Emails are an essential channel for marketers to engage with their customers. Today, successful email campaigns are built on relatable and personalized content, backed by strategic and intelligent data regarding buying and browsing habits. In keeping up with ever-changing customer behavior, traditional email marketing is transitioning to more automated, segmented, data-driven campaigns focused on interactivity, privacy, and multimedia. More marketers are adopting AI to master the email channel and create tailored experiences for their customers through their email marketing programs. We call this new avatar of the traditional email, Email 2.0.
The E-commerce sector has been an active adopter of new technologies in its quest to improve customer experience and enhance cyber security in online shopping. Lifestyle changes brought on by the global pandemic have boosted the adoption of e-commerce making it a mainstream part of the ‘new normal’ and further fuelling market competition. Through all of this, email marketing continues to play a pivotal role in the communication strategy for the sector. With e-commerce connecting with the world of digital users, email becomes the most conversion-rich and cost-effective strategy available for the sector.
According to Netcore Cloud’s Email Benchmark Report 2022, global e-commerce was one of the highest adopters of intelligent AI-Driven emails in 2021. AI-driven email strategies help brands tailor their campaigns for success, with features like Subject Line Optimization (SLO) that help create ideal subject lines for customer emails to AI-powered email delivery for better inbox placement. The sector is focused on building better interactivity for customers through the adoption of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). AMP allows customers to perform actions within the email eliminating the need for them to navigate to a different page. This increased interactivity increases dwell time on the email, improves engagement significantly, and reduces cybersecurity threats that may occur due to multiple-page navigation.
Let’s look at how AI-driven interactive emails have helped ecommerce companies ramp up their email marketing strategies.
Easing the purchase process for customers
E-commerce companies can add interactive elements like showcasing their products in emails and help customers with their buying journey. Customers can look at multiple views of the product, internal and external features, color variants, and more in a series of images that keep revolving, using a feature called the carousel. Within the carousel, the Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) can also be dynamically updated to show only those that are available in stock.
Enabling product search within the inbox
Companies can make emails interactive by providing a mini web store-like experience in emails. This will help customers to search, compare, choose, and buy through the mail. These emails can also enable navigating through different product options based on price, user reviews, purchases, etc.
Tackling cart abandonment
When a customer is able to see product images, read descriptions, view specifications, and browse reviews for the products in their abandoned cart, they tend to take quick action. Moving products from the abandoned cart to order placement becomes quicker and easier when it happens within the email.
Driving interactive engagement within the email
Interactive emails help brands engage their customers in a variety of ways. Adding elements which help customers to post comments, reply to comments, share opinions, discuss views, and give feedback within the mail, improves brand and customer engagement.
Enabling In-mail gamification
There is no doubt that games attract people. Everyone likes to play a simple game and get rewarded for it. For e-commerce, gamification means making gifts, discounts, and price markdowns so much more exciting when the customer wins them from within the email.
Creating compelling teasers for campaigns
Whether it’s sales, discounts, deals or special event promotions, interactive emails can liven up the entire shopping experience for customers. With their colors and movements, engaging communications hold the attention of the recipients and make them want to engage and click through.
With the help of interactive email elements, brands can deliver engaging content, display dynamic data, offer space-saving layouts for large content, ease the processes of form/survey/poll participation, enable a gaming experience and show hyper-personalized content. It also allows transactional emails to upsell/cross-sell, display product reviews, run referral campaigns with recipient-incentivized invites, and much more.
As ecommerce companies plan their next marketing campaign, they must not ignore the potential of Email 2.0 and the innovative tools available for enhanced customer engagement. Brands that are keen on market success should focus on revitalizing their email campaigns by adding intelligence and interactivity. Adoption of these tools will help brands achieve success in a saturated market, ride the new big wave, and build strong customer connections – all with a simple click of an email.
