Product Recommendations for Email

Today, marketers have access to numerous tools to deliver a personalized shopping experience via email marketing. These are addressing by name in emails, sending at the preferred time, picking up content based on subscription categories, sending transactional emails in response to customers' actions, offering personalized promo codes.

Product recommendations for email also belong to such tools. They drive forward products and offers the user might be particularly interested at the moment. This increases the usefulness scores of your emails, making interaction with your brand more convenient and productive.

Types of Product Recommendations

Product recommendations are typically a separate block in the email that displays (recommends) items of a certain category or having the same characteristics. It can be bestsellers, new arrivals, price drops, back in stock, recently viewed, also bought, etc.

Email recommendations can be bulk and personalized. Bulk recommendations are general recommendations you show to all your subscribers and customers. They are mostly used in mass promotional emails when you need to drive attention to a particular product category, for example, hot sales, limited offers, event-related gifts, etc.

Bulk recommendations are also sent to new subscribers or customers on who you don't have much data yet. In this case, bestsellers or hot deals are the best option, as they help discover your brand from the better side.

However, if you want to get 100% customer-oriented, start adding personalized product recommendations to your emails. These are recommended items picked up based on the customer's website browsing behavior and shopping history. They can be restocked products that were out of stock when the user looked for them during the last visit. They can be personal recommendations, cart or abandoned cart recommendations, reactivation recommendations based on previous purchases, etc.

As a clarifying example, let's take a look at two emails with recommendation blocks by Tarte.

Emails by Tarte

The first is a mass promo of mini-sized products. Its aim is to promote a certain product category, so product recommendations feature random bestsellers of travel-size items. 

The second is an abandoned browse email that is sent to the customer who has visited the site but hasn't added anything to the cart. It's a transactional email triggered by the customer's action. It features recommendations selected for this particular customer based on their browsing history and viewed products.

Although personalized recommendations are more likely to hit the target, the best solution is to incorporate both types into your email marketing strategy. Use bulk recommendations to promote and drive traffic to particular product categories. Use personalized recommendations to respond to website visitors and customer behavior.

How to Use Product Recommendations in Emails

Whatever type of recommendations you use, there are general pieces of advice that would help make any of them as effective.

Add All Basic Info

Typically, a card with a recommended item includes a product image, its name and price. However, some marketers opt not to include the price to keep the suspense going and make people click to find it out. I believe that's not a very good idea because people may simply not want to make an extra move to do it.

So when you offer something, provide all the info that can affect the purchase decision process. And the price is one of the main factors.

Email product recommendations by e.l.f. Cosmetics

Add Extra Details

Add any extra details that can speed up the decision-making process and give your products more credits. It can be available colors or sizes, pattern options, review score, etc.

Email product recommendations by UNIQLO

Add an Old Price for Discounted Recommendations

When you recommend products that are on sale, consider adding the old price to compare with. It's effective to show how much real money people would save by taking advantage of your offer. 25% off may sound big but when you duplicate this digit in the currency, say, $50 off, people get a clearer idea of the deal. After all, in our mind, we still count in dollars.

Email product recommendations by Hush Puppies

Optimize for Mobiles

Most modern drag-and-drop email editors offer responsive email templates by default. Responsiveness is a feature that adapts your emails for a proper display on mobiles.

In terms of product recommendations, responsiveness means the location of cards with recommended items not in a row but one above another. This helps avoid distorted display of voluminous content (big text and CTA, wide images). What's more, if you use a 3-column grid and above, non-responsive product cards can look too small and be hard to digest.

So if you design emails in HTML from scratch, make sure you take care of mobile-specific CSS to make all elements of your emails mobile-friendly.

Non-responsive vs. responsive email template in Gmail on Android

Be Versatile

Physical products aren't the only source for recommendations. You can recommend anything from blog articles to podcast episodes. The key thing to remember is that these recommendations should be applicable to the email you're sending. Set up the right algorithms for each email that features recommendations based on its purpose.

For example, when you add recommendations to welcome emails, it's better to get down with the most popular products or staff picks. New subscribers don't know much about your brand so start with items that are the most representative.

Recommendation for a reactivation email should be built taken into account the customer's shopping history and often bought items or preferred categories. Holiday emails should rather feature products that are most associated with the corresponding event. For example, home decoration is what everyone is looking for for Christmas, and sweets and romantic getaways are typical gifts for St. Valentine's Day.

To Sum Up

Product recommendations are an effective tool in your email marketing arsenal. Combined with proper customer segmentation, loyalty programs and custom offers they help create truly personalized communication with your audience. Moreover, they generate repeat sales and prolong the customer lifetime by offering relevant products and predicting the next demand.

Author's Bio

Luliia Nesterenko is a technical writer at eSputnik. Her focus is on exploring current digital marketing trends and describing new strategies for email marketers.