Optimize and personalize emails

With a set of automated campaigns running, and your newsletters being “business as usual”, it is time to look into more advanced features that would help you optimize your emails for the best possible performance and engagement.

Your email campaigns need to be personal and tailored to your recipients. A personalized email demonstrates that you know and understand the needs, interests, and issues of your prospects and that your goal is to help them.

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Free video content

Learn how to optimize and improve your email personalization with a bite-sized video available for free in the Engagement Mini Masterclass. This is especially useful during Black Friday to get the most out of the peak seasons!

A/B testing

The basic principle of implementing any improvements or optimization is to test how your customers respond to those improvements and ensure they bring value to your business. You can set up A/B Tests in Bloomreach Engagement.

In both Email Campaigns and Scenarios, you can create different variants of the campaign and manually set the distribution of subscribers to these variants. However, Automatic A/B testing takes this process to the next level. It removes an extra step by automatically applying the winning variant to the majority of customers. This is done by first testing a smaller sample group and then sending the winning variant to the rest.

To get the best results, review the guide on A/B Testing Best Practices.

Optimal send time

If you want to make sure your subscribers receive emails at appropriate times, there are a few helpful features you can use. To personalize the send time and improve open or click rates, you can use the optimal send time feature. Based on your customer's past behavior, this feature will predict the right hour for receiving an email for each of your subscribers individually. You can optimize for either an open rate or a click rate.

For custom optimizations, you can use a dynamic wait node. This allows you to set more complicated rules using Jinja, such as only sending during business hours.

Improve open rate

There are 3 “opportunities” for grabbing your subscriber's attention - in all major inboxes, they would see your

• Sender name
• Subject line
• Preheader

The preheader is the text visible next to the subject line in email clients. It can present more information to the subscriber.

You can A/B test various combinations of subject lines and preheaders to figure out which works best for your brand. Both of them can be personalized, so let your creativity shine!

Content personalization

Personalization allows you to create tailored messages based on customers' specific data and communicate with your audience on an individual level. Personalization can vary in sophistication, for example, from addressing customers using an individual’s name to more advanced approaches like changing the content of an email based on segmentations or personalized recommendations.

The ability to deliver unique messages like this improves the effectiveness of your marketing and can boost metrics such as conversion rates, website bounce rates, average order values, cost per acquisition, and customer lifetime value.

Learn more about the importance of personalization and the differences between just segmenting your audience and personalization in our blog.

In the following sections, we will cover the personalization tools in Bloomreach Engagement, from the simpler to the more advanced.

Personalization with Jinja

You should start by looking into our templating language - Jinja. This gives you a lot of flexibility to create and serve truly personalized content, so make sure to check all of the options of Personalization Using Jinja as well as useful examples on how to use it, for example, displaying customer name with fallback, accessing products or reports.

Display conditions

To display different content blocks to different segments, based on their behavior or any information they provided, you can use “Display condition” in our Visual editor. This will allow you to display selected content rows only to the segments you choose. In the HTML builder, you can use “if” conditions in Jinja to achieve the same. Include a different banner or products in your newsletter based on your customer's favorite categories or gender.

Recommendations

Recommendations are often the most powerful way you can personalize an email campaign. Every email is different and every product offered is unique to the customer based on their behavior and preference. With 13 out-of-the-box recommendation templates, you can offer the right product to the right customer. Review our recommendation template to display recommended products in an email that you can use right away.

Vouchers

Discount vouchers are a simple, yet very powerful tool when it comes to customer activation or acquisition. We all love discounts, even more, when they are direct and personal. Marketers on the other end, want to make them targeted, trackable, and most of all – effective. Our built-in Vouchers feature works great for both.

Vouchers allow you to import voucher codes in multiple voucher pools and automatically assign them to customers in selected campaigns. You can also display the same voucher code in multiple channels, making sure the customer experience is smooth and consistent.

Language versions

Bloomreach Engagement allows you to create multiple language versions of the same campaign. Customers receive the version based on the language attribute in their customer profile. You can create language variants for each campaign instead of creating multiple campaigns. Creating different language versions for your diverse audience can help you improve engagement - no customer wants to get an email they do not understand.

Personalized use cases

Once you get to know all of the different options you can start improving your existing use cases or create brand-new ones. The best use cases are often a combination of multiple personalization approaches. Start building it step by step, don't forget to A/B test and iterate!

Looking for inspiration?

Review some examples of personalized email campaigns or personalized out-of-the-box use cases in our Plug&Play use case library. Contact your CSM to learn more.