The most efficient way to deliver high fidelity personalization in your daily email, and drive over 11x return on spend (works seamlessly with your existing email service provider).
Infinitely expand your brands photography with Curator™ AI. Generate new product photography that’s indistinguishable from the originals, and combines multiple products together.
Create, manage, deploy, and target an unlimited number of personalized messages. Deliver any of the messages from your pool through a single image URL and link embedded within email, SMS, mobile, or on your website.
Zembula connects with any enterprise data source. If you don’t see a specific data source here or have a custom data source, we will always connect it for free.
The most efficient way to deliver high fidelity personalization in your daily email, and drive over 11x return on spend (works seamlessly with your existing email service provider).
Infinitely expand your brands photography with Curator™ AI. Generate new product photography that’s indistinguishable from the originals, and combines multiple products together.
Create, manage, deploy, and target an unlimited number of personalized messages. Deliver any of the messages from your pool through a single image URL and link embedded within email, SMS, mobile, or on your website.
Integrations
Connect with 100+ integrations
Zembula connects with any enterprise data source. If you don’t see a specific data source here or have a custom data source, we will always connect it for free.
5 Ways eCommerce Brands Can Use Personalized Smart Banners™
We all know email works. But, it doesn’t work in the same way for every brand and industry. There are specific challenges and opportunities for service brands versus retailers versus eCommerce shops. You shouldn’t take a one-size-fits-all approach to your email marketing. Otherwise, you’re going to disappoint your customers and miss out.
That’s why eCommerce brands need to focus on the strategies and tactics that will help them reach customers, build good relationships, and sell products. Email personalization is a huge driver of success and should be one of the key focus areas for your campaigns.
So, eCommerce brands need to develop innovative ways to engage customers, offer personalized email content, and increase message visibility. How to do it? We’ve got just the tool to help: Smart Banners™.
Say bye to generic email blasts
Sending out a generic email not aimed at anyone specific may have worked in the past, and you’ll still get a few clicks today. But, there is a better way to do it, and that’s with Smart Banners™.
A Smart Banner™ is an easy way to turn every email you send into something that’s personalized to your reader. Since more consumers demand personalized emails from eCommerce brands, you need to deliver. Otherwise, you may lose out on potential customers.
If you’re worried that level of personalization might be too much to handle, don’t — Smart Banners™ work by adding a snippet of code to your email templates. Using your customer data, our Decision Engine determines which Smart Banner™ goes to each customer. It saves you time and energy in the long run, leaving you to focus on other tasks.
Check out how eCommerce brands can use Smart Banners™
Want to see a few Smart Banners™ in action? We thought you’d never ask. For eCommerce brands, in particular, there are a bunch of different templates you can use to boost personalization and drive engagement.
Here are a few of our favorites:
Abandoned cart
Of course, every eCommerce brand keeps an eye on those abandoned cart stats. However, with the cart abandonment rate floating around 70%, there are opportunities to get more conversions.
Here’s where Smart Banners™ can make a huge difference. When your reader has left something in their cart, a Smart Banner™ can appear on the top of every email you send, giving them personalized information and a call to action to complete the purchase.
Browse abandonment
Just as with abandoned cart Smart Banners™, you can add a similar level of personalization with browse abandonment notifications.
As long as you have customer browse data available, you can use it to send a reminder to your list that a product they looked at is still waiting for them. If you want to add a bit of FOMO, give them updates when inventory is running low or add a countdown clock.
Sales
Marketing emails are a critical way eCommerce brands can get customers to buy. But, what if you have a flash sale, special event, or offer deals of the day? Is sending out one reminder email enough?
Probably not. Here’s another place where Smart Banners™ make all the difference. Now, when you have a sale event happen, keep that message visible all the time.
Package tracking
Any eCommerce brand knows just how important package tracking is for customers. If your customer doesn’t have tabs on their shipping information, you will probably get swamped with where are my order (WISMO) calls.
Smart Banners™ help remove the guesswork. Add these to your arsenal, and every time your customer opens an email from you, they’ll get the most up-to-date info on their package, reducing your WISMO calls.
Order replenishment
A key part of any eCommerce strategy is to get first-time buyers to come back for more. In most cases, that’s easier said than done. But personalized Smart Banners™ make it possible to improve your customer’s lifetime value.
Stand out by using a Smart Banner™ to remind customers to replenish their order. This is a great way to build a long-term relationship with your customer by giving them personalized product information based on what they’ve bought in the past.
Ready to give Smart Banners™ a try?
Your eCommerce email marketing strategy needs to go beyond the basics. Sending the occasional newsletter and sale announcement doesn’t cut it anymore.
We can help. Get in touch, schedule a demo, and see how Smart Banners™ can make a difference in your emails.
Liz Froment
Liz Froment is a content writer at Zembula. A graduate of University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Liz is a travel aficionado, Boston sports fan, and maple syrup connoisseur.
Take a look at any marketing email sitting in your inbox right now. Most have the same sort of format — a brand header, a content block (with some images), and a footer with social media links.
It’s simple yet relatively effective. Plus, for most marketers finding a format that works means you don’t have to play around with the code and tweak the email, risking the potential that some other part can get scrambled. We’ve all spent frustrating hours trying to undo some random formatting mistake, right?
But, what if there was a way to level up the look and feel of your emails without needing to tweak code or worry about formatting? That’s where Smart Banners™ stand out.
A Smart Banner™ is a type of content block. It sits at the top of your emails and serves as a tool to help individualize every message you send. You can do a lot with Smart Banners™, including adding personalized animation, calls to action, and images.
What helps make our Smart Banners™ stand out is they are incredibly easy to insert into any one of your emails. As a result, you don’t have to completely reformat your emails or worry about starting from scratch. Instead, all you need to do is drag and drop a Smart Banner™ content block right to the top of your email template, and you’re good to go.
It doesn’t get much easier than that.
How do Smart Banners™ improve email performance?
Right now, it’s hard to get a ton of traction with generic email marketing campaigns. Consumers are savvy. They know what’s coming, and it’s easy to ignore all the emails that don’t speak to them.
So, you need to find a way to stand out. That’s why personalizing emails has become so popular. And, it’s more than just a hot trend. You can expect personalization in emails to continue long into the future. Right now, customers demand it, so you need to deliver. Otherwise, you’ll continue to see key metrics like open, click, and conversion rates go down.
Smart Banners™ help boost engagement. That’s because by using them, you’re sending out personalized information to every customer. All you need to do is add a snippet of data code to your template, and the information is pulled into the email. As a result, you can turn any generic email, including triggered emails like transaction receipts and shipping confirmations, into something special.
With well over a dozen different options for using a Smart Banner™ ready to go, retailers and eCommerce brands have a tool that can drive traffic back to the storefront.
Smart Banners™ save you time
Another boost for marketers is using Smart Banners™ in your emails can help save you time. The banners work through an AI-powered decision engine, automatically displaying the right Smart Banner™ for everyone on your list.
Automations are optimized for maximum results in no time at all. Plus, the emails operate at moment-of-open, not moment-of-send. So if you need to make a tweak or change, you don’t need to stop your entire campaign. And, the best part is your customers won’t even notice. It’s all done in fractions of a second.
Customer experience matters more than ever
Today, it’s all about customer experience. From the moment a customer gets the first whiff of your brand to after a purchase is completed, they’re tracking you every step of the way.
You need to deliver and provide emails that not only tie into their in-person and social media experiences but make them feel like they’re getting custom information. Having Smart Banners™ in your emails is the perfect way to help you do it.
Now that you know what a Smart Banner™ is, are you excited to give it a try? Get in touch with us; we’d love to help you get started.
Liz Froment
Liz Froment is a content writer at Zembula. A graduate of University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Liz is a travel aficionado, Boston sports fan, and maple syrup connoisseur.
How Smart Banners™ Can Help Reduce eCommerce Cart Abandonment Rates
Nearly 70% of shoppers abandon their carts at some point during the buying journey. That’s a rate that should make many eCommerce brands nervous.
Of course, cart abandonment is inevitable. But, there’s also a lot of opportunity to drop those rates and start winning back buyers, improving conversions, and increasing revenue. A Smart Banner™ is the perfect tool to help you get started.
These banners sit above your email headers and convey all sorts of information to your readers based on their customer and behavioral data. For example, a Smart Banner™ can provide loyalty information, shipping updates, and announce sales. But the key for eCommerce brands is how Smart Banners™ can help you start attacking those abandoned cart rates.
Here’s how.
Hyper-personalization
You probably know by now that eCommerce customers want personalized content. Look at your inbox. Aren’t you more likely to open emails from the brands you know that always send you content that meets your interests or needs? Well, consumers are the same way. That’s why personalization matters so much — both now and into the future.
Smart Banners™ help you deliver personalized emails without needing to spend hours segmenting lists, running A/B tests, and starting and stopping campaigns to make tweaks. It doesn’t get much easier than that.
A Smart Banner™ can be added to any email to alert customers they’ve left something in their cart by using customer data, including shopping and browsing history. That means every email you send, from monthly newsletters to shipping confirmations, can be personalized with individualized customer information.
Few other tools will give you that level of hyper-personalization. It will make you really stand out from the competition.
Improved engagement
Another benefit to using Smart Banners™ is it helps your customers take action. For example, a standard abandoned cart strategy usually follows a typical three email campaign. While data shows you can get customers to come back and convert with this style of campaign, your chances are still limited, most campaigns only run for about 36 hours, and that’s it.
With a Smart Banner™, you can go way beyond a handful of emails and a hard time limit. Your notifications will increase message visibility. And the more people who see a message, the better the chances of getting more of them to click and convert.
Something else to consider is how it looks. While a Smart Banner™ is designed to be relatively unobtrusive compared to the rest of your email, it also catches the eye. You can add animation such as gifs or product images to remind your reader of exactly what they left in their cart. Personalized animation and moving images are powerful ways to grab attention right from the inbox.
Another cool feature you can pull into Smart Banners™ with your browsing data is a browse abandonment notification. It’s just another way to provide more personalized image content. Consumers will see and be reminded of items they were previously interested in buying. Plus, it gives a gentle nudge to customers to click through and make the purchase.
Finally, Smart Banners™ have space for you to create a built-in call to action within the banner. When a customer sees this, they know they’re only a few clicks away from finishing up their purchase. It helps remove another barrier that may otherwise give a customer pause before going forward.
Smart Banners™ make it easy for customers to get back to their cart and buy, and they help you improve your numbers and get more conversions. That’s a win-win for eCommerce brands and consumers.
Interested in learning more?
If you want to see Smart Banners™ in action in your own campaigns, we’d love to help. You’ll see how Zembual can help you stay relevant with your customers, improve your workflows, and save time and money. Sound good?
Get in touch today, and we can set you up with a demo so you can take the platform for a spin.
Liz Froment
Liz Froment is a content writer at Zembula. A graduate of University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Liz is a travel aficionado, Boston sports fan, and maple syrup connoisseur.
Attention. It’s the biggest challenge of marketers today. With consumers getting bombarded with dozens of emails a day — and most of them going to the archive folder — it’s getting more difficult than ever to stand out.
So what happens when your reader opens your email? That means your job is done, right? Wrong. You’ve cleared the first hurdle, now comes the next challenge; consistently delivering the content consumers want. That means providing personalized information that feels targeted to each reader individually, giving them the content and updates that matter to them.
If you aren’t able to do that, you will not get the engagement you need. Without readers taking action with your emails, your clicks and conversions may suffer. One of the best ways to help solve this problem and boost the long-term performance of your email campaigns is with Smart Banners™.
What is a Smart Banner™?
A Smart Banner™ is a content block that sits right at the top of an email. You can put all sorts of information in the banner, including calls to action, and animate movement within the banner too.
Check out a Smart Banner™ in action above. Your banners don’t need to be static either; adding animation turns them dynamic. It’s just another way to catch your customer’s attention from the second they open their emails while still providing valuable information and messaging at the same time.
Another key benefit of Smart Banners™ is adding another layer to your omnichannel marketing. Banners work in email, mobile apps, and websites, always in the right format, delivering the same experience across channels.
Personalize everything all the time
What makes Smart Banners™ stand out is data. You already have a treasure trove of data on your customers at your fingertips; use that data to communicate better. You don’t need reams of data on every customer to predict behavior and create personalized email content around it. Information from your email service provider, purchase history, eCommerce and loyalty managers, and customer relationship management system will give you more than enough to start.
That data adds to the magic of a Smart Banner™ because it allows you to hyper-personalize every email you send on a 1:1 level.
The above example walks through the power of the Smart Banner™. The banner has multiple levels of personalization pulled from customer data. Beyond name personalization, the banner highlights customer loyalty information, has a personalized promotion, and a call to action. If that’s not enough, add in animation too, and really catch your reader’s eye.
Today’s consumers demand high levels of personalization from brands. And if you don’t deliver and create content that speaks to them on an individual level, they’ll leave and find someone else. So the stakes are high. You need to do something big to stand out. Smart Banners™ can make all the difference.
Let the Decision Engine do the hard work
Marketing needs to be more of a conversation. It’s a two-way street. Instead of only thinking about how you can educate customers about your brand, learn as much as you can about them. The more you communicate with your customers and ask them about their interests and likes, the better you can respond with personalized content and information. That can help boost engagement and drive conversions.
Where Smart Banners™ stand out is the level of personalization you can add to every email, automatically. That way, every email is optimized in real-time. It’s possible through our Campaign Decision Engine.
Smart Banners™ allow you to create multiple personalized experiences for your emails. Rather than needing to spend hours painstakingly going through your list and creating dozens of segments, the Decision Engine does the work for you, right at the moment of open.
Every time your customer opens their email, our AI-based Decision Engine runs through behavioral, loyalty, transaction, and profile data and determines the Smart Banner™ that’s relevant for each reader. The banner is then personalized, animated, and delivered, all in a couple of hundredths of a second.
Smart Banners™ in action
Now you’ve got a solid understanding of how Smart Banners™ look and why they can make a huge difference in boosting your email engagement, it’s time to see some banners in action.
These are a few examples of Smart Banners™ you can begin adding to your emails.
Loyalty
Your loyalty members are some of your best customers, and all too often, they get pushed to the back burner. Use Smart Banners™ to remind your loyalty members about their points and member promotions. Then, to add another level, create reminders for loyalty members to use their rewards to buy.
Package tracking
Customers want to know where their packages are at all times. Otherwise, your support team could be inundated with where is my order calls. Shipping Smart Banners™ always keep your customers up to date on where their package is; every time they open their email, they’ll get the most up-to-date information.
Abandoned cart
If you want to improve your conversion rates, sending out abandoned cart notifications is a great way to do it. When you do it with a Smart Banner™, you’re reminding your customers they’ve got an opportunity to complete their purchase in every email you send. It makes it easy to get customers to re-engage.
Promotions
It’s hard to personalize marketing emails, but when you use Smart Banners™, it’s that much easier to let your favorite customers know you’ve got a special sale or event coming up. Tease savings, offer a discount code, and include a call to action. You won’t have to worry about your promotional emails getting lost in the shuffle anymore.
Order replenishing
Another great way to add more personalization to your emails and enhance your customer’s experience is by anticipating their needs. That’s where your data comes into play. Use it to create a Smart Banner™ that reminds your customers to refill or replenish a past purchase.
Countdown timers
Do you have a special sale going on? Maybe you’re about to celebrate a new store’s grand opening or another event and want to generate excitement. A Smart Banner™ with a countdown timer will let your customers know when it’s happening.
Deal of the day
If you run a deal of the day or multiple sales of the day specials or events, a Smart Banner™ can help. It’s easy to create a variety of Smart Banners™, highlighting deals and specials and then swap them out every few hours or once a day for added message visibility.
Product recommendations
With your customer data, you can gather information on the types of products they love and buy. That makes it really easy to generate a list of personalized product recommendations for them. Use a Smart Banner™ to feature that recommended product and use animation to highlight positive ratings.
Stock updates
We all know inventory is hard to predict today. So rather than leaving customers waiting and wondering if an item they liked is back in stock, tell them. A Smart Banner™ can is another way to use image personalization to remind customers about items they wanted.
And, your options don’t end there, Smart Banners™ can provide a dozen options to interact with your customers and encourage taking action.
Easy to design. Easy to update. Optimize everything.
If Smart Banners™ are catching your eye, now imagine what they can do for boosting your customer value. The best part is introducing these banners to your customers is really easy. You don’t need to worry about re-coding your emails, going back and forth with your designers, or spending weeks testing your emails.
If you want to add a Smart Banner™ to your email, there’s no need to re-do your template. It sits on top of what you’ve already designed. All you need to do is add a snippet of code that pulls in data from your preferred sources, and you’re good to go. Every email you send is automatically optimized to the right customer.
Since these banners are dynamic, they update in real-time at the moment your customer opens their email. So you don’t need to stop or pause a campaign to tweak a bunch of code. Instead, you can make updates whenever you need, with no disruptions — for you or your customers.
Interested in learning more about Smart Banners™ and how they can transform your emails? Get in touch. We’d love to learn more about your business and how Zembula can help.
Liz Froment
Liz Froment is a content writer at Zembula. A graduate of University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Liz is a travel aficionado, Boston sports fan, and maple syrup connoisseur.
Three Ways Personalized Emails Can Improve Lifetime Customer Value
Today, how your customer views your brand is just as important as the product or service you provide. In fact, many customers will drop your brand after a bad experience even if they like your product.
That means you have to fight a war on two fronts. First, you need to have an excellent product or service to offer customers. Then, you must guide them through an outstanding customer experience — from the first touch to post-purchase and beyond.
Do that, and you’re going to have a customer who sticks with you for the long term. But, obviously, that’s easier said than done. It takes a lot of effort on your end to create an improved customer experience that makes people want to not only buy once but keep buying again and again.
These are a few ways your emails can help.
Use data in a way that resonates with your buyers
Here’s the great news, even with the simplest of setups, you have a ton of data available and right at your fingerprints. When you know your customer’s basic information: name, location, and shopping history, it’s that much easier to start creating personalized content.
Check out the above email. In this snapshot, you’re telling your customer the story of their interactions with your brand. They get their loyalty information, custom product recommendations (with ratings), and local store information.
It’s hard to beat the impact of this sort of personalized content. It gives your customer the feeling that you’re speaking just to them. No one else is getting this same email. It stands out in a world where consumers crave individualized interactions with brands.
Go beyond marketing emails
Yes, the goal is to get clicks and conversions from every marketing email. But, the customer experience goes far beyond that. You need to always consider how to engage with and appeal to your customers in every email you send, including your transactional and customer support emails.
A recent study from Salesforce found this stat: “76% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments. However, 54% say it generally feels like sales, service, and marketing don’t share information.”
Every touch point you have with your customers, from in-store experiences to Instagram and email, forms their overall impression of your brand. If you want to extend a customer’s lifetime value, your strategy must include a consistent experience across it all. Personalization can’t stop at a sales email. It should continue through your shipping updates, customer service, and beyond.
Be adaptable
If the past two years have taught us anything, it’s that how the world operates can change very quickly. In 2020, we saw the rise of online shopping and eCommerce infiltrate every part of our lives, from grocery delivery to curbside pickup and changes in product availability.
Customers now are more online than ever, and they expect brands to catch up. Even if you aren’t selling a physical product but providing a service, consumers want to interact and engage with you digitally. That means for many brands, the old playbooks have been thrown out and it’s been a scramble to find new ways to reach customers with the information they need.
Message visibility has always been important, but maybe never more so than now. So you need to find ways to adapt quickly and make sure the messages you’re sending and the information you’re providing about products are always up-to-date. If not, customers will move on and buy from the brands that are using technology and data to meet their needs.
The bottom line
Marketers need to think about continuously building personalized relationships with customers. At first blush, that may seem like a daunting task.
We can help. With Zembula, you can incorporate your customer data into your emails, giving them the personalized experiences they crave without needing to call in your IT team, spend weeks A/B testing, or tinkering with code.
We make it easy. All you need is a snippet of code. Drag and drop it into our email templates, and you’re good to go. To learn more, get in touch today.
Liz Froment
Liz Froment is a content writer at Zembula. A graduate of University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Liz is a travel aficionado, Boston sports fan, and maple syrup connoisseur.
Clicks and conversions. Those are some of the critical metrics marketers watch to see if emails perform. If you’ve found your numbers stagnant, or worse, declining over time, it may be that you have an engagement problem.
If you can’t get people on your list to open and click your emails in the first place, it’s that much harder to see conversions. So it’s a serious problem you need to keep an eye on. If your numbers are lagging, there are probably a few reasons why.
Here’s what you need to look out for and some tips to fix it.
You’re not focusing on your customers from the start
We all know how important the customer journey is; it can often make or break a customer’s opinion of your brand. Your customer experience should start from the very first touchpoint someone has with your company, the welcome email.
Rather than using that campaign only to tell readers about your brand, look at it as an opportunity to start creating engagement right away. Make it clear; this customer journey is going to be a two-way street, where you both learn about each other.
You don’t communicate enough
All too often, a potential customer will sign up for your list, get a few emails, and then…crickets. That doesn’t exactly make people very excited to keep engaging with your brand; in fact, it probably won’t take long to forget you. If you’re willing to let the relationship drop when everything is new and exciting, it’s not a great sign.
Consumers want to hear from you. But, they also want those emails to matter to them. So, especially with your triggered email campaigns, like an abandoned cart or re-engagement series, make sure you give yourself multiple chances to communicate with your readers.
You’re not personalizing emails for the reader
This is a big one. Personalized emails are more than just a hot trend; they are what consumers will continue to demand into the future. Right now, you have the tools to send your readers emails that are chock full of personalized content, from shipping tracking to loyalty points updates to product recommendations and more.
All you need to do is tap into the data you have at hand and use that to start better communicating with your customers. Go beyond the basics and create sophisticated emails that feature location data so you can generate emails that bring in the weather or local specials and offers. Use customer buying history to remind them to refill past purchases or suggest products related to items they already love.
Your emails are kind of boring
Sorry. But, it may be true. Look at your emails with an objective eye and see where you can find places to spice them up. It’s often the case that an email has had pretty good numbers for a while, so you didn’t want to tweak anything that was working. But, over time, engagement started to slow, and now you’re not getting much traction at all.
This is a great opportunity to find ways to add new and compelling content to your emails that can help drive action. Again, here personalization is the key. Create dynamic content that asks the reader to engage and share information, include buying guides for products they’re interested in or tips for getting the most out of items they’ve just purchased. There’s a lot you can do, including using animation and image personalization to make your emails stand out.
You’re not featuring user-generated content
Consumers trust other consumers more than they trust brands. Unfortunately, that’s just how it goes. If a customer is curious about buying a product from you but can’t find anything about what others thought, they could decide to move on. Not having user-generated content like ratings, reviews, and testimonials is a missed opportunity.
The good news is you can capitalize on that by including more user-generated content in your emails. For example, add a Smart Block that highlights a featured review on a recommended product or an item that the customer has left in their cart. Gentle nudges like these that include ratings and reviews can help customers decide to buy.
The bottom line
Engagement is crucial with emails. So, you need to do everything you can to find ways to boost your numbers. Reviewing your current approach and making a few tweaks can help make all the difference.
Liz Froment
Liz Froment is a content writer at Zembula. A graduate of University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Liz is a travel aficionado, Boston sports fan, and maple syrup connoisseur.
