Retail email marketing is both rapid and demanding. Retailers often face the challenge of sending numerous emails with limited time and resources, resulting in emails with minimal personalisation. Crafting a single version is difficult enough, especially with the need to send multiple emails weekly and manage complex automated programs that require constant monitoring and updates. The sheer amount of time needed to dispatch emails leaves little room for developing strategies to streamline and personalise content.
A huge amount of time is spent crafting and coding product content and ensuring emails feature the latest social and blog posts. If we look at product content, a typical email might feature between 6 to 12 products; many marketers face the reality of either asking their designer to design an image for each individual product, or they copy and paste the product image and content into the HTML manually – for every single product. The resource output is massive and let’s face it, it’s boring, manual work that leaves a lot of room for error. It’s also not conducive to efficient testing, if a product needs to be swapped, the code is altered and everything needs to be tested again. All of this manual work can be replaced with an automated content generation solution. Let’s delve into how Content Generator works for retailers and the ways they could be using it to save time and solve problems.
What is Content Generator?
Content Generator enables automatic content production for email. You can connect a ‘content source’ and turn whatever content it contains into perfectly branded images for your emails. Content sources can be a Google Product Feed, a hosted .csv or .txt file, a JSON API or an xml file. For example, say you’ve got a product catalogue with 100,000 products that you sell online. You can connect that feed, go to our design lab and design your image template and then you can generate a pixel-perfect image for any of those 100,000 products. Once you’ve finalised your design you can build totally custom business rules to automatically show the newest products, products in the sale, high stock products, red products, products from a certain category. You name it, we can show it.
Getting started
If your emails feature products – that’s where I recommend you start. Connect the feed your company used to power Google shopping in our UI and you’re ready to get started. All you need is the url for that feed. Once you’ve added your feed as a content source, you can jump into the design lab. In here you’ll find quick add buttons for key product fields. You can design the image exactly as you need it and create data-driven layers that hide and show based on the rules you’ve set. For example, you may want to show your ‘sale’ badge when a product is on sale. This can automatically display all sale items. You can also add fun, eye-catching animations to make your image stand out. Once you’ve designed your image template, it’s time to set up your element.
Popular use cases:
Product ID look up
Generate a perfectly branded, multi-layered image for any product in your catalogue. This is a powerful, reusable element that can be implemented into any merchandised product email. Instead of manually adding every product in the code, add the element to the HTML and all you need to do is add the product SKUs you want to display. You could also merge a product SKU from your CRM to show personalised products to an individual, for example in a cart abandonment email.
The image will automatically update to show the chosen product, with the correct product information (latest price, availability, relevant badges) and the href will direct to the chosen product page.
Where to use: Merchandised emails, automated programs, specific promotional content, personalised product emails.
Newest items
Wave goodbye to manually coding New arrivals every day/week/month (delete as appropriate). Use Content Generator to automatically show the latest products ordered by the date they were added to the feed. Apply rules if needed to filter by gender, category or type.
Newest sale
Apply the same logic as Newest Items but add a rule to only show products that are on sale and instock. This saves time and will maximise your email revenue opportunity; once a product no longer meets the stock criteria set, it will automatically be removed and swapped with the next product that meets the criteria. That’s more money for you and a better experience for your customers.There’s nothing worse than liking a product you see in an email only to click through and find it’s sold out.
Newest Category (CRM or Manual)
This popular use case builds upon the Newest Item foundation and includes a product category filter. Configure the element to look up products in a category of your choice, either hardcode the element to only show ‘dresses’, or set it up to match your input to a specific column. You can add the product category you wish to see products from to the end of the element and we’ll automatically show products from that category. You can also automate this by using CRM data to populate the element merge which is a good starting point for those wanting to start more sophisticated personalisation.
Colour / Price / style / size lookup
Save yourself lots of time by creating a plethora of reusable tags to suit your needs. Create a tag that looks up colour so that you can automate colourwave or favourite colour emails. Build elements to show products under or over a set price point, certain styles or patterns or even use CRM data to show a stream of products in the individual’s size (if known).
Summary
The strategies outlined above can all be easily configured to streamline your efforts, produce greater email revenues and give your customers a better inbox experience. They’re good foundations blocks for personalisation too. Once you’ve set up product ID and category lookups you can start to use your CRM data to automatically display the right products or categories to each individual. It’s a low touch, high return strategy. And the even better news is that you only need to set the elements up once; they can be reused in as many emails as you need without any additional output.
