When crafting emails and sending up transactional and triggered emails, it’s important to personalize them according to the stage that the customer is on. One of the best ways to do this is with product recommendations. By enabling product recommendations for emails, you can increase your engagement and revenue.
Let’s look at why you need to display product recommendations within emails and the 6 ways you can do so based on different stages of the customer journey.
Impact of Product Recommendations Within Email
Email marketing is part of almost every eCommerce store’s marketing. But, what makes your email perform better than your competitor? One strategy that many marketers swear by is personalization.
Personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates.
By adding personalization within your emails— whether it’s a segmented audience, product recommendation, or first name parameters —you can generate more revenue and see a marked difference in how shoppers interact with your emails. In fact, personalized promotional emails had a 29% higher unique open rates and 41% more unique click-through rates.
This is where product recommendations can help. While segmentation is a time-consuming process, adding personalized recommendations is easy to set up, especially when you have the right recommendation engine in place.
AI-powered personalized recommendation engines like Wiser allow Shopify stores to send email promotions that display recommendations that are relevant to the specific shopper. Wiser also integrates with your email marketing app like Klaviyo so that you can display personalized recommendations in emails without any hassle.
6 Product Recommendations for Emails Across Different Stages of Customer Journey
1. Display Best sellers widget on welcome emails
Your welcome emails should let shoppers know more about who you are as a brand. When crafting this email, you can display a ‘Bestseller’ product recommendation widget to show the products that are loved by other shoppers on your Shopify store.
With such a product recommendation widget, you can give these new subscribers a peek into what’s popular on your store and guide them to products that are sure to be a hit.
Display ‘Bestseller’ product recommendations within emails by installing Wiser.
2. Show Inspired by your Browsing History widget on delivery confirmation emails
A delivery confirmation email lets shoppers know that their order has been delivered. Since transactional emails have 8x more opens and clicks than any other type of email. , you can leverage this by displaying an AI-powered personalized recommendation within the email.
Display an ‘Inspired By Your Browsing History’ widget within this order update email. Such a widget shows products that the shopper may be interested in, based on other products that they viewed. With such personalized products, shoppers will be more likely to engage with the products shown to them and come back to shop the items.
You can also provide a small discount or free shipping offer so that shoppers feel incentivized to shop again so soon.
Enable personalized product recommendations with leading recommendation engines like Wiser. Install the app now!
3. Display different kinds of recommendation widgets on newsletters
Newsletters are a great way to create conversations with your shoppers and build relationships with them. You can add a recommendations section towards the end of your newsletter to nudge shoppers back to your Shopify store
Depending on the kind of newsletter, you can show different kinds of recommendations. Here are 2 recommendation strategies based on the kind of newsletter you are sending:
- When featuring a new product or highlight a specific product, you can add a ‘Frequently Bought Together’ recommendation widget to show other products that pair well with the featured item.
- If you send weekly newsletters, you can create a manual ‘Deals of the Week’ widget that shows all the products on sale or are featured. This can be a regular part of your newsletters as well and works well for general stores or Shopify stores with large catalogs.
Install Wiser on your Shopify store to include recommendations within your emails and generate more revenue.
4. Show Similar Products widget on abandoned cart emails
There are multiple reasons for shoppers to abandon their cart— they may forget to check out, they may be suspicious of your store, or they may just not be interested in that product. An abandoned cart email sequence can help you successfully recover your abandoned cart, bringing shoppers back with a persuasive
To ensure that you don’t lose a shopper altogether, add product recommendations to your abandoned cart emails to gives multiple options to shoppers who have lost interest in the product in their cart.
A ‘Similar Products’ recommendation widget can help shoppers see other such products they may want to buy, prompting them to come back to your store to browse more items and shop.
Display personalized recommendations in your emails with Wiser. Install the app.
5. Display Discounted Products widget on re-engagement emails (for sale-friendly merchants)
Re-engagement strategies are a priority for many merchants, helping them reactivate lapsed or inactive shoppers. When crafting such emails, it’s important to display the right products from your Shopify store to entice these shoppers to come back for a purchase.
However, just any recommendation won’t do the trick. Shoppers who have lapsed need a strong reason to come back to the store or make a purchase from you. Many merchants display a ‘Discounted Products’ widget to reel back these lapsed shoppers and get them to shop again.
Install Wiser on your Shopify store to include recommendations within your emails and generate more revenue.
6. Display Featured Products widget on re-engagement emails (for merchants who don’t run sales)
If you aren’t the kind of store that runs sales, a ‘Discounted Products’ recommendation widget may not be the kind of recommendation widget you want to send to lapsed shoppers.
In such cases, we recommend adding a custom recommendation widget named ‘Featured Products’ recommendation widget. With this, you can handpick products like newly launched or featured items for your email recommendations.
A custom recommendation widget like this can help you win back customers who haven’t shopped in a while
Display personalized recommendations in your emails with Wiser. Install the app.
Best Practices for Product Recommendations in Emails
1. Add ratings to the recommendation widget
When adding product recommendations for emails, you can increase its credibility by adding ratings to these recommendation widgets. Ratings display how other customers have liked the product. By adding ratings to your recommendation widget, you can provide shoppers with definitive proof that a product is worth a buy, helping you attract more purchases.
Wiser integrates with multiple review apps like Loox, Yotpo, Judge.me, and Ali Reviews to display ratings within product recommendations.
2. Ensure that the first product image is clear, of high-quality, and enticing enough
Recommendations within emails are automatically generated and display the first product image for the product within the catalog. Due to this, it’s important to ensure all your products have high-quality images so that shoppers are eager to engage with the recommendations. A badly photographed or pixelated product recommendation widget is sure to put off shoppers.
Some merchants add photos of products in front of a white background while others show the item in use, like a dress worn by a model.
3. Use analytics to understand the performance of the recommendations
Just adding recommendations isn’t enough. Once you’ve set up recommendations for different kinds of emails, you can analyze their performance, compare different recommendations within the same email, and find the strategy that works best for you. By testing your recommendation strategy, you can find one that works best for you and optimize it to generate more revenue.
Apps like RevTap allow you to see your email performance within an integrated analytics dashboard. You can use this to understand different metrics:
- Learn exactly how shoppers who landed on the store through your emails interacted with your store and whether they made a purchase
- Compare different recommendation widgets and find the strategy that works best for your Shopify store.
- Run A/B tests on your email marketing app and enable recommendation widgets to see which recommendation performed better.
Display Product Recommendations Within Email To Increase Sales
We hope this helps you understand the different ways you can use personalized product recommendations for emails across customer stages. If you haven’t already set up recommendations, it’s about time you do!
Recommendations are a powerful eCommerce strategy, helping you nudge shoppers to purchase by showing the right products to them at the right time.
AI-powered personalized recommendations, especially, display products that are customized to each shopper. With such a detailed level of personalization, shoppers will be more inclined to shop from the brand and would even choose you over your competitors.
Vanhishikha is the Content Marketer at Expert Village Media. She can be found looking for strategies to grow online stores, or browsing through Instagram.