Today’s consumers are savvy shoppers. They shop on more devices than ever – not just the standard laptop, tablet and phone – but also smart TVs and wearable technology as the Internet of Things becomes a reality. And with the rise of subscription box services customers don’t even have to shop anymore as hand-selected, personalized merchandise is delivered right to them.

They know that retailers collect a lot of data on their shopping habits and they expect the retailers to use that information to inform and personalize future interactions.

Remember, your messages have a lot of competition, not just from your competitors but from emails from friends and family, cute cat videos and funny memes. For your messages to cut through the noise they must be useful and beneficial to the shoppers. And nothing is more useful or beneficial than an email that is personalized for each subscriber.

Below are five personalized automated messages that are designed to boost both engagement and revenue.

1. Recurring Automated Campaigns

Recurring Automated Campaigns let you deliver the most relevant products and messages to each subscriber in an automated fashion. Using a predesigned template and a set weekly deployment time, the messages are populated the moment shoppers open them based on past shopping and browsing behavior or other business rules, such as new markdowns or top sellers.

Recurring Automated Campaigns have a ton of benefits both for you and your audience. You can send more than one of these themed emails per week; and, to make them even more useful, you can let subscribers sign up to receive the ones they are most interested in receiving. These emails can essentially replace your batch and blast messages as you can promote the same content but in an automated and personalized fashion.

These campaigns work. In this email example, the retailer sends weekly messages to customers who have browsed its site but didn’t purchase. The email features items in the same category that each customer browsed, previously purchased or abandoned in their carts. The retailer had been sending weekly hand-curated messages designed in DreamWeaver that took hours for the designers to create but, with Listrak’s Product Recommender, the emails are now designed in a small fraction of the time as the template is already built and the client simply has to set up the business rules to show the right merchandise.

Have some fun with these campaigns over the holidays with weekly messages like “Monday’s Must Have Gifts” or “Santa’s Saturday Social”

With a 9% click-through rate and 1.8% conversion rate, these messages generate revenue that is 4-5 times higher than the regular broadcast messages.

2. Abandonment Nurture

The path to purchase for any customer is far from linear. But, when buying gifts, customers are even more hesitant as they often must research products, brands and prices. While cart abandonment rates typically drop somewhat over the holidays, browse abandonment increases as site traffic grows.

Adding in some targeted and personalized messages to your site and cart abandoners can help re-engage those shoppers using a useful and soft-sale approach. Abandonment nurture campaigns add two or three additional messages to your typical campaign. Let’s say you currently send three cart abandonment messages on day one, three and five. Adding two nurturing messages on days two and four will increase the likelihood of a conversion by nearly 25%.

These messages include the merchandise that was browsed or abandoned, along with related content on the product or similar products. What isn’t included is any messaging related to the abandonment, such as “items you love” or “come back and take a second look” or “complete your purchase”. They look like a product email or one of your broadcast campaigns. The difference is that they are highly personalized with the merchandise each subscriber has previously shown interest in and purchase intent.

On average, these messages have 25% higher conversion rates and generate 16% more revenue than other emails.

‍3. Transactional with Recommendations

Transactional emails have the highest open rates and shoppers just don’t keep them, they often refer to them more than once, especially during the holidays. These messages, which range from order confirmation, shipping notification, delivery or even return processing, are the perfect opportunities to promote additional merchandise that is directly related to the transaction

Think product recommendations don’t belong in an order confirmation email? Think again! You might be surprised to hear that most second sales take place on the same day as the first, with nearly 85% coming in within the first three days after the purchase. Take advantage of this opportunity by helping customers discover new great products they are bound to love based on their previous purchases.

4. Thank You

Many of your holiday shoppers will be first time shoppers. There is no better way to keep them engaged after the first purchase than to send a thank you email.

A thank you message helps you build goodwill and strengthens your relationship. You’ll stand out from other retailers who don’t take the time to thank their customers for purchasing. And, by adding an incentive to place a second purchase, along with personal product recommendations related to the past purchase and browse history, you’ll encourage shoppers to place that second order.

This example has a 45% open rate, 24% click-to-open rate and 13% conversion rate.

5. Back in Stock

An automated back in stock message will help you recapture shoppers while better managing inventory over the holidays.

Many holiday shoppers visit your site to compare merchandise and prices. By removing items from your site when you are out of stock, you lose customers. But, if you allow customers to sign up for a notification when the item is back in stock and available for purchase, you will prevent some of the shoppers from purchasing the items elsewhere.

This back in stock message, which uses dynamic product recommendations, has a 52.5% open rate, 33.7% click-to-open rate and 23.5% conversion rate. The retailer recently moved from static recommendations to dynamic and has achieved a 14.5% higher open rate, 14.4% higher click-to-open rate and 45.4% increase in conversions.‍

Questions about other ways to engage your holiday shoppers? Let us know.