopify app is built to help you power your store with personalized recommendations based on each shopper’s history and behavior. Using this data, Wiser allows you to display widgets like ‘Recently Viewed Products’ and ‘Inspired By Your Browsing History’. 

You can also set up custom recommendations like ‘Popular Products’ and ‘Frequently Bought Together’. Wiser lets you set up ecommerce personalization on your Shopify store without having to spend too much time customizing experiences manually. Install Wiser now to personalize recommendations on your Shopify store.

3. Location relevant announcement bar

Running a sale for shoppers in a specific country? Or want to inform shoppers in different countries about their shipping times? One of the best ways to add location-based context to shoppers is with a customized announcement bar. This can allow you to display different messages based on the country that the shopper is from, ensuring shoppers receive a very unique experience and accurate information about your Shopify store.

You can enable this with the Country-Based Announcement Bar App. This newly launched app lets you display specific announcement messages for different countries. You won’t be limited to one generic announcement bar anymore!

4. Live chat

When you enter a retail store, you have a store assistant who helps you find the right size and clear any questions you have. This experience is often lost in an ecommerce store. This is where live chat can help.

With a live chat, your shoppers can ask questions to your team and get instant, personalized help. With their questions answered, shoppers can go on to confidently shop from the store. 38% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company if they offer live chat support. 

Tidio is a Shopify store that lets you set up live chat on your Shopify store. With it, you can set up automated chatbots to answer frequently answered questions as well as allow your customer executives to respond to custom questions from shoppers. 

5. Segmented audiences for personalized marketing campaigns

Your analytics has a goldmine of information on the different ways you can personalize experiences for different customers. Analytics apps like RevTap allow you to tap into customer segments. These segments define different kinds of customers you can have on your Shopify store and understand their preferences.

You can then use these customer segments to send personalized marketing campaigns to these segmented audiences. This way, you can deliver relevant messaging to shoppers, increase clicks and conversions for your marketing promotions.

6. Product customizations

Shoppers want more flexibility with how they customize the products they buy. This is especially important for items like shirts. Many ecommerce stores provide multiple variants of a specific product and even custom details, based on the industry. You can provide such flexibility on your Shopify store too.

The Bold Product Options app lets you set up a customizable product so that shoppers can choose specific details. You can even use the product customization app to add image swatches, size options. engraving details, ask for gift wrapping, etc. For instance, if you allow custom messages on the product, your shoppers can input the text while adding the item to their cart.

7. Triggered marketing messages

Triggered marketing messages allow you to send messages to shoppers based on a behavior or action taken by them, or by where they are in the customer journey. This action may be making a purchase or viewing a specific page. Some triggered messages include transactional messages like order confirmation or review requests.

SmartrMail is one of the best Shopify email marketing apps. Using its inbuilt automation flow features, you can set up triggered marketing messages to be sent to shoppers. These automated messages can be sent for different reasons— abandoned cart messages, cross-sell products, offer personalized recommendations, etc. 

One of the most common automated messages set up by Shopify stores is the abandoned cart email. This allows you to remind shoppers about the item left in their cart in an attempt to bring them back. You can set up a sequence of 2 or 3 abandoned cart emails to nudge these interested shoppers to come back and buy, using tactics like discounts and urgency.

8. Personalized search results

Smoother shopping experiences result in better conversions. By improving search functionalities on your Shopify store, customers can add context to their search, letting them find the product they are looking for more quickly. In one study, it was found that when site search was used, conversion rates on ecommerce stores shot up by 80%.

Searchly is a Shopify app that lets you enable a smoother search experience on your Shopify store. Shoppers can filter their search with specific details like color, size, and type, allowing them to find the product they are looking for quickly. The app also allows you to enable auto suggest so that shoppers can be shown suggested keywords in real time instead of having to type out the entire word.

Ready to personalize your Shopify store’s experience?

Ecommerce personalization is a crucial part of any store’s success. By keeping in mind different ways you can personalize your store experience, you can cater to online shoppers, provide relevant recommendations and suggestions, and increase your conversions.

Product recommendations, especially play a huge role in how online shoppers end up buying on your Shopify store. With the right recommendation displayed at the right parts of your store, you can nudge shoppers to buy more, remind them of products they expressed interest in, and lower drop offs. Recommendations are a surefire way to enhance the shopping experience.

Wiser makes it easier to deliver personalized shopping experiences. The Shopify app lets you display unique and customized product recommendations based on the shopper’s behavior and history. 

You can place these recommendations across different parts of your store, nudging more sales. Ready to enhance the shopping experience your store offers? Install the Wiser for product recommendations app today. 

The post Guide to Ecommerce Personalization for Shopify Stores appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

“Hi,

Did you enjoy your food? Fill this form to let us know with your review. We will appreciate your feedback.

Regards,”

OR

“Hi Dany,

How was your experience at table number 5, ABC Kitchen on Sunday at 10 pm? Your feedback will help us improve our services. Kindly take a moment to fill out this form. We hope you enjoyed the meal.

Joe
ABC Kitchen”

I’m sure you would like to receive the second email after your experience at any restaurant. This is because a touch of personalization in the email has engaged you more towards it. This is why I always prefer personalization in each type of content you prepare for your user. There are so many ways to add a personal touch in emails to make them more appealing for the recipient and drive them towards you.

1. Send an Automated Welcome Email

Whenever anyone subscribes to your email list, send a welcome email. Almost 75% of users expects an email from the website when they are signing up. An email start with a name as we all appreciate when someone remembers our name. You may also mention other information related to the subscriber such as to further personalize it.

Sending the welcome email with some pertinent information regarding the interest of your customer can also help too. You can have an idea of their interest by analyzing the time spent with any particular product or page. Relevant products attached to the welcome email could work for you. Similarly, birthday emails and anniversary emails are a great source to boost your conversions.

2. Do Not Be A Sales Machine

Users enjoy emails that have a natural human tone to them. Robotic email may lead to frustration. Do not always ask your customers to purchase. Sometimes, try giving them some relevant information of their interest.

Let suppose you have analyzed that some of your customers show a great interest in soccer and your store has just launched a new soccer T-shirt. Instead of emailing them directly to purchase the T-shirt, you can provide them some recent updates regarding soccer. With that particular email attach the visuals of your product and some of its features. This will attract them more.

3. Offer Product Recommendations

About 31% of an e-commerce site’s revenue is based on personalized product recommendations. Because of this, it is imperative to create a list of relevant products with each of your items.

You can utilize many factors to create a highly personalized email to bring customers back into your store. These include:

• Purchase History
• Demographic Data
• Browser Search Details
• Product Interactions
• Preferences and Behavior

4. Use Triggered Emails To Reduce Cart Abandonment

About 70% of users who visited your website could move away without purchasing even after adding products to the cart. To reduce the percentage of users doing this, you can create a triggered email; sent to the customers when they leave any product in the cart without purchasing for a few days. To increase the effectiveness of your emails, follow below tips.

1. Specify the items that the customer has left unpurchased.
2. Include a link back the product so that it will be more convenient for them to follow it back.
3. Use FOMO (fear of missing out) – stating that only a few items are left.
4. Offer some discount or free shipping to push your buyer over the line.
5. Add some reviews in order to increase the trust and motivate them to buy the product.
6. Suggest some other items that might be a better fit against the particular product that was left in the cart.

5. Structure Your Content According to Customers’ Intentions

To accelerate your customer down the sale funnel, optimize the effectiveness of your content. Your material should be organized according to the lifecycle stage of the customer. You must utilize some useful tools such as Crowd Writer, Academist Help, and Grammarly that can help you to create content according to your requirements.

1. Customers in the ‘Awareness’ stage will be more attracted to the information that defines your brand and builds trust and credibility.
2. Include more details about the features of your services if the customer is at the ‘Consideration’ stage.
3. Attract potential buyers with discount offers and limited time sale.
4. For your existing customer, award them with exclusive offers, and you may also ask them to provide awareness about your brand to others.

I recommend you to take some time and think about how you can add more personalization to your emails as it is the best way to engage more customers and boost your conversation rate. Without a doubt, personalized emails play far better than your regular newsletter. Hence this is the right time to change your strategy and build a family out of your customers sending some personal emails.

Author Bio: Spending a lot of time with new people is one of the favorite hobbies of Stella Lincoln. She focuses a lot on fitness and loves art, music, and culture. Apart from that, Stella is a mother of two, and she is working as a Marketing Strategist at Australian Masters.

The post How Personalized Emails Can Boost Your Conversion Rate appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

However, in the context of marketing, machine learning is simply the process of setting up programs to analyze user information and make intelligent decisions without being specifically programmed to do so. This is different to rules-based marketing automation programs, which requires explicit instruction and programming from marketers and web developers.

The fact is that you’ve almost definitely experienced machine learning already. Netflix, Amazon, Google, and countless other tech companies making use of this powerful tool to analyze your behaviour to serve you more personalized content on their websites and via email marketing. Now, machine learning programs have become much more affordable and accessible to small to medium businesses.

Previously, automation and segmentation were the tools of choice for email marketers. Machine learning and hyper-personalization are the next frontier – and they’re sure to generate gigantic conversions . Hyper-personalization means 1:1 e-commerce emails that have been tailored specifically for each customer based on their purchase behaviour and interaction with your emails and website. This is an important strategy for your store, because 74% of shoppers are frustrated when shown content that is not personalized.

As a result, machine learning allows e-commerce stores to capture the personalized shopping experience a customer receives in a bricks and mortar store. You also benefit from machine learning by staying ahead of the competition by being able to deliver more relevant and enticing content to your customers.

Rules-based marketing automation strategies, such as creating segments from your email list and delivering targeted messages accordingly, can be effective. However, the rules that inform these strategies don’t recognize that customer behaviour is always changing. Machine learning fixes this issue by continually taking in data to alter the content shown to customers in marketing emails – without the need for humans to alter the rules and conditions in the program.

Additionally, no customer is exactly the same as another. So while segmentation helps to remedy this, machine learning can make a truly personalized experience for customers by continually adjusting and refining the content shown to each individual recipient.

While machine learning might seem overwhelming right now, there are a number of ways that you can easily get more sales by implementing it in your store’s email marketing strategy.

1. Sending Personalized Products

First and foremost, machine learning allows you to serve your customers the products they’re most likely to buy.

In the e-commerce world, Amazon are the kings of utilizing machine learning to create a 1:1 personalized online shopping experience for their customers. This is based on a series of algorithms that analyze the behaviour of users, such as what they click on, search for, add to their shopping carts, purchase, and so forth.

Using this machine learning, Amazon algorithms can automatically deliver highly personalized product recommendations to customers on their website and through behavioural target marketing. This includes email marketing as well, with Amazon sending personalized product recommendations right to customers’ inboxes.

To read a more in-depth guide on how Amazon uses product recommendations and machine learning, read here: 3 Ways to Achieve Amazon-like Sales Growth with Product Recommendations.

However, you don’t need a huge team of web developers or Jeff Bezos amounts of money to implement machine learning in your email marketing.

SmartrMail allows you to easily send personalized product recommendations in e-commerce email newsletters to send out to your email list. We use machine learning to predict what each of your subscribers is most likely to purchase next. To do so, simply set your product mix settings to ‘recommended’.

This also saves you time. Rather than creating multiple email newsletters to send out to different segments you’ve created based on purchase history, you can quickly and easily send out one newsletter that will show each subscriber different products based on their individual behaviour.

But using machine learning in delivering personalized content to customers isn’t limited to just email marketing. There are a number of programs that can also make use of machine learning to recommend products as customers browse your website, or order specific products as they use your store’s search engine.

2. Timing Your Emails

Nothing annoys me more than waking up in the morning and seeing my inbox has been flooded with promotional emails that international companies sent me during the night.

The more emails there are, the less likely I’m going to look at each of them individually. Instead, I’ll probably just select all of my unread emails, and mark them all as read. I guarantee you that I’m not the only one who does this.

There is no specific time that will ensure that your emails are read. The reality is that your subscribers are all different, and will open your emails at different times, based on their location, time zone and daily routine. Even if you’ve hypothetically found the ‘perfect’ time to email them, it’s still impossible to ensure that your email will be read; there are an infinite number of scenarios that might prevent a subscriber from seeing your email.

Additionally, nobody has the time to sit around at a computer 24/7 to send out individual emails to each subscriber based on the the time of day that they engage most with your emails; even using rules-based automation to set the sending time of your newsletters is unnecessarily time consuming.

However, machine learning can get the timing of your email newsletters as close to perfect as possible. Machine learning can predict when recipients are most likely to open emails you send, resulting in an increase in open rates, click through rates, and transaction rates.

3. Pushing Customers Along the Purchase Journey

The beauty of machine learning is the ability to utilize large amounts of data that no human possibly could (or at least no standard e-commerce marketer). Sure you can probably analyze your purchase data in excel and determine which items are frequently purchased by the same customers. But even the best excel wiz can go further than purchase data and start analyzing every visit and interaction with your site.

By tracking data such as what your customers are viewing on your store, and how many times they’re visiting your store – you can start to measure intent and give customers an extra nudge if they haven’t found something they like or are hesitant on a big purchase.

A basic example would be to increase the frequency of your emails to customers who’ve shown a strong intentions to purchase (or reduce your frequency to those who haven’t).

However with machine learning and some clever browse tracking, you can identify what items are typically purchased by customers after they viewed (and didn’t buy) other items on your store. Armed with this data, you are able to use these trends in customer purchases to serve relevant recommendations to other customers who engage in the same ways with these products.

Like you, your customers are time-poor and don’t have time to browse your entire site to find something they like. Start utilizing your browsing data and predict their next purchase for them.

Conclusion

While I’ve listed 3 of the main ways you boost your store’s sales by implementing machine learning in your email marketing strategy, there are an infinite number of possibilities that are becoming available and more accessible to you each day.

The goal of machine learning is to create a 1:1 personalized online shopping experience for all your customers that mirrors traditional bricks and mortar shopping as closely as possible. This will result in higher engagement with emails and your e-commerce store, leading to more sales. A more personalized experience is also likely to result in an increase in customer lifetime value and brand loyalty as well.

Machine learning might be intimidating at first, but it’s actually incredibly easy to start implementing right now. In fact, in order to ahead of the pack, it’s an imperative to incorporate machine learning in your email marketing.

The post 3 Ways You Can Use Machine Learning to Boost Sales from Email Marketing appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

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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!

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