How to Use Product Collections to Drive Email Marketing CTRs

We know that email marketing is one of the main digital touchpoints and a vital cog in an online retailer's marketing arsenal. When combined with the right segmentation and product personalization, it:

• Maximizes ROAS
• Boosts conversion rates
• Gives more access to deeper analytics
• Builds better long-term customer relationships

But in today’s market, that’s just not advanced enough.

Instead, to improve CTRs while simultaneously boosting revenue and maximizing margins, retailers should harness the power of cutting-edge product sorting that considers a multitude of marketing and retail KPIs.

In this post, we show you how to do just that, using product collections to drive email marketing CTRs, in five key steps:

1. Establishing Goals
2. Upgrading Lead Capturing and Sign-Up Strategies
3. Reviewing Segmentation and Audience Groupings
4. Harnessing the Power of Automation and AI Personalization
5. Deep-Diving into Metrics and Tweaking Strategies

Let’s jump in.

Step #1: Establishing Goals

The first step when upgrading any marketing strategy is to review, reevaluate, and redefine your goals. Email marketing goals need to be specific and attainable, as well as measurable.

For product collection emails specifically, the goal is to drive CTRs. However, product collections have specific goals based on critical marketing and retail KPIs that retailers have set. This includes:

• Conversion rates
• Day to finish inventory and inventory value
• Sales quantity or revenue goals
• Number of days in stock limits

Step #2: Upgrading Lead Capturing and Sign-Up Strategies

If you build it, they will come — if you have a well-optimized email capturing strategy in place, that is. You can have the best email marketing strategy in place using the most advanced product sorting customization around, but without an audience to personalize for, your emails and collections are moot.

However, like with any marketing audience, the key is quality, not quantity. Attracting the wrong kind of audience will drive your email marketing CTRs down, not up. Instead, you want to invest in reviewing and upgrading your load capturing and signup strategies to ensure you are drawing in more of the right potential shoppers.

The right sign-up strategy will offer incentives for good CTAs (call-to-actions) and be strategically placed on- and off-site. Here’s a good example from Nuzzle:

 As you can see, it doesn’t have to be overly complicated. In this case, the incentive is “special offers and updates,” and the CTA is to “subscribe.”

The key is always offering a payoff for signing up. Here are some strategies your marketing team can use to boost your online store email marketing lists:

• Make email signup super user-friendly
• Use exclusive discounts or deals
• Run giveaways/contests
• Use your social channels and/or digital marketing campaigns to offer email signup incentives
• Implement form validation to stop spam form signups

Step #3: Reviewing Segmentation and Audience Groupings

Next, you’ll want to review your email segmentation and audience. The more segmented your audience is, the more personalized your product collection emails will be, both of which ensure you have a higher chance of improving CTRs and boosting sales.

How advanced your email segmentation is will depend on the goals you set in step one, your marketing team’s audience grouping, and the limitations of your specific email marketing platform.

Let’s say your goal is to increase sales from repeat customers. You would want to create highly segmented customer lists based on essential demographics, such as location, product bought, or amount spent. This will help you create a more customized marketing email with a product collection that:

• Encourages stocking up (if they bought that specific product before)
• Promotes upselling (by offering complementary products to what they already purchased)

Simply put, segmentation and targeting greatly influence your email marketing CTRs. The right segmentation will increase:

1. Email campaign engagement, which in this case would be improved CTRs from email to promoted products
2. Customer retention, due to the more personalized and customized marketing message and product collection

Additionally, the more customized a product collection and marketing email is to each specific shopper, the less likely they will unsubscribe from your lists.

Step #4: Harnessing the Power of Automation and AI Personalization

One of the most significant driving forces behind new online retail trends is automation and AI-powered personalization. And when you combine this type of machine learning with advanced product merchandising ideas and email marketing, the effects can be profound.

We’re not just talking about increased revenue and profit. Adding automation to your email marketing strategy drives down costs by:

• Offering more engagement for fewer resources
• Tweaking in real-time to course-correct possibly expensive mistakes
• Bettering time management for marketing teams
• Lessening workload

The secret is using the right AI-powered tools and services for email marketing and product collection merchandising, such as Kimonix.

A leading eCommerce brand that’s been known to use product collection customization to build personalized product collections they use for is Chelsea Dogs.

Step #5: Deep-Diving into Metrics and Tweaking Strategies

The last step on how to use product collections to drive email marketing CTRs is looking at your metrics. To ensure you get the most CTRs for your effort, you should constantly measure and improve your strategy to peak performance.

Ultimately, you want to keep a constant eye on your metrics and make incremental improvements in real-time. Yes, as a whole, you are aiming to use product collections to drive email marketing CTRs. However, CTRs are the bigger picture.

In other words, there are so many other important metrics that play a part in the success of your email marketing. These include:

• Open rates
• Conversion rates
• Revenue per email
• Email sharing rates
• Unsubscribe rates

All of these can be used to tweak your campaigns to boost CTRs and sales.

Final Thoughts: Combining Advanced Product Collections with the Persuasive Power of Email

There you have it, how you can use product collection to drive email marketing CTRs. Ultimately you should be combining the power of email marketing with well-optimized, advanced product collections that are tailored to each specific shopper or small, segmented audience.

This will help you increase not only marketing CTRs, but your product sales as well, both of which drive customer retention. However, it’s how you create your product collection that is the secret ingredient here.

By combining significant inventory KPIs with marketing goals, you can ensure you show the right product to the right customer at the right time to not only make a sale, but ensure that sale is in line with margin and inventory needs and goals.

Want to learn more about how you can upgrade your product collection on auto-pilot? Reach out to our online merchandising and retail marketing experts here.