If you get lost in an unfamiliar place, chances are you’ll look to signposts to help you find your way. E-commerce shoppers are the same: if they’re looking through your store, thinking about buying something, they might need a little guidance on where to look. One way to nudge prospects in the right direction is by using well-timed, relevant product recommendations in your email marketing campaigns. Recommendations in emails are known to increase their click-through-rate by 300% or more and are a reliable way to increase traffic to your e-commerce store and boost your average order value. That said, here are nine real-life examples of effective ways you can use product recommendation emails across your marketing strategy. You’ll discover different types of recommendations, along with some actionable ways to get the most out of them.
The Welcome Email
Your welcome email is one of the first impressions that your subscribers get of your brand, so it’s worth spending time on perfecting.
Luckily, if they’ve subscribed to your email list, it’s likely that they’re already excited about you and your products, which gives you a head start on encouraging them to take the plunge and make a purchase.
You can give them the first nudge in the buying process by placing some product recommendations in your welcome email.
Barnes & Noble is a great example. The variety out there is just so overwhelming. Thankfully, Barnes & Noble understands this problem. From the get-go, they introduce their subscribers to the world of books with plenty of recommendations. To avoid overwhelming the reader, they divide the books into several categories, including bestsellers and a few different genres.
The Promotional Email
Promotional emails are the backbone of your email marketing strategy, so it’s no wonder when over 50 percent of shoppers say that they make purchases from marketing emails at least once a month.
Adding product recommendation to these emails can be a great way to increase your conversion rate even further. So Beauty Bay adds a short product recommendation section to all promotion emails they send out.
Unlike Barnes & Noble’s recommendations, these are personalized to each recipient, based on their previous browsing history. If you click on any of the products, you’re taken immediately to the product page.
By going the extra mile and generating a personalized list of products the person has already been thinking about, Beauty Bay increases the chances of prospects making a purchase.
The Abandoned Cart Email
Ah, the abandoned cart email: another mainstay of any self-respecting email marketing strategy. In fact, for every angle that you can think of to encourage people back to your checkout flow, chances are that there’s a brand already using it.
The cosmetics brand Tarte does something interesting with their abandoned cart emails. In them, they cleverly offer alternative products alongside those the buyer initially added to their cart.
If people abandoned their carts on your site, it may be because they couldn’t find what they were looking for. By adding a few recommendations to your email, you can provide some similar alternatives that they might not have noticed the first time around—and that might just be enough to entice them back to the checkout. This may just be what your prospect needs to sway their decision and return to their cart.
The Seasonal Email
Around the holidays, everyone faces the same struggle. You’ve got a lot of people to buy gifts for and few ideas about what to get.
In recent years, gift guides have become an incredibly popular way for e-commerce brands to recommend products and boost their seasonal sales. Thus, they make it quick and easy for customers to find interesting and relevant gifts for their loved ones, erasing the frustration of trawling through websites for hours on end.
L’Occitane is an example. It’s simple, showcasing a few collections of their best products, along with some catchy titles that let you know the benefits of each.
The number of options they offer isn’t overwhelming; it just provides a convenient starting point in your gift search. If subscribers are intrigued by these ideas, they can click through to the website to find further information and more gift inspiration.
In your holiday emails, you could sort your recommendations by category, price, or recipient and even link to a dedicated landing page on your site with more options to choose from.
The Order Confirmation Email
Now that we’ve discussed what happens when people don’t know what to buy. Let’s move on to what can happen when they do. They place an order with you!
Order confirmation emails are eight times more likely to be opened than regular marketing emails; and those who receive them are more likely to become fans of your brand and your products. This makes them an ideal place for cross-selling products.
Zalando’s order confirmation emails are a great example of effective cross-selling. In fact, once you buy an item of clothing, they provide a compelling call-to-action alongside it, inviting you to “Complete the look”.
If you click the link in the email, Zalando takes you to a landing page of items “you might also like”.
And, just like that, Zalando has increased its average order value.
Importantly, these products genuinely complement the original item in the order. If you want to preserve your customer experience, you must help your customers, not annoy them with irrelevant suggestions.
Recommendations like this work especially well in the apparel sector; because everyone loves a well-put-together outfit, but you can easily adapt this idea to all kinds of e-commerce niches.
Conclusion
Product recommendations are about giving people a clear and convenient path from prospect to buyer. I hope that these examples have provided you with some inspiration; which helps you do just that, without coming off as too promotional or irrelevant. You can experiment with the types of recommendations you offer, where you place them even the copy you pair them with. And see for yourself the most effective ways to engage your customers and increase your revenue.
Besides product recommendation emails, consider more about having recommendation systems on your site as a tool to help you relieve the burden and optimize your business. Refer to Product Recommendation App of Grit Global as an outstanding example that can act as your assistant.
This is an application that creates & manages multiple rules. They can based on customer behavior and choose specific conditions to show recommendations: pages, cart items or values, and customer behaviors. In conclusion, this is a simple and flexible solution for upselling and cross-selling products.
