Meanwhile, discover strategies to boost conversion rates, transaction size, and customer engagement in our Idea Guide.
Personalization is no longer a “nice to have” but a necessity to meet customer’s expectations. The value of getting it right is worth more than ever. According to a McKinsey report, 71% of shoppers expect personalization and 76% get frustrated when it doesn’t happen.
Of course, personalization needs to exist on your ecommerce site but having personalization in email and SMS marketing can also significantly improve customer engagement and drive sales. Here are five ways you can take personalization beyond “Hi [first name]” in your email and SMS marketing.
Today, with powerful product integrations you can combine best-of-breed solutions to achieve these new levels of personalization. With Omnisend and LimeSpot by Pantastic Apps, you can deliver relevant, data-driven product recommendations in your various email and SMS campaigns.
Generally, segmentation helps you split up your subscribers into smaller groups so you can send targeted messages. But there are a variety of ways to segment your audience and you can use more than one type of segmentation and layer them together to send more personalized messages at scale.
Demographic
You’re likely already familiar with demographic segmentation and grouping your customers by these criteria (think: city, gender, age, etc.). This is the very first level of segmentation you can do that helps you send more relevant messaging.
For example, you might be doing a sale during a holiday that’s only in the US so you’d want to email just US subscribers with your promotional email.
Subscribers segmented by country - USA [Omnisend]
Behavioral
Another level of segmentation is based on customer behavior. Behavior-related segmentation can prove more powerful, since it’s based on known customer actions. Some email providers, like Omnisend, have examples of segments preset in their solution so it’s easy to identify and create those email lists.
Some segmentation presets [Omnisend]
Automation for email marketing helps you set triggered messages that go out whenever a subscriber performs a certain action or meets a condition. Your personalized messaging is the “what” and automation is the “when.” You need your targeted messages to land at the right time to be the most compelling.
Automation makes a true impact: research by Omnisend shows that 31% of store revenue comes from automation (but it accounts for only 1.8% of emails sent).
There are different criteria you can use as triggers. Action-based triggers are the most popular, such as abandoned carts or welcome emails.
Abandoned cart workflow that goes out one hour after a shopper abandons their cart [Omnisend]
There’s also condition-based triggers which are useful for reactivation campaigns. For example, you can define that when 30, 60 or 90 days have passed since a customer bought from you, an email, SMS, or both will get sent out to the customer.
Reactivation workflow that goes out 30 days after a shopper hasn’t bought anything [Omnisend]
Personalization using automation workflows really pays off. Omnisend research shows that the highest-converting automation workflow — back-in-stock notifications — convert 88x better than standard email campaigns.
Now that we’ve talked about who you’re targeting and when to send the messages, we can talk about the what - different personalized elements you can include in the email itself.
There are a ton of ways to offer discounts but you can personalize these too. Instead of using a generic promo code like “SALE2023,” you can create unique discount codes using your customer’s name, such as “ASHLEY20OFF.” Creating promo codes using your customer’s name creates a more personalized experience, and leads to a better click-through rate.
To help improve the conversion from your email content, the product recommendations in it need to be as targeted as they can be. In addition to highlighting your hero products, feature collections, etc. there are opportunities in the email to also feature additional products like “Most trending” or “Just for you.”
This is where using a product integration, like Omnisend and LimeSpot, can really shine. This enables you to serve different types of personalized products in any email campaign, whether it’s promotional, transactional, or post-purchase.
Product recommendations shouldn’t just be limited to marketing email campaigns. Some of your most opened emails are notification emails (a.k.a. transactional emails) like order confirmation, shipping update, out for delivery, and account creation. These emails are a great opportunity to showcase cross-sell, upsell, or relevant products.
Product recommendations in an Account Welcome email
Combining these personalized product recommendations with your most opened emails help maximize every opportunity for sales.
While the average email marketing open rate for retail businesses is 19%, the open rate for text messages can be as high as 98%. Imagine if you added personalization at scale into your SMS marketing, the potential conversion rates you could see from this channel?
With tools like LimeSpot, you can integrate with your SMS marketing platform and serve personalized product recommendations via SMS. For example, if you had a new athleisure collection, you could show a jacket to one segment and sneakers to another.
Targeted SMS messages by segment [LimeSpot]
The best way to implement the strategies above are to leverage the capabilities of best-of-breed apps. That means using apps that excel in what they do and combining their power–email marketing service providers and data-driven personalization apps, like Omnisend and LimeSpot. With LimeSpot’s integration, it’s easy to include personalization in your emails and SMS, plus track the success of those components in those campaigns.
“Omnisend and LimeSpot have enabled us to easily serve dynamic, personalized product recommendations in our email campaigns and they have become a critical element of our retention strategy.”
Charles Combs, Head of Marketing at Molly Mutt
By implementing segmentation, automation, discounts, and personalized product recommendations, you can take personalization to the next level for your ecommerce business and provide your customers with a unique experience that they won't forget. So why wait? Start implementing these tactics today and see the positive impact that personalization can have on your business.
