Email Campaigns
3 effective strategies for retail email campaigns
Maybe you’re wondering: What are some of the specific strategies that are helping retail marketers drive sales and revenue with email marketing?
One of the most effective ways marketers are boosting sales within email is by ditching the mass-message email blast of the old days. Instead, they’re opting for a more customized approach–which helps ensure subscribers are getting the right message at the right time.
But what’s truly surprising about this tactic is that it’s still largely under-utilized. Media Post found that only 21% of marketers were using real-time personalization or A/B testing, and only 56% were using segmentation-based targeting as a top tactic within their email strategy.
So here’s what you need to know about customized messaging to improve your retail email campaigns.
1. Personalization
Data proves that emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened, and information from The Aberdeen Group echoes this truth: Their research shows that 96% of organizations believe email personalization can improve email performance.
Email Personalization
And personalization comes in many forms. You can make emails feel more tailor-made by leveraging custom fields for features like:
- Subject lines that use the subscriber’s first name
- Message body text that use the subscriber’s first name or a recent purchase
But personalization also relates to content. This means leveraging personalized content that is relevant to subscribers’ unique interests, relates to their geographic location, where they’re at in the sales funnel, etc. Relevancy is extremely important for customers. In fact, 74% of online customers get frustrated with content when it has nothing to do with their interests.
You can deliver more relevant content via segmentation.
2. Segmentation
Segmentation is the grouping of subscribers into lists based on a categorical context. Lists can be segmented in a variety of ways, including:
- Geographic location
- Average spend
- Gender
- Age
- Interests
- Job title
- Transactional data (like last purchase made)
- Behavioral data (like which content they’ve interacted with)
This tactic is proven to deliver impressive results, too.
Segmented emails have been shown to produce as much as a 760% increase in email revenue. It makes sense: The more relevant the message, the more likely your subscriber is to act on it.
Segmented Email Campaigns – Increase Revenue
- But in order to execute segmentation effectively, you need to collect the right data from subscribers up front. You can segment subscribers in two main ways:
- Self-segmentation via separate, page or location-based opt-in lists
- Sorting subscribers based on data they’ve provided
- Once you’ve created your different segments, you can start sending more targeted emails with content that relates to your subscribers’ unique interests.
- Retail marketers can use our integration with Shopify to power smart email campaigns using pre-built segments including high spenders, repeat customers, first-time customers, and newsletter subscribers.
- Dynamic content is another way to personalize your emails for increased relevancy.
3. Dynamic content
Dynamic content allows you to decide which customers should see which blocks of content within your email.
So, for example, you might be sending out a retail email campaign for two new product lines: One for men, and one for women. Using dynamic content, like Adidas did in this example, you could indicate “who should see this” for each block of content, and create two separate types of content: One for men, and one for women.
This way, you can create two different versions of the same email that’s optimized for your customer data–all within a single campaign. Again: No one-size-fits-all messaging. You’re sending emails that are highly relevant to the recipient.
With these three tactics, your retail emails can become much more effective at boosting website traffic that ultimately translates into sales.
