5 Expert Personalization Strategies for Eye-catching eCommerce Emails

If you sell on eCommerce channels other than Amazon, including your own website, you likely have an email list. In this guest article, Cheyenne Ng of Zembula shares best practices for creating eCommerce emails that get noticed.

We all know how important it is to stand out in our customer’s inbox these days. There is a lot of competition. According to Statista, by the time 2021 comes to a close, around 320 billion emails will have been sent. That’s a lot of emails!

And, while it might seem hopeless to get noticed amongst that much competition, there is at least one tactic that has proven itself time and time again when it comes to grabbing attention.

Personalization is a tried-and-true tactic to stand out against all the other run-of-the-mill marketing emails your customers and prospects receive on a daily basis. Why is it so effective? It provides a more relevant experience with your brand and is more likely to reach them with the information they want when they want it. The best part is, it doesn’t provide diminishing returns! That’s because creating more personalized eCommerce email messaging for your audience is a long-term trust builder, not a novel one-off campaign.

So if personalization is so amazing, why isn’t everyone doing it all the time? Well, it can be a challenge for brands to accomplish. Many of us have data in multiple databases and lack the time or ability to utilize it all for our email content. Those that can bridge this gap, however, are seeing some of the best results in email marketing today.

New research shows that 70% of companies that use advanced personalization are seeing 200% ROI or more. To help you cash in on some of this ROI, I'm going to walk you through five expert personalization strategies and share some excellent eCommerce email examples. Let's go!

1) Go beyond first name.

Using someone's first name in email content is a great place to start. But if that’s as far as you go, you’re missing out. In order to cash in on some of the best ROI advanced personalization has to offer, you need to dig a little deeper into your data and get creative with it.

You probably already have the data to accomplish this. Do you have birthday information, a loyalty program, or purchase history? All these data points could be used in a personalization campaign. If you don’t have data like this to pull from, think about your lead captures on your site and adjust them to collect the data you’d like to start using.

You can also try using other details like known location or even interests to personalize your email communications.

2) Don’t forget your transactional emails.

Transactional eCommerce emails have some of the highest open and engagement rates. You can up the conversion rate on these by making them more relevant and even including upsells where appropriate.

Add personalization to your shipment confirmations to build upon your relationship and encourage repeat purchases.

3) Try triggered campaigns.

Triggered campaigns are a favorite among marketers. These set-and-forget campaigns are easy to establish and maintain as they usually only require effort on the front end.

You may not initially think of triggered campaigns as a perfect place to add personalization, but with such high open rates and engagement, it’s worth a shot! You can optimize triggered campaigns, like abandoned carts, by adding personalization to them to encourage people to return to checkout and complete a purchase.

4) Add animation or interactivity.

Adding animation and interactivity to personalization supercharges your marketing efforts. When your customers see relevant information in your emails that feels like it was made just for them AND they can interact with it, they will remember it!

Creating personalized animations is difficult but can be accomplished with the right software!

5) Create a banner area in your email template for personalized announcements.

Creating a dedicated area for important information at the top of your email template is a low-effort way to layer personalization and high-value content into your emails.

You can add these without altering the rest of your template. People that use these personalized banners see higher engagement throughout the email. You can use them for critical information as well like store hours or shipping cutoffs for the holidays!

Zembula has an easy way to do this. They’re called Smart Banners™.

Personalize Your eCommerce Email Strategy

Personalization can be a hard strategy to nail down if you don’t know where to start. It’s important to start moving beyond just first name and utilize more of the data you’ve already collected. In addition, think about other areas of your eCommerce email strategy you could sprinkle personalization into, like triggered or transactional campaigns.

Start small and work your way to the more advanced techniques like animations and interactivity. Your customers not only enjoy when the emails you send them are relevant, they expect it!