The danger of your branding-first email strategy
Each new season brings new marketing challenges. Creating the perfect email shouldn’t be one of them.
Think of all the questions you go through when creating emails around each season’s new styles:
–How can I combine new products in the best way possible?
–What’s the right balance between tailored outfits and individual products?
–How do I break up the sections of the email for each set of new products?
–How do I incorporate this season’s hot new color with our brand colors?
Decisions, decisions, decisions. You should be confident you’re making the right moves. Are your tastes different than 30% of your email database? Congratulations, you’re alienating a third of your customers.
These problems are enough to give even the most seasoned marketer a headache.
However, ReSci’s clients confidently respond to these concerns with one simple statement: “Cortex will handle it.”
Our clients trust our artificial intelligence engine to curate the most relevant new products for each user. In the examples below, you’ll see how the most customer-centric brands leverage dynamic templates to save time, personalize content, and adhere to brand standards.
Branding the Draper James way
Reese Witherspoon is the face of Draper James, fusing a Southern belle fashion with a bit of Los Angeles chic. The contemporary lifestyle brand leverages Reese’s star power, and customers’ browsing and purchase data, to provide a personalized and branded experience.
With ReSci’s easy-to-use merge tags, they were able to construct a simple template promoting branding at the top while leveraging personalization at the bottom. This hybrid approach simplifies their workflow and creates a tailored message for every customer in their database.
Fig 1. Draper James’ hybrid template. The merge tags personalize the message for every user in the database.
Let’s examine the improved workflow for the Draper James team.
Step 1: Create a New Arrivals email that lives in the ReSci platform.
Step 2: Receive new products into inventory.
Step 3: Take photos of the new products for the website.
Step 4: Add the products to the website.
Step 5: Let Cortex take care of the rest.
The AI takes care of identifying new products, predictively matching products to users, and sending out emails containing the products that are most likely to convert a user. This gives the marketing team more time to refine their strategy or focus on other important projects.
Let’s take a look at a few versions that were sent to real customers. Each customer has different preferences that are reflected in the products that were recommended.
Each of these emails was personalized with no extra work from the marketers at Draper James. The power of machine learning allows the marketing team to focus on creating their strategy, getting new product shots, and updating the website.
We can streamline this process even further by doing away with the branded image at the top of the email. Your team already spent the time shooting these images to be on brand, so why not let the images speak for themselves?
Go completely dynamic
As mentioned before, your team already focuses their time on creating beautiful product images. Instead of recreating the wheel with a branded hero image, let’s allow the product images to do the heavy lifting.
A logo, some copy, and a few image placeholders are all it takes. Activating this template in ReSci’s New Arrivals stage creates a personalized experience each and every time your brand gets new inventory.
The ReSci platform identifies, curates, and sends the new items out automatically. Marketers don’t have to select specific products to send out to the entire list. Instead, they can rely on the machine learning algorithms that have collected immense amounts of data on each one of their users.
In the next section, we’ll show you how marketers are taking this one step further by removing most branded content while increasing KPI’s.
Add a personal touch
Sometimes an overly branded email actually takes away from the message. A simple text-only message can often be more powerful than any branded content that you may send. The below example has plain dynamic links that were populated by Cortex.
This template had a click rate that was 6x higher than the branded content being sent to their users. A personal touch with very little branding creates a relationship with the customer, above and beyond the most beautifully branded templates.
Would your team have had the confidence to try something as unique and different as this? With the assurance of Cortex, these ideas can come to life. Cortex allows marketers to save time, take risks, and optimize their brand’s relationship with customers.
Key takeaways
Complement your branding with dynamic product recommendations.
Let Cortex choose pre-existing, branded content and personalize messages for each user.
Sometimes branding is overrated. Use personalized messaging from a “human” to engage and win the loyalty of your customers.
You never know what might work—it’s important to have a platform that gives you the freedom to experiment.
About the author
Nick Hein is a Client Success Manager at ReSci. He helps marketers strategize campaigns to get the most out of ReSci’s artificial intelligence platform.
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