Irrespective of the industry, most brands leverage email as their primary channel to reach out to and engage their customers. However, the highly competitive business landscape coupled with the overwhelming volume of daily emails customers receive, means that very few emails actually make the cut when it comes to capturing customer attention.

So, what does this mean for email marketing in general?

At MoEngage, we did a detailed study of over 17 billion emails across multiple industries to see which factors contributed to higher engagement in emails. We derived the industry averages for key email performance metrics and did a detailed analysis to uncover how brands can improve their email campaigns to increase customer engagement and conversions.

In this blog, we’ll walk you through the key findings from our report and what they mean for you. 

What is the average open rate for email marketing?

The Email Benchmarks Report reveals that the average open rate for email marketing is 28.6%, with the lowest open rate being 14.5% and the highest being 42.4%.  

Email open rates are typically calculated by dividing the total number of emails opened by the number of emails successfully delivered to your recipients. 

They are largely influenced by factors like email type, campaign strategy, and industry. 

Behavior-based emails, for instance, have open rates as high as 42.36% while broadcast emails see only between 14.5% – 26.9% opens. In industries like retail, ecommerce, and financial services, open rates are higher when emails are tailored to the customer journey or behavior, rather than generic ones.

Aside from this, open rates can also vary by device (mobiles or desktops), the customer experience across different platforms, the timing and frequency of campaigns, subject lines, etc.

A good way to increase your open rates and ultimately, the success of your email campaigns, is to leverage advanced analytical tools to learn more about audience behavior. You can use these insights to create personalized and targeted campaigns that truly resonate with subscribers .

What is the average click-to-open rate for email (CTOR)?

The report also gave us insights into the average email click-to-open rate (CTOR). It stands at around 14.1%, ranging from a low of 13.4% for the Financial Services industry to a high of 15.25% for the Media & Entertainment industry.

CTOR is the percentage of customers that both open an email and click a link in that email. 

This metric allows brands to compare the number of customers that click a link to the number of customers that open them. It also helps them analyze customer engagement with their email campaigns.

What is the average conversion rate for email?

The average email conversion rate is 12.04%. It ranges from a low of 2.7% for the Retail & Ecommerce industry and to a high of 21.3% for the Financial Services industry.

The email conversion rate is the percentage of customers that complete a conversion event out of the number of email recipients. 

It represents the email campaign’s ability to get customers to complete an intended action, whether that be a completed purchase, renewed subscription, or even an app download or newsletter opt-in. Most notably, email conversion rates are used to measure the ability of your email campaigns to actually generate sales.

What is the average unsubscribe rate for email?

The average email unsubscribe rate is 0.82%. It ranges from a low of 0.23% for the Financial Services industry to a high of 1.98% for the Media & Entertainment industry.

The email unsubscribe rate is the percentage of customers that unsubscribe from a brand’s email list out of the total number of customers that are subscribed.  

It represents customer dissatisfaction with a brand’s email campaign, but it doesn’t necessarily indicate why they are dissatisfied. However, brands can analyze when this drop-off occurs to better understand what led to this instance of churn. Accordingly, they can implement a targeted reactivation campaign via omnichannel marketing.

Email Open Rates By Industry for Retail & Ecommerce, Finance, & Media

Email open rates are among the most important metrics to analyze for your campaign strategy, simply because they give you a snapshot of the campaign’s success. However, the benchmarks for different industries often differ.

In the report, we bifurcated email marketing performance to derive industry-level benchmarks for Retail & Ecommerce, Financial Services, and Media & Entertainment. 

Based on our findings, the average email open rates are as follows:

Now let’s explore how you can use these industry averages to tweak your email campaign strategy.

1. Retail & Ecommerce Average Email Open Rate: 32.59%

Email has been and continues to be the primary channel for communication between Retail and Ecommerce brands and their customers. But with time, the efficacy of generic, broadcast emails has worn out. Instead, businesses need to think about how they can stand out in a crowded online marketplace.

This is evident in the fact that the average open rate for broadcast emails is 26.59%, which is much lower than the industry average of 32.59%. However, adding attribute, behavior, and journey-based personalization to emails can improve the open rate by 20-40%.

In fact, personalization can help email open rates reach as high as 37.04% open rates.

A closer look also reveals that behavior-based personalization of emails has the most impact across all key metrics: open rates, CTOR, and conversion rates.

In comparison, journey-based personalization improves conversion rates significantly, but the impact on CTOR is not as high as that of the other email types. Similarly, attribute-based personalization increases CTOR significantly, but it’s not the same case for metrics like conversion rates.

Key takeaways for email open rates for retail & ecommerce:

• Broadcast emails perform less than ideal for all metrics, with a 26.9% open rate, a low CTOR of 1.1%, and a conversion rate of just 0.09%.
• With a 37.04% open rate, 25.5% click-to-open rate, and 5.5% conversion rate, behavior-based emails have the greatest impact on email campaigns across the board. However, they can be a double-edged sword with the highest risk of an unsubscription among all personalization types, if emails are sent too frequently or sound intrusive.
• Conversion rates saw the greatest uplift due to personalization, with a 60.7x increase for behavior-based personalization compared to broadcast emails. This was followed closely by journey-based personalization which increased conversions by 55.9x.
• It’s safe to say that Retail & Ecommerce marketers will benefit from leading with behavior-based personalization when it comes to maximizing email engagement.

Example strategy for behavior-based emails for retail & ecommerce

We saw that behavior-based emails had the greatest impact on email metrics, leading to a whopping 60.7x increase in conversion rates. 

Crafting behavioral-based emails that get triggered by a customer’s specific actions is a great way to improve customer experience, if timed correctly and without seeming too pushy.

When you send customers emails in real time, with recommendations that are relevant to what they’ve been searching for or actions that they’ve recently taken, the message is far more likely to resonate with them. The more relevant your recommendations, the higher the chances of a conversion or sale.

Nike often uses behavior-based personalization to get conversions. Say a customer is on the hunt for a pair of running shoes and adds their find to the cart but doesn’t complete the purchase. This immediately triggers an email nudging them to complete their purchase.

As you can see in the email below, Nike is sending a cart reminder and offering free shipping to encourage the customer to sign up for a membership. It also includes a few other recommendations based on the customer’s past behavior, browsing history, and budget, in case they’re looking for something better.

2. Banking & Finance Average Email Open Rate: 27.42%

Banks and other financial services operate in very regulated environments. Communication can be sensitive, with customers expecting emails and messages to be compliant with regulations and highly relevant. Sending generic emails not only poses the risk of unsubscriptions but can also have an impact on your credibility.

The average email open rate for financial services is around 27.42%. Behavior-based personalization leads to the highest opens (42.36%) and CTOR (21.64%), and the lowest unsubscribe rates (0.13%). It performs the best in terms of improving metrics across the board. Since these emails are based on the customer’s banking needs or wealth management goals showcased by their real-time behavior, it makes them highly relevant. 

On the other hand, the data also shows that journey-based personalization provides the highest conversion rates amongst all personalization types. This is because such emails are tailored to specific customer journey stages: awareness, decision (e.g. when they download the app), purchase (e.g. when they make an investment like a fixed deposit), retention, and advocacy. 

Key takeaways for email open rates in banking and finance:

• Broadcast emails have an open rate of 14.5%, a CTOR of 6.1%, and a conversion rate of 9.5%, which is lower than other email types and also the industry average.  
• Attribution-based emails fare better than broadcast emails, with double the conversion rates, but they aren’t as effective in terms of open rates and CTOR.
• Behavior-based emails perform the best across most metrics. They also have a strong conversion rate of 26.5% which is almost 3x higher than broadcast messages.
• With a conversion rate of 29.2% journey-based emails outperform all the other email types in this industry. A clear indicator that aligning your messages with the customer’s journey has a significant impact on decision-making.
• Both journey-based and behavior-based emails showed the greatest impact across the board. This is why BFSI marketers should lead with journey-based emails but complement them with a behavior-based strategy for the best results.

Example strategy for journey-based emails for banking & finance

Journey-based personalization drives the highest conversions in the Financial Services industry. And there are various ways to integrate this kind of personalization into your email strategy. Some brands send out onboarding and welcome emails to introduce new customers to their services. Others send it out based on whether the customer is ready to become a brand advocate.  

Look at how the United Bank for Africa does it, for instance.

This is an example of a well-framed welcome email sent to a newly onboarded customer. It clearly highlights how their account is going to help them manage money. Aside from this, UBA has also included everything that the customer can do with their new debit card. The email also guides the customer to the nearest branch and mentions their 24-hour support hotline in case they need it.

All these steps play a key role in educating the customer and ensuring that they feel confident in accessing help. This allows the customer to complete their onboarding and make the best use of their account, reducing the likelihood of drop-offs.

3. Media & Entertainment Average Email Open Rate: 25.78%

The Media & Entertainment industry thrives on monetizing customer experiences. You have streaming services, ticketing platforms, news platforms, and several other digital content providers vying for the customer’s attention. Again, personalization is critical here if you want to stand out against the high content saturation and continue getting ROI.

Our research shows that the average email open rate for the Media & Entertainment industry is 25.8%. Behavior-based emails once again show the highest CTOR and open rates while journey-based emails have the highest conversion rate. 

In terms of unsubscribe rates, the Media & Entertainment industry has the widest range, with broadcast emails leading to 6.4% unsubscribes and journey-based emails reducing it to 0.15%. This goes to show how customers in this industry are highly-sensitive to the kind of marketing communication they receive. If it’s not personalized and made relevant to their preferences and journey stage, they’ll not take even a second to hit the unsubscribe button. 

Key takeaways for email open rates in Media & Entertainment:

• Broadcast emails have an open rate of 15.1% and extremely poor CTOR and conversion rate, in comparison to other email types and industry benchmarks.
• Attribution-based emails are still better than broadcast emails when it comes to open rate and CTOR, but still fall behind with conversions
• Behavior-based and journey-based personalization have the greatest impact, but on different metrics. 
• Behavior-based personalization significantly increased open rates (39.7%) and CTORs (26.5%), whereas journey-based personalization significantly improved conversion rates (42.1%) and unsubscribe rates (0.2%).

Example strategy for behavior-based emails for Media & Entertainment

Crafting behavior-based emails for customers in the Media & Entertainment industry hinges on observing their current and past actions, such as their viewing history or a new playlist they favorited. Based on these insights you can send them relevant content recommendations, re-engagement emails (for inactive users), and special offers for upselling or cross-selling.

To illustrate this better, let’s take the example of Spotify. The platform looks at customer analytics to find out more about their users’ listening habits, preferred genres, and favorite artists. They then use this information to send very specific emails to their users whenever a relevant show or album is launched. This way they guide their users to use the Spotify app for more than just listening to music but also discovering live events and concerts nearby by their favorite artists/bands. This helps them close the entire journey loop and boosts customer retention. 

These are just some of the findings in our Email Benchmarks Report. But we unpack so much more in this report, including in-depth insights on:

• Email deliverability benchmarks to keep an eye on
• When to send your emails so that customers are most likely to open them or convert
• Best practices to help you optimize your email campaigns
• Pro tips from industry experts from Inbox Monster and Movable Ink

5 Other Average Email Open Rate Studies For More Information

Since email performance continues to be a source of constant evaluation and improvement, it’s always a good idea to have access to as many resources as possible. We’ve compiled a list of five other email open rate studies you can refer to, if you need more information on how to drive maximum results from your email campaigns.

1. Email Marketing Benchmarks and Metrics Businesses Should Track | Mailchimp

This report gives you insights into the email benchmarks such as average email open rates, across multiple industries (including consulting, business and finance, and creative services). You can simply select the industry you want to analyze from the drop-down provided on the page to get the benchmarks for your industry. Even though these metrics aren’t analyzed in-depth, Mailchimp’s report provides various strategies to execute email marketing. 

2. Email Open Rates By Industry (& Other Top Email Benchmarks) | HubSpot

This is a consolidated report of the average email open rates and other metrics sourced from a number of other studies (such as Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Mailerlite, Omnisend, GetResponse). It gives you a holistic view of email performance. However, since this is based on secondary data, you must look at the benchmarks with a pinch of salt. 

3. Average open, click, and bounce rates of Constant Contact customers by industry | Constant Contact

Constant Contact provides an updated list of average email open rates, CTRs, and bounce rate benchmarks for different industries, based on its customer data. The report is updated frequently so you will always get access to the updated data. However, the report does not cover any other email metrics or the implications of the metrics shown. 

4. Email, SMS, and push marketing statistics for ecommerce in 2024 | Omnisend 

Omnisend’s report includes data based on the analysis of the performance of all the email campaigns sent by their merchants across multiple channels in 2023. It compares different email metrics for different industries and also includes insights on the performance of automated emails against campaign emails. However, these insights are applicable only to the ecommerce industry.

5. What are good open rates, CTRs, & CTORs for email campaigns? | CampaignMonitor

If you want a breakdown of the average open rates, CTRs, and CTORs across industries, regions, and days, this can be a good resource to refer to. It also offers a handy email revenue calculator to help you calculate the potential ROI from your campaigns. However, the biggest drawback is that this report just covers benchmarks for 2022. 

Exceed Average Email Open Rates with MoEngage

One of the biggest takeaways from this year’s Email Benchmarks Report is the decrease in open rates when we do a Year-on-Year comparison. This is suggestive of the fact that consumers are becoming more reluctant to open emails and screening them more diligently than ever before.

Aside from this, unsubscribe rates are also on the rise, meaning that customers are quick to drop-off from mailing lists of brands that don’t offer them any value.

On the other hand, the significant uptick in CTOR and conversion rates suggests that when emails are personalized the right way and timed correctly, they can be quite effective in driving engagement and increasing conversions. It can also have a huge impact on bringing unsubscribe rates down, in the long run.

Keeping this in mind, it’s time to rethink your email strategy and your email tech provider. If you want to meet and beat the industry benchmarks for email performance, you’ll need to focus on crafting emails that are personalized based on real-time customer insights on behavior and journey.

A customer engagement platform like MoEngage can help you leverage customer-friendly analytics and advanced segmentation to build and execute highly personalized email campaigns that resonate with your audience. Interested to know more?

Book a demo now with our customer engagement experts.

The post Average Email Open Rate By Industry: A Data-Driven Study appeared first on MoEngage.

Even after decades, email remains a dominant channel for marketers.

According to Forbes, there are 4.48 billion global email users, and on average, 88% of those people check their emails every day, creating a massive opportunity for marketers. However, the challenge is interacting with all these people in a meaningful way. 

Fortunately, automation helps brands execute their email marketing efforts so they can simplify campaign management and bulk email delivery, reaching millions of customers at scale. Despite the known impact, only 58% of businesses use automation in their email marketing strategy.

With email marketing revenue projected to surpass 14.5 billion USD in 2026, all businesses should be implementing email marketing automation to maximize the efficiency and impact of their email campaigns.

Modern marketing automation makes it possible for brands to deliver personalized, tailored emails to their customers at just the right time. In fact, it gives brands the ability to reach — and engage — these customers at scale. Also it has an extremely high ROI compared to its cost (in terms of both actual dollars and time invested).

To help brands execute flawless email campaigns, we explore what email marketing automation is in-depth, how it works, its main benefits, and how to actually automate your email marketing efforts.

What is Email Marketing Automation?

Email marketing automation is the process of automating parts of your email marketing efforts, including email creation, optimization, and bulk delivery. It enables brands to send personalized emails based on where customers are in the customer journey, at the optimal time using real-time triggers.

Using omnichannel analytics about customer activity and behavior, email marketing automation systems help brands engage customers most effectively based on their customer segment, current position in the conversion funnel, past engagement levels, and other behavioral signals.

How Does Email Marketing Automation Work?

Email marketing automation is made possible through the use of specialized software that automates email creation and delivery. These tools ingest customer data to create segmented email lists, design campaigns for unique scenarios, and determine the conditions under which these campaigns trigger.

This ensures emails are automatically sent to customers at the right time based on their actions, saving your team from manually sending these emails. More importantly, this guarantees that every email you send is contextually relevant to your customer, and therefore more likely to elicit engagement.

These workflows can be set to automatically run, without much input from your team, enabling you to essentially put your campaigns on autopilot until they need to be revisited and reviewed. 

Marketers can also A/B test campaign performance and dynamically optimize email campaigns on-the-go based on their success, helping you get the channel, timing, and type of message just right.

Brands use email marketing software to create complex email campaigns for unique scenarios, triggering based on very specific customer actions that have signaled a particular customer may have an interest in (or need for) the respective campaign.

But how is email marketing automation actually different from more traditional email marketing strategies?

Traditionally, email marketers have used bulk email and drip campaigns. 

• Bulk email campaigns involve sending the same message to a large group of consumers at once, which is ideal for promotional offers that are aimed at a particular customer segment. 
• Drip campaigns send a series of pre-written emails to subscribers over time, which is ideal for welcome and lead nurture campaigns. 

Automated email campaigns are even more dynamic, instead triggering unique campaigns when particular conditions are met, ensuring customers get a contextually relevant email based on what they’re actually doing.

The main difference is in timing and targeting: bulk is sent to a specific group at once, drip is scheduled over time, and automation is triggered by specific customer actions. The best strategy is using all three, with automation tools determining when to trigger certain bulk deliveries or drip sequences.

Email Marketing vs Marketing Automation: How They Differ

Email marketing and marketing automation are both aimed at supporting an organization’s marketing efforts, the main difference is in their scope.

Email marketing refers to any processes, solutions, or strategies focused specifically on email marketing. This can include automation, but it also includes other processes and procedures that are not automated.

Marketing automation is exclusively focused on automating marketing processes and procedures. It’s not exclusive to email either and is instead used for different channels and backend procedures. It’s used to eliminate the burden of manual tasks, increasing operational efficiency and improving productivity.

Most modern brands engage customers on more than just email, which necessitates an omnichannel marketing automation strategy that activates customers across channels. But to manage these channels, brands often choose to rely on a cross-channel marketing automation solution that allows them to manage all their channels — including email — from a single platform.

While it’s certainly advantageous to take an omnichannel approach to modern marketing, email remains a crucial channel to use.

8 Benefits of Email Marketing Automation

Email marketing automation is necessary not just to get ahead of your rivals, but simply to keep pace with the market and operate at scale. Fortunately, using an email marketing automation tool comes with a lot of significant benefits.

1. Increase brand visibility: The more emails you send, the more visibility and exposure your brand garners. The right email campaigns not only help you acquire customers but also keep you on top of your customers’ minds.
2. Keep customers engaged: Automated emails that are personalized to your customers’ needs and arrive at precisely the right time significantly increase customer engagement with your email campaigns.
3. Drive acquisition and retention: Automated email marketing helps brands acquire and retain new customers through a series of acquisition, lead nurture campaigns, abandonment, and re-engagement campaigns.
4. Reach customers at scale: By automating bulk email delivery, customer segmentation, and personalization, marketers are able to quickly and easily create campaigns that reach customers at scale.
5. Improve operational efficiency: Automation saves email marketers time on otherwise manual tasks, streamlining team processes, increasing operational efficiency, and improving productivity.
6. High return on investment: Investment (in terms of cost, time, and resources) is extremely low when email automation is implemented, but the return on investment is extremely high. 
7. Deliver personalized emails at scale: Even when sending large volumes of emails, modern email marketing solutions can factor in customer behavior, activity, and interests to deliver personalized recommendations, offers, and messaging that resonates more effectively.
8. Robust data and analytics: These systems automatically collect customer information, powering actionable insights about customers’ interests and preferences. It also provides metrics so you can gauge your overall performance.

As you can imagine, email marketing automation can superpower your email marketing efforts, saving you significant time, resources, and costs. This drastically reduces your effort while increasing the ROI and impact of your email campaigns.

How to Automate Email Marketing: Top 9 Strategies

We’ve already covered how email marketing automation works: brands curate a segmented customer list, craft dynamic email campaigns, and establish triggers that automatically send emails when certain conditions are met.

This allows brands to have emails automatically delivered when customers take particular actions, like signing up for your service, opting in to your newsletters, or abandoning a shopping cart.

But to actually execute this process is far more complicated than it seems. It requires email marketers to get a multitude of things right, with very little room for error. After all, to elicit active engagement, brands need to ensure their emails arrive in the right customer’s inbox at the right time.

Below, we explain how to automate your email marketing efforts in 9 easy steps.

1. Define your email marketing automation goals

To get the most value — and impact — out of your email marketing automation platform, you first need to determine your main objectives. Ask yourself: what do you hope to achieve with email marketing automation?

Determine whether you will use email marketing automation to improve operational efficiency, increase the impact of your campaigns, maximize outreach and engagement, or all of the above.

Establish your team’s top priorities, and make sure these goals are clear to all stakeholders. This will ensure all your automation efforts are aligned and working towards the same goal.

Think critically about what features you’ll need to achieve your objectives, and ensure you have a way of measuring your performance along the way.

2. Choose an email marketing automation software

Now that you’ve clearly defined your goals, make sure the solution you choose has the features and capabilities you need to achieve them.

The system you choose should empower you to build dynamic, media-rich email campaigns that will pique your customers’ interest and foster greater engagement. Make sure it has personalization capabilities that let you uniquely tailor your campaigns to your customer segments for better traction.

MoEngage provides customers with all the core email marketing automation features they need, including bulk email delivery, granular segmentation, deep personalization, dynamic A/B testing, and real-time, AI-powered optimization.

However, as an all-in-one marketing platform, it also has comprehensive features allowing brands to automate more than just their email marketing campaigns.

3. Build and segment your email list

The effectiveness (and ROI) of your email campaigns depends on your ability to reach the right people with the right email.

To automate your email marketing campaigns, your solution needs to know who to send your email campaigns to. This means clearly defining your customer segments so you can deliver tailored emails that perfectly suit your recipients.

Create multiple dimensions to segment your customers by, including location, gender, device type, personal interests, and more. Segmentation will allow you to automate targeting, ensuring email campaigns are sent to the ideal customer groups.

You can even drill down to get more value out of your high-intent customers, reactivate dormant customers, and motivate new customers to buy again. Ultimately, accurate, reliable segmentation ensures your emails are being sent to the ideal customer and minimizes time wasted by sending campaigns to the wrong customers.

MoEngage’s segmentation capabilities are designed to help brands achieve deeper personalization so their emails resonate with their customers. We are brands with the tools to increase traction and engagement so they can get more value out of their outreach efforts.

4. Determine which email campaigns you’ll automate

Not every campaign should be — or even can be — completely automated. In some cases, certain elements of your email campaigns will still be done manually, whether by necessity or because you prefer to retain manual control.

Decide which campaigns you’re going to automate and which elements of those campaigns you’ll be automating.

Will you automate campaign creation, or take a more hands on approach and design them from scratch yourself?

Will you fully automate segmentation, or do you already have particular customer groups in mind?

Or do you really just want to automate bulk delivery?

Ultimately, the balance will depend on how much control you want and how good your email automation solution is. Many teams opt to do some manual design while automating optimization and delivery, while others choose to take a more hands-off approach and automate campaign creation as well.

To get an idea of which email campaigns you could automate, here are some campaigns that are commonly automated:

• Welcome campaigns: It’s simple to set up welcome campaigns that automatically trigger when you gain a new customer. It requires only a few campaign variations, and only needs to be triggered when a customer meets very specific criteria by becoming a first-time customer.
• Product recommendations: It’s critical that product recommendations are personalized to your customer’s interests. Establishing workflows that automatically send recommendations after a customer has viewed an item is a great way of automating relevant recommendations.
• Discounts and offers: Brief explanation of why automating this is important
• Order confirmation emails: Customers want to stay informed about the status of their purchases. Order confirmation emails that automatically trigger when transactions are complete, orders are processed, and deliveries are received increase customer satisfaction by keeping them informed.
• Cart abandonment campaigns: These campaigns target high-intent customers who have already shown a keen interest in a particular product. It’s also easy to set up conditional triggers that ensure these emails are sent at the optimal time.
• Re-engagement campaigns: Recovering inactive and dormant customers requires perfectly timed email sequences. Establish clear conditions for trigger re-engagement campaigns that alert customers when they’re on the verge of going inactive, encouraging them to return before it’s too late.
• Anniversary emails: Whether you want to congratulate your customers on their birthday or another happy year as your loyal customer, anniversary emails are extremely easy to set up, and can be set to send each year automatically.

Not every campaign will need to be automated, or fully automated. In some cases, you’ll want to take a more hands-on approach, tinkering with individual subject lines yourself. For others, it’ll make more sense to automate subject line creation and optimization through A/B testing.

At the end of the day, it’s important that you know which campaigns (and which parts of those campaigns) you plan on automating, how that will benefit you, and how you’ll achieve it.

MoEngage is capable of creating customized campaigns for virtually any scenario you can imagine, from greeting first-time users to feedback loops that help you collect zero-party feedback through surveys and questionnaires.

5. Map out your customer journey

Clearly map out your customer journey, considering all touchpoints. Identify precisely where and how you plan on using emails to maximize engagement.

Consider where your email campaigns fit into various customer journey stages, from welcome campaigns to order confirmation emails.

For campaigns, you’ll send customers more than once in their lifecycle, like re-engagement campaigns, product recommendations, and discount offers, consider not only where in the journey they fit best, but also the conditions that trigger those emails.

By the end, you should know exactly which campaigns you’ll use, where you’ll deploy them, and how you plan on automating them. This will allow you to leverage each campaign at the optimal point in your customers’ journeys, as well as create a seamless customer experience across channels.

MoEngage helps brands orchestrate seamless customer journeys across all channels, including email. We help marketers eliminate redundancies in messaging, simplify their communication, while maximizing the impact of each interaction.

6. Create your email marketing campaigns

We know it seems like we’ve waited a long time for this, but now it’s time to actually build the campaigns themselves.

If you jump the gun too early, you’ll end up having to rework your campaigns to fit into your customer journey and meet your core objectives. This will mean rewriting your campaigns, but it may also mean restructuring them entirely. By doing that work upfront, you streamline the creation process so you can design email campaigns that fit effortlessly into your customer journey.

MoEngage’s email builder helps brands create interactive, engaging email campaigns that are personalized to the interests and needs of your customers so they always connect with your audience. We make it easy for brands to build campaigns with no code using a drag-and-drop feature or simply select from professionally crafted templates.

7. Set up automated email workflows

You’ve crafted your campaigns, and you’ve planned where you’ll be deploying them; now it’s time to actually set up the workflows. Using rule engines, you can build workflows that automatically send specific campaigns when particular conditions are met.

Brands can use these smart triggers to automate emails for a variety of unique scenarios: a welcome campaign can be sent immediately after a new customer completes sign up, or an abandonment campaign can trigger an email to send 2 hours after a customer abandons an item in their cart.

This enables brands to set up automated workflows that send contextually relevant emails at the right time, based on the customer’s most recent action (or series of actions). When used properly, it empowers brands to automate email campaigns so they can effectively engage customers while being delivered at scale.

MoEngage comes equipped with ready-made templates for some of the most common email campaigns, and we make it easy to set up automated campaign workflows for these scenarios. Clearly define trigger conditions so your email campaigns automatically send when customers need them most.

8. Test, finalize, and implement your automation setup

Now that you’ve set everything up, it’s time to get started, right? Wrong.

First, you want to test that your strategy, campaigns, and automated workflows perform as designed. Test them in a controlled environment to ensure they work as intended before implementing them.

Never let them go stagnant either. Your campaigns must be reviewed and updated periodically at the very least. It’s best to run consistent tracking on the performance of your campaigns so you know when campaigns are falling short and may require an update.

Consistently A/B test your email campaigns to make small improvements and maximize engagement. Understand which types of emails have the greatest impact with which customer segments and test different subject lines, preheaders, and even email content to see what grabs your customers’ attention — and holds it!

MoEngage’s Uplift allows customers to conduct A/B and multivariate testing to compare campaign performance down to the smallest detail. This enables marketers to make minute adjustments to their campaigns that squeeze out the most engagement possible.

9. Collect customer data to analyze and optimize

To keep pace with customer expectations and maintain a competitive advantage in the market, you must consistently improve your email campaigns. While you can certainly do this entirely based on instincts and intuition, pairing those with reliable, accurate engagement data is far better.

It’s critical that your email marketing automation solution is able to collect customer data and track the performance of your email campaigns so you can make informed, data-driven decisions about your email strategy.

Think critically about which metrics you’ll use to measure your performance, such as open rates, click-through rates, click-to-open rates, conversion rates, and more.

Detailed customer analytics will help you identify gaps so you can optimize where needed.This enables you to identify not only which campaigns are performing best (or worst), but also which elements of your emails are underperforming, so you can optimize those components for greater traction.

Over time, you can identify which types of emails are best for your unique customer segments, as well as what style, tone, and voice resonates the most with them.

MoEngage’s marketing automation platform provides you the actionable insights you need to make informed decisions about which campaigns to drop, which ones to optimize, and where to make the most impactful changes.

Key Features of Email Marketing Automation Platforms

No matter what solution you choose, it’s critical that it helps your team do a better, more effective job. These are some essential features to look for when purchasing an email marketing automation platform to help email marketers achieve modern goals.

• Smart Triggers: Automating email campaigns relies on your ability to trigger them at the optimal time in the customer’s lifecycle. Smart triggers need to be customized so they initiate campaigns when the right conditions are met.
• Deliverability: The impact (and ROI) of your email campaigns depends on your ability to land emails in inboxes. It’s imperative you optimize your email strategy and campaigns to increase deliverability.
• Personalization: Emails that don’t speak directly to your customer’s needs and interests aren’t effective. It’s imperative that your email campaigns are personalized to target the right audience and that they’re tailored to that audience.
• Transactional alerts: Keep customers informed and up-to-date in real-time with transactional alerts, whether that’s about a completed purchase, a delivered order, a feature update, or a change to their terms of service.
• Predictions: It’s challenging to deliver customers the right campaign every time. Predictive analytics helps brands anticipate your customer’s needs so you can deliver the email they need when they need it, not a week later.
• Cross-channel: Email is only one piece of the customer engagement puzzle. Omnichannel engagement creates a cohesive customer experience that lets them flow seamlessly between online and offline channels.

Ultimately, the most important features will depend on your brand’s industry and objectives. However, the above features are all critical for email marketing success in today’s omnichannel environment, where customers expect seamless experiences both on and offline.

Automate Your Email Marketing Efforts with MoEngage

Email is still a main choice of brands for marketing; it’s cheap, effective, and provides incredible ROI. Modern automation efforts make it incredibly easy to execute while still driving significant engagement and conversions.

MoEngage’s Email Marketing Platform is designed to help brands engage customers and elicit conversions. It helps brands strengthen their email marketing efforts with powerful segmentation and personalization capabilities that ensure your emails are tailored to your unique customers.

As a cross-channel marketing solution, we help brands seamlessly integrate email into their omnichannel marketing strategy, helping them engage customers on all channels.

Our Marketing Automation Platform helps brands automate a variety of marketing tasks — including email. Our system is designed to improve operational efficiency and increase productivity, amplifying business growth by 400%. 

Schedule a demo with our sales team to find out how we can help you automate your email marketing efforts, saving you time and money while helping you grow your business and increase conversions.

The post How To Utilize Email Marketing Automation For Your Campaigns appeared first on MoEngage.

In today’s crowded E-commerce landscape, brands that succeed are those that understand and meet customer’s unique expectations.

Every interaction counts, and your E-commerce app is the most critical one. To stay ahead, brands must continually improve their app experience, tailoring it to each audience segment.

However, personalizing your app goes beyond suggesting related products; it’s about creating a unique shopping experience for every customer, from the moment they open your app to making their final purchase.

9 Ways E-Commerce Brands Can Use App Personalization

Let’s take a closer look at the different ways you can leverage App Personalization for your E-commerce Application –

1. Location-based Recommendations

When browsing an E-commerce app in a warmer climate, you will likely see the retailer’s summer collection showcased in clothing suggestions. However, if you were to relocate to a colder area, your recommendations would adapt to reflect more winter-oriented attire. This is because E-commerce brands leverage location-based recommendations.

In addition, brands also tailor product availability, shipping options, and local offers to your location.

2. Discount Offers

E-commerce brands can easily analyze ​​customer interactions, past purchases, cart history, and product preferences on their apps. Based on these insights, they should send customized offers, often enticing customers to buy their favorite products again or prevent abandoned shopping cart transactions.

Personalized discounts help with higher conversion rates, better customer engagement, and improved customer retention. Here’s an example of  how Snitch provides exclusive deals to their customers based on their favorite products –

3. Product Recommendations

Most E-commerce apps have a “You Might Also Like” section. It shows personalized recommendations based on browsing history, past purchases, and preferences.

The recommended section of your app is often dynamic and tailored to suit each customer’s shopping experience. Whether it is the best shirt to pair with your latest jeans purchase, the new handbag from your favorite brand, or the recent new launches in your favorite product category, the biggest E-commerce brands know your buying patterns and show recommendations accordingly.

Amazon is an excellent example of this. They recommend products on every app page, and their recommendation grids are vast, too.

4. App Homescreen Personalization

If you return to your favorite E-commerce app, they will probably show you the items you last browsed or products from categories you buy the most from. Sometimes, they’ll also use it to show the items you might have left in your cart.

By showing relevant product suggestions, brands hope to increase conversions and engagement. Here’s a cart abandonment example from Myntra below –

5. Personalized App Notifications

Personalized push notifications are the primary communication channels for E-commerce brands. Whether it’s to nudge customers to complete their transactions from the cart or to offer a discount on the products they were just browsing.

Brands usually personalize these notifications based on customer’s favorite brands and frequently purchased products. In addition, brands leverage it for new sales, trending products, or restocked items.

6. Custom Product Filters

Many E-commerce brands provide default filters based on customers’ past behavior and previous purchases. Whether it is the size of a shirt or your favorite brands, they apply personalized filters to product searches.

This allows customers to discover relevant products quickly and smoothens the customer experience further.

7. Personalized Checkout Experiences

From your preferred payment method to your shipping preferences to your default address, E-commerce apps nowadays provide a customized checkout experience to all their customers. E-commerce brands also prompt to save card details and wallet accounts to ensure a seamless checkout experience.

Tailored checkout experiences ensure customer delight, resulting in fewer drop-outs and additional revenue.

8. Personalized Loyalty Programs

Many E-commerce brands run loyalty programs for their customers where they provide personalized discounts or exclusive access to their sales. Many brands even trial their new products on their apps with their loyal customers.

Few even distinguish their members on different ‘tiers’ based on their purchase history, frequency, and purchase values.

9. Interactive product quizzes

Many fashion apps ask customers about their style preferences, body type, and favorite colors to suggest personalized outfits. These interactive quizzes guide customers toward products that suit their style, size, or specific needs.

These insights allow E-commerce companies to show customers the most relevant products, making the shopping experience seamless while increasing sales.

Here’s an example from Bombas: they’re trying to determine customers’ preferences for socks to provide a curated shopping experience.

What’s Next?

The E-commerce industry has grown remarkably in the past decade, and personalized shopping experiences have been a driving force behind it. Personalization plays a critical role in conversions, loyalty, and customer retention.

And, since a substantial portion of E-commerce transactions occur on apps, the role of App Personalization becomes even more pronounced. It empowers brands to deliver customized, meaningful, and timely interactions that foster a deeper connection with their customers.

The post 9 App Personalization Tips for E-commerce Brands appeared first on MoEngage.

I want to start the 2024 year review with the mindset that has always worked for us and helped move MoEngage engineering in the right direction.

I have seen the best engineers live by this mindset.  Organizations with a strong desire for success, like ours, recognize the importance of living by this idealogy. We maintain a strong commitment to growth, and recognizing that every member’s contribution is valuable, we work together to unlock our organization’s full potential.

We at MoEngage Engineering constantly strive to reinforce our core principles, and as a natural part of our growth journey, we have doubled our efforts to ensure every team member embodies these values moving forward.

Building on our foundational beliefs, I’m excited to share the significant improvements we’ve recently implemented in our Engineering division, which have already begun delivering impactful results.

Vision

In 2024, we formalized our vision for MoEngage Engineering. This vision statement continues to guide us in making decisions and serves as a foundational framework that shapes our coherent and thoughtful decision-making. It still remains a source of inspiration and guidance that deeply resonates with our entire team.

Scale

The scale at which our platform operates has challenged our team for years, and our challenges grew by about 30% last year. 

Developing an application that effectively serves millions of users is a complex challenge that goes far beyond initial production – it requires expert fine-tuning to meet rigorous service standards while carefully managing operational costs. How do we strike the perfect balance for 2 billion monthly active users, ensuring customer satisfaction and sound financial management? That’s the question guiding our development strategy.

Our collective strength lies in our ability to elevate our problem-solving approaches when faced with complex challenges – an aspect we are proud to encounter and address every day at MoEngage.

Speaking of scale, we launched a new data center for our customers in Indonesia, taking the total count of our worldwide data centers to 6.

As we move into 2025, our strategy includes a targeted expansion that will strengthen our global presence and introduce our services to a range of new markets.

Security

In 2024, we took proactive steps to embed security best practices into the core of our development workflow, ensuring that secure design is a central element of our product development from the outset. 

We improved our DLP practices across the software applications used by our teams. We enhanced our cloud security posture, allowing our team members to access the data they have access to securely. 

Our team integrated advanced GenAI technology into our operations to revolutionize our processes. This technology offers substantial time savings and operational efficiencies that we anticipate will be game-changers for us in 2025.

The past year brought unexpected and profound challenges, none greater than the loss of our head of security, whose memory will continue to inspire our path forward. 2024 was a year of resilience for our team. We also welcomed our new head of security, whose expertise is already evident through their recent completion of PIMS & BCMS certifications, a testament to our enduring dedication to excellent security practices even in times of transition. 

As we reflect on this loss, our security team is committed to achieving our 2025 objectives with the excellence and focus they have always championed.

Quality Assurance

We all know bugs and incidents are unavoidable in production. Over the last few years, we have made significant investments to shift the testing leftwards and become more reliable. 

As part of our initiative to integrate testing and security earlier in the product development cycle, we set a goal to enhance automation across all products by the end of 2024. Our efforts paid off, as we saw a significant reduction in manual effort. Today, we save 105 hours in testing per release cycle, greatly accelerating our time to market.

We implemented a new initiative known as Blackbox monitoring. This system rigorously tests our live production environment at regular intervals, ensuring that any potential issues are identified and resolved promptly. Thanks to this strategy, in 2024, we efficiently addressed over 40 incidents before they impacted our users. Our dedicated QA team has wholeheartedly adopted this methodology, and their commitment is reflected in the marked improvement of our service reliability and user satisfaction.

SDKs

How do we automate our releases for various Maven repositories? I’m proud to share that our SDK team’s innovative approach to solving this challenge has been recognized within the Maven community. Our plugin contributions are now listed on the Maven Central Repository; take a look. 

Embracing a Kotlin multi-platform development approach enabled us to use the same codebase for iOS and Android platforms. This strategic move not only cut down development time significantly but also ensured a uniform experience for our customers interacting with our SDKs, which are the first touchpoints of integration for our customers.

Frontend

In a significant enhancement to our development process, we transitioned our frontend technology to use React instead of the Angular code that we used in the past.

Our frontend teams pioneered the adoption of micro frontend architecture, streamlining our systems so that each team can autonomously develop their part of our applications while presenting a unified platform to our consumers. This innovative approach has led to an impressive 3-5 days reduction in release times for each team. The commitment and skill our team has demonstrated through this transition are truly commendable, and I am thrilled with the progress.

Backend

While we always aim for continuous improvement and know we have the potential to achieve even more, in 2024, we successfully delivered several key initiatives that have positively impacted our customers and driven business growth.

We revamped one of the most coveted products of MoEngage – Flows. The new stack rollout is ongoing for some customers. This change will improve the reliability of Flows for our customers. Firebase Cloud Messaging has moved away from accepting multiple tokens in a single API to send push notifications. This was a massive surprise to us, but our team adopted it brilliantly, and HTTP2 multiplexing was introduced to counter this. We saved about $7k/month due to this change. We have also introduced FastAPI to one of our public-facing services, which receives burst traffic. This has reduced our p99 latencies for this service by about 10 times.

MoEngage data ingestion has become close to real-time, and we have greatly improved our customer experience. You can read more about that here. 93% of the time, we can provide data to our customers within 5 seconds of the data hitting our servers. The extension of this project is real-time segmentation for our customers, where we can help them interact with their audience accurately. Real-time segmentation capability has boosted our personalization experiences massively.

In our efforts to incorporate Iceberg tables into our data framework, we gained valuable insights into the optimizations needed to fully leverage this technology. With a clear roadmap for these enhancements, we are confident as we prepare for a successful implementation in 2025.

Operations and Culture

We have always aimed to excel in engineering practices, and a key priority for us is to consistently set and achieve higher standards. We have started refining our performance evaluation process, anticipating strategic enhancements in 2025 that will further our commitment to excellence.

We also reboarded all our team members, emphasizing what we expect from each team member and what kind of support they can get from the leadership team.

Additionally, we’ve initiated a comprehensive review with our engineering teams to clarify roles, expectations, and the extensive support available from our leadership. 

This reinforced alignment ensures that every team member is fully engaged and supported in contributing to our collective success.

Improvements

Towards the end of 2024, we conducted a thorough review of our engineering practices and identified several opportunities for further advancement.

Operational excellence is our priority, and we’re taking concrete steps to enhance our processes in 2025. We developed a comprehensive action plan with clear targets to elevate our performance and deliver on our commitment to quality and innovation.

Ensuring every team member understands their role and contributions, we enter 2025 with a shared focus on executing these strategies and achieving our objectives.

As we reflect on 2024, I see not just the outcomes but also the heart and dedication our platform teams poured into every challenge.

 My belief has never wavered that with the right focus, our platform teams are nothing short of remarkable – they’re the heartbeat of our company. 

Together, we will continue to refine our approach until we meet the high standards we know we’re capable of.

In my years as CTO, I’ve seen the transformative power of data and clear objectives. As we step into the next year, I’m committed to fostering a data-driven and impact-focused culture that aligns with our passion for excellence. We will collaboratively redefine our OKRs, sharply focusing on the meaningful results that drive us forward.

What’s in Store for 2025?

In 2025, we want to change how we look at our success. 

We have been examining micro metrics so far, but we want to change them to macro metrics and align them with our values. It’s not just about numbers; it’s about the real value each of those numbers represents for our customers.

Customer obsession is one of the core values of MoEngage. 

From a deeply personal place, and as the CTO of MoEngage, I’m leading us towards embracing a ‘macro’ view of our impact—one that resonates with the meaningful experiences we strive to deliver to our customers every day.

We will judge our engineering triumphs not just on features and functions but on the true enrichment they bring to our customers’ lives – this is the question that will be at the heart of all our endeavors:

The post Behind the Code: Engineering Year in Review 2024 appeared first on MoEngage.

Mobile banking has transformed the financial world. Today, with a tap, you can manage your savings account, transfer money, and hundred other things. Financial apps have truly made every aspect of banking less complicated and more convenient.

And as a result, the number of consumers using finance apps has skyrocketed. According to a recent Google report, 60% of mobile users prefer these apps over websites when it comes to managing their finances.

However, financial institutions must keep enhancing their app experience to meet rising customer expectations. And there’s nothing better than leveraging real-time app personalization.

5 App Personalization Strategies Financial Institutions Can Execute Right Away

Let’s look at different app personalization strategies financial institutions can leverage to provide a superior customer experience –

1. Drive Engagement through a Personalized Homescreen Experience

The home screen is the first thing customers look at when they open the application. While often overlooked, it’s a great place to promote offers, upsell various financial products, and drive clicks to relevant categories.

To craft a tailored home screen experience, financial institutions can easily get insights by tapping into customer’s current financial situation, spending habits, and goals. Furthermore, they can also tweak depending on preferences customers set during onboarding.

For example, brands can reorder categories or sections based on customer preferences. So, if customers regularly check their credit card transactions and rewards, those tabs can be displayed prominently.

The same applies when promoting offers. For customers with high credit card usage, brands can prioritize card-specific offers and discounts on the home screen.

The app home screen can also be utilized to prompt customers to perform specific tasks such as completing Know Your Customer (KYC), finishing onboarding processes, showcase payment reminders and more.

Below is an example of AU Bank’s home screen. If you look closely, you can see how they’ve prioritized relevant categories and highlighted new ones.

2. Increase Conversions Using Personalized Offers

Financial institutions can also leverage customer insights to tailor their offers. It’s common knowledge that personalized offers tend to convert better than generic ones. Also, it ensures brand maintain a superior customer experience. The last thing you want is to bombard customers with irrelevant offers.

For instance, BFSI apps know customers’s spending habits, credit history, and credit score. They can use these insights, customer preferences, and eligibility to show personalized credit card offers. Similarly, if a customer travels frequently, financial apps might suggest a travel-related credit card or display travel insurance offers. On the other hand, if customers spend their money on groceries and utilities, they can promote a daily reward cashback card.

Additionally, rather than bombarding these offers to all possible channels, brands can trigger the offer to only those channels where customers are most active. This boosts engagement and reach significantly.

3. Upsell New Financial Products and Adoption Through Personalized Recommendations

BFSI brands can only succeed through effective cross-selling and upselling. It is critical for their sustainable growth. With increasing acquisition costs and competition, most financial institutions focus on increasing customer lifetime value and retention. This isn’t possible without effective adoption and upselling of new products.

But at the same time, brands cannot afford to upsell irrelevant products. This is because product eligibility depends on multiple factors, especially in retail banking. For example, personal loans can only be offered to eligible customers with a certain credit score and income; the same applies to mortgage loans.

Similarly, BFSI brands can offer more premium credit cards to customers after monitoring their credit card usage after a specific period. They can also upsell vehicle and personal loan during the festive season.

In conclusion, brands must leverage customer insights to offer personalized products like credit cards, loan offers, and insurance plans for higher conversions. They can easily do this by analyzing customer’s credit history, account balance, monthly cash flow, and more.

4. Keep Customers Informed Through Personalized Push Notifications

Many financial transactions are recurring, such as EMIs, subscriptions, credit card bill generation, or monthly deposits. Banks must ensure they inform customers about these transactions especially through push notifications and in-app messages.

Most banking apps also send real-time notifications to alert customers if they find any suspicious activity like a fraudulent transaction. For example, when you log in from an new device or transact from a different location, BFSI apps will instantly notify you over a push notification and email to verify the login attempt.

5. Activate Customers Quickly Using Personalized Onboarding

With ever-changing banking regulations, onboarding has remained a constant challenge for financial institutions. However, for customers to start using their platforms, they need to complete the onboarding. It’s also a great opportunity to understand customer’s financial goals and gain valuable insights into their needs and expectations.

And for banks to achieve the above, they need to provide a personalized onboarding experience.  For instance, financial institutions can simplify onboarding by providing incentives such as cashback or rewards and offer personalized recommendations. Similarly, onboarding needs to be tweaked according to the customer segment, as every customer approaches banking with different levels of tech-savviness and goals.

Overall, providing personalized onboarding helps brands to have a competitive edge and fosters stronger connections with customers.

What’s Next?

There’s no denying that app personalization will be relevant in 2025 than ever, allowing financial institutions to convert and retain maximum customers. We’ve already seen few examples of how app personalization can truly transform the app experience. With increasing competition and customer needs, brands must take real-time app personalization incredibly seriously and add it to their customer engagement strategy.

If you’re looking to tailor financial web experiences, you can read our latest guide here. 

The post 5 Financial App Personalization Tactics That Will Transform Customer Engagement appeared first on MoEngage.

Email marketing is a direct marketing channel that helps brands engage with existing and potential customers. Marketers can segment their audience, automate campaigns, measure the effectiveness of each marketing campaign, and personalize emails to a hyper-accurate level. Email marketing also enables brands to interact with customers regularly, and this helps build customer loyalty. Let’s explore each of the benefits of email marketisegmenng in detail:

1. Increased reach and ROI
2. Enhanced segmentation and personalization
3. Improved brand awareness and customer engagement
4. Higher conversion rates
5. Integration with other marketing channels and automation
6. Mobile optimization and accessibility
7. Building and nurturing customer relationships

Increased Reach and ROI

Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective and produces the highest ROI of all marketing channels. Brands don’t have to fight for ad space and can reach their customers on multiple devices.

Each dollar spent on email marketing can generate $40 in revenue. Marketers can also save time by automating their emails, creating drip campaigns, and conducting A/B testing to analyze what is working well with their audience.

Enhanced Segmentation and Personalization

Email marketers can segment subscribers based on demographics, age group, life stage, preferences, and behavior. These segments help micro-target the audience based on their interests and what resonates with them most. For example, IKEA segments customers based on age group and life stage. Each segment receives product recommendations that match their needs.

Ikea asks its customers smart questions to help the company micro-segment its customers as early as they sign up. More customer information can be extracted using sign-up forms, engagement rates, and purchase history. Asking customers smart questions early helps curate a niche email marketing strategy. The performance of each segment can be measured, and based on the data extracted, customer segments can be optimized.

Insights gained from running segmented email marketing campaigns can help create various “Ideal Customer Personas,” which can help optimize email marketing and digital marketing campaigns across various platforms.

Improved Brand Awareness and Customer Engagement

Regular interactions with customers via email marketing campaigns can help improve brand visibility and recall. Promotional campaigns that reward email subscribers can increase customer cohesion and loyalty to the brand.

Brands can interact with the customers using interactive email marketing campaigns that start a dialogue with the customer. For example, companies can ask for feedback using an interactive feedback scale that allows customers to rate their experience. Other interactive elements that can be used in emails are spinning wheels, sign-up forms, puzzles, and scratch-off discounts. An email marketing strategy that uses interactive elements helps create a brand recall among email subscribers.

Higher Conversion Rates

Email marketing helps the brand connect with the customers directly. This direct connection with the customer enables the brand to push the customer to the next step of the customer journey. Customers can be directly informed about promotional offers with a CTA that redirects them to the purchase webpage.

For example, every time a customer leaves after adding items to their cart, an email can be triggered within 24 hours, reminding the customer to take action. Cart abandonment emails can directly contribute to revenue generation by pushing targeted customers toward making a purchase.

Unlike traditional marketing campaigns like print media, the results of an email marketing campaign are measurable. The CTR, bounce rate, open rate, and conversion rates can be tracked across campaigns to understand what the customer resonates with the most. Email marketers can reach the pulse of the consumer by frequently conducting A/B testing on different campaigns. Each email campaign exposes the marketer to a plethora of essential data, which helps them make data-driven decisions on their future campaigns.

Integration with Other Marketing Channels and Automation

Triggering email marketing campaigns manually can take up a lot of time and effort. Marketers might not be able to keep up with all customers who have abandoned their cards, signed up, purchased, or taken any other relevant action. Additionally, scaling the email campaigns can become a challenge without the option to automate.

Marketers can automate their email marketing campaigns to scale efficiently. Drip marketing campaigns help reach the right consumers at the right time by triggering emails automatically on a predefined schedule. For example, whenever a customer’s subscription renewal is near, they will receive an email to renew their subscription automatically.

Automated emails can also be personalized using the recipient’s name or interests. By using automation, marketers can make their email marketing campaigns more powerful and efficient.

Mobile Optimization and Accessibility

46 percent of emails are opened on mobile devices. Every email marketing campaign that a brand sends out should be optimized for mobile devices to achieve optimal campaign results. The key to creating effective mobile-friendly emails is to keep them simple. Select layouts that are simple and clutter-free, embrace white space, and keep subject lines short.

Headspace, for example, chooses clean templates with easy-on-the-eye visuals. This helps grab the reader’s attention towards the key message of the email. The trick to ace mobile friendly emails is to ensure the customer can quickly skim through the email and yet get a fair idea about the brand communication.

A major chunk of email readers consume their daily dose of emails on their mobiles. This makes it essential for brands to optimize their graphics, content, and CTAs for mobile devices as well to ensure a wider reach and impact.

Building and Nurturing Customer Relationships

Brands and small businesses can use email marketing to build and nurture customer relationships. Newsletters or regular email cadences that provide valuable content regularly to customers can help build stronger customer relationships. Polls, surveys, and other interactive elements integrated within these campaigns help business owners understand their customers even better. These valuable insights derived via email marketing campaigns tend to be beneficial in recognizing prospective customers, carving out promotional campaigns, and segmenting the email audience to enhance personalization and targeted messaging.

Regular email interaction with customers helps create brand recall, which eventually leads to customer retention and repeat business. For example, brands trigger special email campaigns during festivals, holiday seasons, and birthdays to nurture their email lists.

64 percent of millennials and 60 percent of Gen Z believe email is the most personal channel for brands to interact with them. In the survey, email outperformed all other channels of communication. Email marketing is a powerful tool that brands should leverage to build and nurture customer relationships.

Conclusion

Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools for helping brands tap a new customer base and establish customer loyalty with their existing customers. 66.9% GenZs receive 20 emails or less a day, which opens up space for brands to market themselves without tough competition. Companies can establish a personal touch in a cost-effective way with their existing and potential customers using email marketing.

Brands can maximize the benefits of email marketing by creating personalized content, triggering targeted messages, redirecting emails to the brand website to generate website traffic, and creating automated campaigns. Regular contact with customers can help strengthen customer relationships with the business. Amplify your business growth by creating and automating effective campaigns with MoEngage; schedule a demo today!

The post The Top Benefits of Email Marketing appeared first on MoEngage.

It’s 2025. Do you know where your customers are? 

The reality is, marketers are facing challenges that keep growing in type and number. These include fragmented customer data, trying to balance personalization with privacy, and being able to speed up decision cycles and reaction times. On top of that, marketers must deal with increasing competition to stand out not only in the inbox but also against the many apps and social media platforms that also vie for a consumer’s attention. 

But we have good news for you! When you switch your mindset from focusing on B2C email marketing to an omnichannel approach, these challenges are easier to overcome.

This B2C email marketing guide will help you increase your insight into your customers’ behaviors and preferences, plus understand the importance of a cross-channel approach, ultimately resulting in higher ROI.  

Understanding B2C Email Marketing

Although businesses large and small have several options for marketing to consumers, from social media to advertising and more, it is B2C email marketing that reigns supreme over all the others. Why? Because it offers by far the best return on investment (ROI) of any marketing method. That ROI isn’t automatically granted, however. The savvy marketer who will maximize that potential return is the one with a thorough understanding of B2C email marketing. 

What Is B2C Email Marketing?

B2C email marketing is the use of email to market goods and services to consumers rather than other businesses. 

For those new to B2C email marketing, an overview of email marketing in general might be helpful. But if you’re already aware of the ins and outs of this marketing method, let’s explain the B2C aspect of it in more detail. 

In essence, B2C email marketing is using email to market to consumers, rather than businesses. (That’s B2B email marketing and we will talk about that more later.) This doesn’t mean, however, that you simply get your hands on a list of email addresses and start emailing these consumers. That’s technically spamming. No, there’s more to it than that. 

B2C email marketing delivers such a high ROI because it isn’t generalized, meaning sent to anyone. Rather it is targeted. And because it is targeted, it is an effective way to build direct and personalized communications with consumers. With an omnichannel approach, it can be even more targeted…and profitable. 

B2B vs. B2C Email Marketing: Main Differences

If you’re wondering how B2C differs from B2B email marketing, it’s all about the audience. In B2B email marketing, the audience is quite literally other businesses. That means you’re probably selling something significant, like software, equipment, or consulting services. And it’s probably pricey. That means the email marketing campaigns will likely be more complex, with longer emails and longer sales cycles. 

In addition, the many stakeholders complicate the buying process. With B2B email marketing, many people are involved in the decision-making, including influencers, champions, technical decision makers (TDMs), and business decision makers (BDMs). These stakeholders will likely compare competitors’ products and decide which products or services to buy. 

B2C email marketing, on the other hand, targets individuals. As an individual buyer, you are more likely to make many smaller purchases rather than the occasional big purchase made by a business. And these purchase decisions are often impulsive rather than carefully considered. 

That means B2C email marketing tends to use more and shorter emails intended to drive these purchases. Ideally, these emails are targeted and timely, because a marketer’s insight into a consumer’s behavior and preferences—enabled by a cross-channel marketing platform—results in messaging and cadence targeted to that consumer.

5 B2C Email Marketing Statistics That Prove Personalization Matters

How much does this personalization matter? Quite a lot, as these b2c email marketing statistics  compiled by Forbes demonstrate: 

1. People are 3x more likely to make purchases from email marketing than social media.
2. 59% of people say that email marketing impacts their purchasing decisions.
3. 50% of people said they buy from a marketing email at least once a month.
4. Personalization within emails generates 6x higher transaction rates.
5. Automated flows such as abandoned cart or post-purchase emails generate up to 30x more revenue per recipient. 

Core Challenges in B2C Email Marketing

Despite all the benefits of personalized B2C email marketing, it is not without its challenges. Just because a marketer has the desire to personalize email and build campaigns based on consumer behavior does not mean it happens without some effort. 

Delivering personalization at scale, standing out in crowded inboxes, and mastering lifecycle-based targeting are the three core challenges facing B2C marketers today. Here’s how to overcome each. 

Challenge #1: Delivering Personalized Experiences at Scale

The first challenge is to deliver personalized experiences at scale. If I am sending an email to you, I can easily personalize it. Perhaps I can even take the time to personalize emails to 10 different people. But if I am a marketer with an email list of 20,000, I’ll be hard-pressed to personalize all those emails! 

And “Dear Name” doesn’t cut it anymore as personalization. While our recent report found that attribute-based personalization is better than no personalization at all, today’s consumers expect the emails in their inboxes to be highly relevant to their current interests and past purchases. 

How do you overcome this challenge? With the right automation tool that enables dynamic segmentation, marketers can easily personalize one-to-one communications to everyone on their list. 

Think about it: When you personalize product or content recommendations based on your customers’ interests, browsing history, and behavior, you can stand out from the competition with ease. Why? Because you’ll be the one reaching consumers with the right message at the right time.

This is where your email marketing platform choice is crucial, because you’ll need advanced capabilities such as interactive email elements and AI-generated subject lines that make this level of personalization possible—without extra work for you.

Challenge #2: Standing Out in a Crowded Inbox

The second big challenge in B2C email marketing is standing out in a crowded inbox. Picture your own inbox, whether you tend to check email on your computer or your phone. It’s full, right? And every day it seems a little fuller. 

For email marketers, that means your competition doesn’t necessarily come from your competitors; it comes from all the other messages competing for your customer’s attention. 

This isn’t a fruitless battle, however. You can win your customer’s attention away from the other emails by optimizing subject lines, using visuals, and timing your emails for better open rates. 

If you’re wondering how to identify the best send times and content formats to get the best open rates, choosing an email marketing platform with advanced analytics means the software can determine that for you. In addition, this platform can generate personalized subject lines for you using AI, and make sure the timing is spot on for a particular consumer. 

In short, this is no longer a challenge with the right email marketing platform. 

Challenge #3: Navigating Customer Lifecycle Complexities

We’ve talked about how to personalize at scale and stand out in a crowd. The third big challenge is taking that personalization to the next level by meeting consumers where they are in the buying journey—because they’re all in a different place. 

The consumer who has shopped at your website but not made a purchase needs a different message than those who are ready to buy or have items in their shopping cart. But it even goes beyond that. Sometimes, consumers simply stop opening your emails, and they need to be won back. Some consumers might make one purchase, but you want to convert them into loyal fans. And obviously, you don’t want to lose sight of the customers who are already loyal; you want to keep them that way. 

Can you see the complexity inherent in navigating all these different customer journeys, to ensure everyone gets the right message and at the right time? 

Overcome this challenge with the right email campaign manager, one that helps you unify customer data, enable lifecycle-based targeting, and trigger emails based on that customer’s lifecycle.

Lifecycle marketing means developing a strategy to address customers at various stages, on an individual level. It reaches prospects and customers at every lifecycle stage starting at the beginning, and then ongoing to build loyalty. It is also used to re-engage them later if necessary. This is how you build a holistic B2C email marketing strategy. 

Done right, lifecycle-based email marketing aligns with specific customer stages, leveraging insights and automation to trigger relevant campaigns for long-term success.

For example, online retailer Poshmark used MoEngage’s Smart Recommendations for personalized messaging, driven by AI and user behavior data. They implemented flow versioning and provided helpful hints and suggestions at relevant points in the customer lifecycle journey to nudge users toward conversions. The result? The company saw up to 60% email open rates and more than a 30% lift in converting listings to sales. 

For more examples of brands winning at email, see The Ultimate Email Marketing Best Practices Cheatsheet.

Building a B2C Email Marketing Strategy That Works

Now that you understand the biggest challenges and how to overcome them, your next step is to build a B2C email marketing strategy that works. 

If you’re new to this, we recommend starting with this comprehensive email strategy guide. 

On the other hand, if you’re ready to dive in, let’s cover some of the basics: knowing your audience, personalization, optimization of timing and frequency, and testing. 

The Foundation: Know Your Audience

Knowing your audience is the first step in building your B2C email marketing strategy. To do this, you will need an email marketing platform that centralizes customer insights based on behavior, demographics and purchase history, so you can create actionable segments.

Personalization Beyond Names

Next, it’s time to move beyond “Dear Name” to target consumers with actual personalization such as dynamic product recommendations, localized content and curated offers. Why? Because that is the level of personalization that consumers today expect when they see your email in their inbox—or an SMS message on their phone. According to the MoEngage report on personalization, 56% of North American consumers want a curated shopping experience. 

This might sound like an impossible task, but the right B2C email marketing tools can enable this level of personalization at scale. For example, Loblaw—a company with multiple brands and 2,500 stores—partnered with MoEngage to scale up its transactional messaging needs across a number of different business lines. They enabled on-site messaging, email, SMS, and push to engage users across multiple devices.

If you want to dig in further you can see a comparison of the performance of attribute-based, behavior-based and journey-based personalization in the report Email Marketing Benchmarks for 2025 & Beyond. 

Optimize Timing and Frequency

Most unsubscribes are due to over-messaging, making timing and cadence important for retention. But optimized timing and frequency can also improve your B2C email marketing ROI, which is why it needs to be part of your overall strategy. 

When you can access your data and use it to avoid over- or under-communicating with your audiences, you are—in effect—personalizing your emails even more because you are delivering the right message at the right time. And the right email marketing platform can make that possible.

For example, bridalwear retailer Cocomelody used the MoEngage platform to centralize data from physical boutiques and their website to understand where and why customers were dropping off. They used that insight to develop two different campaigns to address the problem. Doing so, they increased their repurchase rates by 27%. 

Testing and Iterating for Success

You can’t succeed at B2C email marketing if you don’t know what’s working…or not. That’s why testing is key and must be part of your strategy. You need to do A/B testing for everything you can, from subject lines to images to design to calls to action. You can even test your From name, logo placement, you name it; the possibilities are almost endless. 

And that can also make testing time-consuming, not only to set up but also to analyze the results and act on the information. So make sure your 2025 B2C email marketing plans include finding an email marketing platform that can automatically analyze and optimize based on test results. Because testing is not optional.

For more B2C email marketing strategy ideas, see 8 Email Strategies You Should Be Implementing. 

4 Types of B2C Email Marketing Campaigns to Master

Now that you’ve given some thought to your email marketing strategies, it’s time to develop your B2C email marketing campaigns. The four that we will cover here include welcome emails, transactional emails, promotional emails, and win-back/retention emails. 

1. Welcome Emails That Set the Tone

The saying “You never get a second chance to make a first impression” is true in B2C email marketing. That means your welcome emails need to be well-written and designed but also carefully considered. The welcome email is your first chance to start building trust with this new subscriber. So, emphasize its welcoming aspect. 

Your reward for this effort? Higher than usual open and click-through rates. 

Also, make it more than one email. Use a sequence of emails to start familiarizing your new subscribers with your business. Avoid the temptation to jump into selling. Approach your welcome emails like you would a meeting with a new person and getting to know them. You’d take it slow, right? 

How many welcome emails in your B2C email marketing campaign is up to you. There isn’t a set number, and testing will teach you the number and cadence that deliver the best result. 

2. Transactional Emails That Build Trust

Transactional emails are the next B2C email marketing campaign you’ll need. Think beyond the transactional email that says simply, “Your product has shipped.” Instead, use these emails to reinforce your brand and deepen your customer’s loyalty. Every one of your transactional emails, from purchase confirmations to shipping updates and receipts, can reinforce your brand and even bring a smile to your customer’s face.

Think beyond email, too, for transactional messaging that uses text messages, push notifications, and in-app and on-site messages. 

3. Promotional Emails That Drive Action

Your welcome and transactional emails aren’t intended to do the heavy lifting of sales. That’s what your promotional emails are for. But not every email can have a “buy now” message, or you’ll cause list fatigue and lose customers. Instead, you need a mix of urgent emails that offer a flash sale, for example, and value-focused emails that offer useful information to your customers and help solidify your brand and their loyalty. 

That’s not to say you can’t include calls to action and links in these value-focused emails because you certainly can. But it’s important to find the right mix of promotional emails that sell outright and those that do a soft sell by building the brand. 

More importantly, your promotional emails must show up in the inbox in real time based on consumer behavior. This is crucial to boosting conversions and building your brand.

This is also the time to deploy your arsenal of B2C email marketing tools. Your promotional emails should include those triggered in real time by consumer behavior, such as cart abandonment emails and location-based offers. 

Cart abandonment emails are a huge opportunity to not only encourage a customer to complete a purchase, but also to build brand as retailers allow these emails to be full of personality that resonates with their customers. For ideas on crafting your own, see these expert tips on crafting cart-abandonment emails. 

Location-based triggers coupled with AI-powered push notifications are used everywhere, from hotels to retail and beyond. Think about how: When it shows up while a customer is physically close to your location, how much more relevant and timely can your message be? 

4. Win-Back and Retention Emails

Your fourth B2C email marketing campaign is the one that keeps consumers coming back. When a consumer has disengaged, you want to win them back. Since retaining existing customers is less expensive than winning over new ones, this is key, and a growing priority for B2C marketers.

Retention emails might be about loyalty program updates or exclusive offers for existing customers. These are emails intended to keep consumers interested. It’s worth noting that retention is easier when your email marketing has timing and cadence personalized for each consumer. That way, you’re not under- or over-messaging anyone, which can mean they lose interest (in the first case) or unsubscribe (in the second case). And the right email marketing platform can help you automate that timing and frequency.

Win-back emails, on the other hand, target dormant customers with personalized offers or re-engagement campaigns. To do this, however, you need data and insights. You need to know which customers need winning back. And, you need a strategy to do so. 

Publisher’s Clearing House succeeds at this by using prediction capabilities to reactivate over 30,000 dormant and inactive users, averaging a 3.93% overall conversion rate.

Measuring Success in B2C Email Marketing

Once your campaigns and strategies are in place, you need to measure your results so you’ll know what to change and how to improve. In the old days of B2C email marketing, the metrics you’d measure were basic: open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. 

You still need that data, and those are still key metrics to measure. But that’s not the kind of actionable information you need to level up your marketing. 

These days, the best email marketing software has evolved to offer you much more, to give you actionable insights like predictive analytics or cohort-based analysis. That means you can optimize your campaigns with advanced analytics to increase those open rates, yes, but to do more: to reach your customers with the right message at the right time for improved ROI.

You need to move beyond the obvious to leverage insights so you can optimize campaigns. For example, the restaurant chain Outback wanted deeper insights into customer behavior so they could create and send more relevant personalized messages across channels like push notifications, emails, SMS and WhatsApp. However, they also wanted to cap the frequency of these messages to avoid over messaging subscribers. MoEngage helped them achieve these goals. 

Emerging Trends in B2C Email Marketing

Deeper insight into analytics is definitely one trend, as more email marketing platforms offer it. However, other emerging B2C email trends are worth noting because they will help you succeed if you opt to use them. Two of these trends will be game changers: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cross-channel integration.

AI-Driven Personalization and Optimization

AI is all over these days, and that’s going to both save you time and increase your ROI. AI will learn from your past campaigns, simplify your A/B testing, generate targeted subject lines, automate processes, generate multiple variations of assets (such as content for push notifications, emails, SMS, advertisements, creative assets, social media), generate images, optimize your send times and much more. 

B2C email marketing tools such as AI will both speed up and optimize your campaigns while enabling you to continuously react and optimize in real time, for unprecedented personalization.

Cross-Channel Integration for Unified Experiences

Although it’s already happening, B2C email marketing in 2025 will be even more integrated with multiple channels, including SMS, push notifications, and in-app messaging. For marketers, this will require a consistent user experience across devices and channels, as well as provide deeper insights into customer preferences and behaviors.

Why is this key? Because consumers are seeing or engaging with your brand in many different places, from social media to their phones to your website, and you need to offer a seamless experience throughout. 

With cross-channel integration, you’ll be able to reach your customers wherever they are, confident that it’s the right message at the right time. 

Watch for these two B2C email trends to transform how you think about email marketing in the year ahead. 

Succeeding with B2C Email Marketing in 2025: Concluding Thoughts

We’ve certainly given you plenty to think about with this guide to B2C email marketing in 2025. 

From personalization that is so targeted as to be location-based to using AI to optimize subject lines and campaigns, there is a lot to take in and process. If you want a partner to guide you through deploying some or all of these best practices, consider a demo of MoEngage’s email marketing solutions. 

MoEngage is the B2C email marketing platform built for engaging conversations cross-channel, with plenty of AI built-in to simplify and speed up optimized email campaigns. For a walk-through of our platform, request a demo today.

The post The Ultimate Guide to B2C Email Marketing in 2025 appeared first on MoEngage.

Product recommendations have become a critical part of the online shopping experience. From helping customers discover new products to influencing their purchasing decisions, E-commerce recommendation engines are crucial in driving sales.

In fact, 35% of Amazon’s E-commerce revenue is attributed to its advanced product recommendation engine.

Over time, these recommendation engines have become more complex in meeting increasing customer demands. However, choosing the perfect recommendation engine can be difficult with so many options available.

But don’t worry—we’re here to help. Our blog will help whether you plan to switch to a better recommendation engine or want to onboard a new one.

In this article, we’ll explore the workings of E-commerce recommendation engines, the various types, their benefits, and more. We’ll also discuss the all-new AI-powered MoEngage Smart Recommendations.

What is a E-commerce Product Recommendation Engine?

E-commerce product recommendations are dynamically generated, real-time personalized product suggestions designed to help shoppers discover the right products they might be interested in buying. These suggestions are usually based on customer preferences, history, previous purchases, trending products, etc.

The recommendations are powered by an E-commerce Product Recommendation Engine.

Types of E-commerce Product Recommendation Engines

Broadly, there are three types of recommendation engines, each using a distinctive filtration method for product suggestions.

Collaborative Filtering

In this type of filtering, customers are added to different segments based on behavior, preferences, and location. The filtering tries to personalize suggestions based on similarities between customers. So, for instance, if a person buys a certain product Y after buying X, all customers who’ve bought X would be recommended Y.

When compared to other recommendation models, its advantage is that it doesn’t require past data or a particular volume of data inputs before it can generate accurate suggestions.

Content-based filtering

This type of filtering suggests products based on previous purchases. For example, if a customer has bought sports shoes, they’ll be suggested other sports clothing like t-shirts, shorts, and more.

The recommendation model focuses on a product’s attributes to suggest similar products. These attributes include color, brand, product category, features, and more.

Hybrid filtering

This method combines collaborative and content-based filtering, which will help customers discover both new products and product categories.

For example, customers who’ve bought running shoes would be recommended sportswear and products from other categories, like smartwatches.

Benefits of E-commerce Product Recommendation Engines

Below are the various benefits of an E-commerce Recommendation Engine –

Boosts Sales 

Recommendation engines enable faster product discovery by suggesting the most relevant item to shoppers. This directly helps streamline the shopping experience, enhancing customer satisfaction and increasing sales.

Increases Average Order Value and LTV

Suggesting trending and relevant products during checkout helps in increasing the cart value. This doesn’t boost immediate sales but also increases long-term customer value.

Improves Conversion Rate

Shoppers are more likely to purchase items that match their preferences, and by recommending such products, you’ll increase overall conversions and customer experience.

Reduces Cart Abandonments 

Providing relevant product recommendations and nudging customers after cart abandonment help them return back to the app or website, significantly minimizing cart abandonment.

Fosters Loyalty 

By providing a personalized experience, brands can establish more trust with their customers, which helps them remain loyal in the long term.

MoEngage Smart Recommendation 

Smart Recommendations is our proprietary recommendation engine. We’ve built it to help you create personalized micro-moments for your customers. You can send suitable recommendations to each customer based on their preferences, past interactions, and engagement patterns in real-time, easing product discovery and increasing conversion.

It’s built on seven distinct recommendation models –

Impact of AI and ML on Recommendations 

Artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities have transformed the landscape of product recommendations. Today’s leading brands harness sophisticated AI-powered recommendation engines that go far beyond the usual “you might also like” suggestions. These systems create highly personalized shopping experiences by accurately understanding and anticipating customer needs.

Here’s a three-step framework that powers the AI Recommendation engines –

1. Data collection

Modern AI systems continuously capture and process numerous data points related to customer interaction. This includes the shopper’s every click, scroll, and pause. The true power of AI lies in its ability to transform seemingly random behavioral data into actionable insights.

The system monitors:

• Product viewing patterns and duration
• Category exploration behaviors
• Purchase history and frequency
• Customer preferences and profile information
• Session-specific interactions

2. Creating customer segments

Based on these insights, AI algorithms create multiple customer segments based on hundreds of dynamic attributes that keep updating according to customer behavior. This dynamic approach ensures that segmentation remains relevant and effective as shopping patterns change.

3. Predictive analytics

The real power of AI recommendation engines lies in their predictive capabilities. By analyzing vast amounts of historical and real-time data, these systems can anticipate customer needs before they arise. This predictive insight enables brands to:

• Forecast seasonal buying patterns
• Anticipate product affinities
• Identify emerging trends within specific customer segments
• Optimize inventory based on predicted demand

The result is a recommendation ecosystem that keeps brands consistently ahead of customer expectations, driving higher engagement and conversion rates while building stronger customer relationships through increasingly relevant suggestions.

Examples of E-commerce Recommendation Engines

1. Amazon

Personalized Search Recommendations

In-app app searches have become more personalized than ever. Brands change the order of search rankings based on your search history, demographic information, or geographic location!

When you go to Amazon and search for sneakers, Amazon shows you results based on your past preferences – your favorite brands and models. The top results make it easier for customers to find what they want!

Dynamic Product Recommendation Grids

If you have ever shopped on an E-commerce app, you must have been recommended many products besides the ones you selected.

These recommendations are based on your behavior patterns (browsing history, past purchases, items added to the cart) or preferences (frequently visited categories, budget range, geographical location, etc.)

Once the system has the data, it analyzes it based on the products that similar customers to you have purchased. It then shows them on a dynamic grid that gets updated based on your real-time browsing and the latest actions on the app.

2. Best Buy

Upsells

If you need to drive upsells its absolutely critical to show the most relevant products. For example, here’s an example from Best Buy where they’re upselling different accessories and insurance plans according to the television.

What’s Next?

E-commerce Recommendation Engines have become a vital part of the online shopping experience. They directly impact your bottom line and customer experience, which is why choosing the right one is incredibly important for your online store’s success.

If you’re interested in learning about our recommendation engine, you can read about  MoEngage Smart Recommendations here.

The post E-commerce Product Recommendation Engine – A Beginner’s Guide appeared first on MoEngage.

Email marketing newsletters are a critical aspect of a B2C marketer’s arsenal. Brands can send a wide variety of newsletters, such as actionable advice, tips based on scientific research, interviews with industry experts, growth hacks for a business, expert marketing knowledge, or a collection of best articles.

Let’s look at how marketers can optimize their email newsletter strategy. We’ll also discuss a few best practices and resources to explore how to understand your audience, create click-worthy content, get quick hits, optimize newsletter design, and enhance email deliverability.

What Is An Email Marketing Newsletter?

An email newsletter is a periodic email sent to customers at daily, weekly, monthly, or pre-determined intervals to communicate directly with them, engage them, and retain them. Conversion rates of marketing newsletters are much higher than other types of email sent, because these marketing newsletters often contain information that’s essential to their readerbase.

Brands can send a daily newsletter or get readers to subscribe to an email sent on a weekly basis. This cadence isn’t set in stone and can be adjusted based on the needs of your audience and your digital marketing or content strategy.

Why Are Email Newsletters Important?

Brands should incorporate newsletters into their email strategy because this is a powerful medium that can help brands continuously engage with their customers. Newsletters can be leveraged to drive:

1. High conversions and repeat purchases
2. Increased sales via specific announcements
3. New product arrival discounts
4. Increased engagement and brand recall
5. Reduced churn and drop-off

So, what’s the secret sauce for creating the best marketing newsletters?

Understanding Your Audience

Brands often limit personalization to starting the email with ‘Hi <first name>. However, according to marketing expert Seth Godin, mass personalization is a trap. It doesn’t appear genuine. If you want your audience to click on the email newsletter, go beyond addressing them with their first name. Understand your audience well enough to tailor the email content.

Audience segmentation can help you understand and group your audience based on their demographics (age, gender, location), behavior patterns (purchasing history and browsing patterns), and interests. If you’ve got a lot of new leads, send them a different type of marketing newsletter. If your business has many loyalists, you can consider sending them a daily newsletter.

You can use this to tailor the content for each segment and increase the clickthrough rate (CTR), engagement, and sales by delivering the right message at the right time. It’s an unbeaten strategy to connect with customers and drive desired results.

Crafting Engaging Content

Good content is the foundation of a successful email newsletter. It is the main reason for consumers to open an email. Ensure that your marketing newslettesr are nicely designed, informative and engaging. You can make your content engaging and informative in many ways. To start with, you can experiment with many marketing newsletter types.

You can send the following types of marketing newsletters:

• Blog posts: Send a curated list of your most relevant, originally published blog posts. If you’ve got a weekly newsletter, you can try to maintain a theme for each week. Add links to each blog post, drive traffic to your website, and showcase thought leadership via your blog.

• Guides: You can send step-by-step guides and free resources on using your products or how to solve a problem. The objective is to demonstrate your expertise in the subject area. For example, if you manage an insurance brand, consider sending a guide on choosing the right health insurance plan for you and your family.

• Discounts, promotion codes, and contest invitations: You can send coupon codes and special discounts or invite readers to participate in contests over a weekly newsletter. This might help with converting subscribers who are on the fence about certain products.

• User-generated content (UGC): The best way to foster a sense of connection among readers is to share user-generated content, such as the success stories of other readers, with them. This will boost the customer’s confidence in the brand and help them engage more with your content. For example, fitness brands can share personal transformation stories of other clients to motivate them to stay fit.

• Video content: Customers can retain information better in video format than text. Include videos in newsletters, especially if you are sending an email about new product features, customer testimonials, or tutorials. You can also promote these across your social media feeds.

• Industry updates: To help readers stay updated, you can send information about the latest trends and updates in the industry along with industry news. These can provide readers with business updates if required, but if you want to keep it fun and engaging, you can also consider including relevant pop culture updates.

• New launches: You can send these marketing newsletters to inform readers about new product launches or new features in existing products. This will motivate them to try the latest product or increase the usage of the existing one.

• Business news and announcements: You can share regular updates about your business through a weekly newsletter. Include information about new acquisitions, client wins, marketing trends or the latest marketing news and partnerships, to maintain transparency and boost confidence in your brand.

Apart from experimenting with content types, add compelling headlines and visuals to the newsletter. A good headline can quickly grab attention and create a first impression about the brand in the customer’s mind. Keep it simple and concise, and use a mix of emojis, action words, symbols, and numbers to make it interesting.

Additionally, use high-quality videos and images and ensure enough white space in the emails to make them look clutter-free. This will improve the readability of your marketing newsletter.

Finally, ensure consistency in brand voice and use a tone and style that aligns with branding guidelines and resonates with your audience.

Optimizing Newsletter Design

Here are some growth strategies to optimize your newsletter covers and design to increase readability across your marketing campaigns:

1. Implement Best Practices To Create Visually Appealing Newsletters

• Don’t add too much text to your marketing newsletter. Break the monotony by strategically placing high-quality images between text. Ensure a proper text-image ratio and test if it loads fast on all devices.

• Keep UI/UX in mind while choosing the email template. Ensure it is accessible on all devices and aligns with your brand’s guidelines. Take signals from the best marketing newsletters and leverage pre-made templates to ensure your newsletters don’t feel overwhelming.

• Speaking of content, keep the content concise to avoid scrolling. Make it scannable and use fonts, font sizes, and font colors that are easy to read on all devices.

• Choose a responsive design for your email newsletter. This ensures that your email is accessible on all devices and subscribers can read it without any issues.

2. Use Clean, Clutter-free Layout, Typography, And Attractive CTAs

• Consider an inverted pyramid structure for your newsletter layout. The inverted pyramid structure comprises a header, content, images, CTA, etc. This type of layout will guide your audience to the CTA button.
• If you have a lot of content or images to cover, use the angular, zig-zag format. This will make your email newsletter look more visually appealing and less chaotic.
• Avoid cluttering your newsletter with too many elements.  Segregate content into relevant sections and use web-safe fonts like Arial, Verdana, Times New Roman, and Courier, as they are readable on all devices.
• Remember to include eye-catching call-to-action (CTA) buttons that lead back to relevant landing pages. Make them visible and enticing using bright colors and short, impactful action words such as “download for free” or “contact us.” The objective is to nudge the reader to take a desired action.

3. Don’t Forget The Unsubscribe Button

The best way to build trust among your readers is to include an unsubscribe button regardless of the nature of the email.

An unsubscribe option implies that the reader can opt out of your marketing newsletter at any time. Not giving them the option to unsubscribe could damage your brand’s reputation.

Ensure the unsubscribe button is clearly visible on the footer of your marketing newsletter and doesn’t involve a lengthy opt-out process. Ideally, it should not take more than 1-2 clicks to unsubscribe.

You can also give the option to update email preferences and receive only selective emails from your ID. This can help reduce churn and improve customer retention.

Timing and Frequency

According to MoEngage’s Personalization Pulse Check report, 23.4% of consumers prefer to receive messages and communications from brands once a week. Too many or too few emails can either overwhelm or alienate your readers. Similarly, sending an email newsletter at midnight or on the weekend might not get you the expected CTR or open rates. That’s why it’s vital to get the timing and frequency correct.

1. Marketing Newsletter Timing

According to Campaign Monitor’s research, a weekday is the right time and day to send an email newsletter. The research shows slightly lower open rates during weekends compared to weekdays. It further indicates that most opens happen between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., with 3 p.m. being the peak time.

2. Marketing Newsletter Frequency

While MoEngage’s research on email marketing strategy shows that once a week is the ideal frequency for sending email newsletters, a lot depends on factors like industry benchmarks and the average open and unsubscribe rates. If your unsubscribe rates are high, it could mean that readers are overwhelmed by the frequency of emails. The ideal way to find out what frequency works best is to experiment and analyze the open, clickthrough, and unsubscribe rates.

Read more about email scheduling here.

3. Test And Measure Results

The best email newsletter shoots to the top because of a culture of testing and analysis. Here are a few crucial metrics to measure to analyze your marketing newsletter:

• Open rates: This helps marketers understand how many consumers opened their emails.
• Clickthrough rates: CTR measures how many readers clicked on a link or took some action after opening your email. This is a crucial metric for understanding newsletter performance.
• Unsubscribe rates: Keep checking your unsubscribe rates. If they are high, revisit your email campaigns and experiment with the timing and frequency of the newsletter.

Use industry benchmarks to measure the performance of email newsletters, as the success metrics vary for different industries. This will help marketers set the right expectations based on industry standards and local marketing trends.

List Management

Imagine unsubscribing from an email newsletter and still receiving them regularly. Sounds frustrating, doesn’t it? Most often, marketers don’t look at their subscriber’s list. They send emails that either bounce or are irrelevant to readers. To avoid such problems, marketers must manage their lists regularly and segment audiences.

Maintain A Clean And Updated Email list

A clean and updated list serves two primary benefits for marketers.

• First, it improves email deliverability. A clean list reduces the number of bounces and improves the sender’s reputation. This eventually helps land the emails directly in the subscribers’ inboxes, improves the open rates and CTR, and enhances the campaign’s performance.

• Second, it helps marketers save costs on inactive or dormant readers, optimize the email marketing budget, and maintain communication only with engaged readers.

Subject Lines and Preheaders

A subject line is the headline of your email that the subscriber notices first. A campaign’s performance depends mainly on the subject line. A preheader is a short snippet next to or below the subject line in the inbox preview.

Here’s how you can write attention-grabbing subject lines and preheaders.

1. Techniques for Writing Attention-grabbing Subject Lines And Preheaders

We’ve analyzed the best marketing strategies and content marketing guidelines to list out subject line and preheader optimization techniques.

2. Copywriting Tips for Subject Lines

• Keep the subject line short and concise to optimize it for mobile viewing
• Keep it relevant to the email’s content
• Add emojis to attract attention, but don’t overdo them
• Tailor the subject line to include the subscriber’s name or interest
• Avoid using too many capital words or special characters to prevent from being considered a spam email

Learn more techniques on writing subject lines here.

3. Growth Hacks for Preheaders

• Don’t repeat the subject line in your preheader
• Offer a follow-up to the subject line or unique information in the preheader
• Summarize the email’s content or give a preview
• Keep the preheader short and use language that intrigues or teases the subscriber’s curiosity
• Reveal limited-time offers or exclusive information to generate curiosity and urgency
• Reference the best email newsletter examples from your inbox to get an idea of good preheaders

4. Use Personalization, Urgency, And Intriguing Language

• Tailor your subject lines by including data like subscriber’s name, preference, or past behavior to generate curiosity and boost open rates and CTR
• Use action-oriented verbs or time-sensitive language, such as ‘limited offer’ or ‘act now’ to create a sense of urgency
• Use humor, strong verbs, and creative wordplay to grab subscriber’s attention and make the email newsletter stand out from the rest of them

A/B Testing and Optimization

Marketers must regularly perform A/B testing of marketing newsletters to improve performance and results. This optimization is critical to digital marketing and facilitates experimentation with different elements. Here’s how you can do A/B testing and optimize the email newsletter to improve outcomes from your marketing efforts:

1. Determine the expected outcome of A/B testing. This could include boosting open rates, CTR, and conversions.
2. Choose specific email elements to test. This could include testing:
   • Subject lines: You can test variations in wording, length, etc., to see which grabs the reader’s attention.
   • Call-to-action (CTA): Experiment with different colors, phrases, and button placements to see what attracts more clicks.
   • Timing: Send your email at different times and days to identify when the reader will likely engage.
3. Divide your readers into different segments and send them different email versions to check what works better.
4. Compare each version’s performance metrics, such as open rates, CTR, and conversions, to analyze results and refine the approach to improve the outcomes. This includes:
   • Determining which version performed better based on chosen metrics
   • Analyzing elements that didn’t work with readers and using those insights to improve your marketing newsletter
   • Formulating new hypotheses and testing different content marketing elements to make continuous improvements to your marketing strategy

Ensuring Deliverability and Compliance

Marketers must understand that email deliverability is different from email delivery. Delivery means the marketing newsletter has been sent to the subscriber. There’s no guarantee that it reached the inbox or the spam folder.

Deliverability, on the other hand, is the rate at which emails reach readers’ inboxes instead of spam folders. With billions of emails sent daily, an email landing in a subscriber’s inbox is half a battle won, increasing the chances of a subscriber opening it. Let’s find out how to improve email deliverability and compliance.

1. Best Practices For Email Deliverability

• Use proper protocols, such as Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIF), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC), to verify the authenticity and identity of email messages and boost deliverability.
• Segment your subscribers based on behavior and preferences to send relevant emails at the right frequency.
• Update your subscriber list frequently by removing inactive ones.
• Avoid spam words and characters in subject lines.
• Use spam filters to remove spam languages.

2. Compliance With Local and International Regulations

In addition to following these best practices, brands must comply with email marketing regulations across geographies, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM Act).

While the GDPR focuses on data privacy and individual rights, the CAN-SPAM Act curbs deceptive email marketing practices. Complying with these regulations will help brands earn trust and improve deliverability of their email marketing campaigns.

3. Provide Clear Opt-in And Opt-out Options

Regulations like the CAN-SPAM Act and GDPR require brands to seek consent from subscribers to send emails, inform them about privacy practices followed and data stored, and keep opt-in and opt-out options accessible and straightforward. Here’s how brands can do it:

• Ask readers for consent to use their data for marketing.
• Allow readers to unsubscribe if they no longer wish to receive emails.

Conclusion

Email newsletters are an efficient way to share interesting articles, ideas, news, and information with readers directly. However, marketers must deeply understand their audience through segmentation, tailor content to make it relevant, optimize design for mobile marketing and other devices, and send personalized emails.

Marketers must also maintain a clean list, get the timing and frequency right to maximize engagement, and perform regular A/B tests with their email marketing newsletter strategy to optimize content and achieve better results.

Implement these best practices and experiment continuously to capture your readers’ attention and drive meaningful interactions via marketing newsletters.

The post Email Marketing Newsletters: Tips and Tricks for Success appeared first on MoEngage.

Delivering an elevated customer experience can be a key differentiator for brands, leading to improved customer satisfaction, increased revenue, and a strong brand reputation. Data shows that companies that adopt a customer-centric approach can improve their revenue by almost 5-10% by improving their customer experience strategy. 

Domino’s, one of the most loved global pizza brands, is a great example of how a business can grow by delivering elevated customer experiences over anything else. Domino’s has always relied on its three core principles: ‘put people first,’ ‘do the right thing,’ and ‘champion the customers.’ And that’s the reason why Domino’s has been ruling the pizza industry for years. The brand’s people-centric approach, authentic pizza tastes, and appealing campaigns have made it a popular household name. 

The purpose-inspired brand’s vision of staying attuned to customer needs and enhancing customer experiences highlighted the necessity of onboarding an agile engagement partner.   

How Domino’s Elevated Customer Experiences at Scale

Domino’s biggest strength has always been its ability to be completely in tune with customer preferences and to receive feedback favorably.

With technology entering the industry, the changing times prompted the pizza chain to look into better UIs to interact with customers. 

This meant:

1. Targeting the right customers at the right time
2. Automating the customer journeys end-to-end
3. Gauging drop-offs proactively
4. Re-engaging dormant customers into becoming active ones

However, the brand’s previous legacy Martech platform lacked the right features and functionalities to achieve these objectives.  

The need of the hour was an engagement platform equipped with state-of-the-art features and easily handling large-scale operations (over 1-1.2 million customers browse Domino’s website and app daily).  

Domino’s found all that and more in MoEngage.  

Here’s a breakdown of how the collaboration panned out: 

Understanding the Customer’s Pulse

By partnering with the agile MoEngage platform, Domino’s could better understand the customers’ pulse and gauge their preferences precisely. The brand used MoEngage to gather feedback and conduct surveys via their in-app nudges. This not only helped Domino’s uphold one of their core values, “Put People First,” but also helped them gather firsthand insight about their customers.  

Predicting Drop-Offs and Re-engaging Customers

With the help of MoEngage, Domino’s could easily clock when the drop-offs were about to happen, meaningfully re-engage with those customers, and bring them back into the funnel stronger than before. This helped Domino’s tremendously to see an uptick in their revenue. 

Sending Timely Communication

After partnering with MoEngage, Domino’s was also able to communicate timely offers and discounts to its customers. 

Sakun Suri, Manager of CRM Marketing at Jubilant FoodWorks Ltd, mentioned, “We reach out to our customers 4-5 times every 24 hours, so timely delivery of these communications is critical. MoEngage has delivered excellently on this front.” 

Implementing the Loyalty Initiative

In 2023, Domino’s launched its loyalty program, “Domino’s Cheesy Rewards.” The program was aimed at customers who fulfilled the criteria of placing six orders with an average order value of INR 350 and above. The customer would then get 600 reward points, following which they could claim a free pizza.

The supplementary engagement and complex (yet seamless) integration with Domino’s database ensured the program’s success, as the rewards point data flowed into MoEngage accurately. 

In addition, Domino’s was able to send relevant nudges that reminded the customer that they were “so many” points away from a free pizza or to use their reward points before they expired. The whole communication process was spread over 6-7 automated journeys that were implemented and executed using MoEngage. 

The loyalty program was so successful that the revenue generated and the number of orders received through it exceeded the numbers received through the rest of the database—over 20% more! 

End-to-End Campaign Management

MoEngage played a crucial role in complete campaign management for Domino’s. From building customer segments to content creation and campaign dissemination, Domino’s team found everything to be as easy as it could be with MoEngage. The lack of coding assistance or knowledge required to take a campaign from idea to reality also helped the cause. This stellar feature of the platform significantly reduced the time and effort required in the entire process for Domino’s.  

Boost Your Revenue And Elevate Customer Experiences with MoEngage

Offering stellar customer experiences that keep consumers coming back is truly the foundation for all QSR brands like Domino’s.  

But Domino’s has an upper hand in the game. By partnering with an agile customer engagement platform like MoEngage, the brand significantly improved its already stellar customer experiences and consequently boosted its bottom line as well! 

This impact is a great example of what consumer brands can achieve with the right Martech stack. Here’s a glimpse at what Domino’s achieved with MoEngage by its side:

• 20% Uplift in revenue from the loyalty management program
• Set multiple automated customer journeys seamlessly
• End-to-end successful loyalty program management 

By partnering with an enterprise engagement platform like MoEngage, your brand can build a loyal customer base and thrive regardless of the competition! 

MoEngage, the choice of many leading global consumer brands, is built on AWS and uses key services like EC2, Kafka, Athena, SQS, Lambda, and Personalize to deliver real-time customer engagement for your customers.  

The platform delivers personalized marketing communications within seconds while scaling up easily for businesses of every type – startups with 1000s of customers to large unicorns and enterprises with 100s of millions of customers. 

If you, too, are planning to go phygital and want to see maximum ROI for your efforts, look into agile customer engagement platforms like MoEngage. The right engagement partner can help you actually improve the bottom line by supercharging customer experiences and helping your brand achieve phygital excellence. 

Are you ready for it?

The post How Domino’s Won Hearts by Delivering Delightful Customer Experiences & Uplifting Revenue With MoEngage appeared first on MoEngage.