5 Places to Include Product Recommendations in Your Emails

Product recommendations are incredibly powerful. 

Not only is over 30% of a typical online store’s revenue attributable to personalized recommendations, but they can also increase your conversion rate by up to 26%.

In terms of your email marketing, including product recommendations can result in a 175% increase in click-through rate and a whopping 344% increase in time spent on your store.

So the effectiveness and importance of including product recommendations in your email campaigns are not in question. 

Instead, it’s how you can best make use of personalized product recommendations in your campaigns. 

That’s why we’ve put together this list of 5 places you should be recommending products in your emails.

The best places for personalized product recommendations

1) Welcome emails

Your welcome emails are usually the first campaign a customer will receive. They’re also among the most opened and read campaigns you’ll ever send. 

So with so many customers engaging with your welcome emails, you’ll want to make the most of the opportunity. 

And the best way to do this is by including some product recommendations. 

However, seeing as customers receiving your welcome email have likely only just started interacting with your store, chances are they don’t have extensive browsing or purchase histories that would usually inform relevant product recommendations. 

Luckily, SmartrMail lets you include different types of recommendations in your email. One of these options is to prefer your best-selling items when determining which product to recommend. 

You can then label these recommendations as ‘best sellers,’ ‘popular,’ or even ‘loved by everyone’ like Glossier has done in their welcome email below. 

2) Abandoned cart emails

After your welcome series, your cart abandonment emails are one of the most important campaigns. Both in terms of the extra sales they generate and the prime opportunity to recommended products.

While these emails focus on the product your customer has abandoned, you don’t want to put all your eggs in the one basket. 

Especially when some of the most common reasons customers abandon carts is because they have either already purchased the product elsewhere or are simply no longer interested in it. 

That’s why it’s important to cover your bases and include product recommendations in your abandoned cart emails as well. Just like Perigold has done in their abandoned cart email below.

3) Browse abandonment emails

Just like your abandoned cart emails, your browse abandonment emails are another prime opportunity to recommend products.

And for much the same reasons too. 

Just because someone was looking at a particular item, doesn’t mean they necessarily want it. There could’ve been something wrong with the particular variant or it just simply wasn’t their style. 

That’s why it’s important to include personalized product recommendations so that you still have an opportunity to make a sale. 

And even if your customer ends up purchasing the original product, they might also purchase one or two of your recommendations which will increase your average order values.

4) Sale emails

It’s not just email automations that make for great opportunities to recommend products. Any email newsletters and sale emails you send also lead themselves well to personalized recommendations.

All you need to do is include some specific product recommendations in your email below the main message. Like Breda has done in their email below.

For sale emails, you’ll obviously only want to recommend products that are actually on sale. You can do this in SmartrMail by creating a new product feed and then selecting it when adding your recommended product block.  

5) Win-back emails

Lastly, one other automation where you’ll definitely want to include product recommendations is your win-back campaign.

As their name suggests, your win-back emails attempt to re-engage customers who have gone cold and stopped purchasing from your store. 

And given that this is no easy task, you’ll want to make sure your win-back emails are the best they can be which means including product recommendations. 

Again, all you need to do is include a few personalized recommendations beneath your main message like in Birchbox’s email below. 

How to send personalized product recommendations in emails

It’s all very well and good to know where to include product recommendations. It’s another thing to know how to actually include the recommendations in your campaigns.

Thankfully SmartrMail makes it incredibly simple and easy to add recommendations to any email you send. 

All you have to do is drag a Recommended Product block into the email as you’re composing it. Or if you want to add recommendations to one of your existing automations, you just need to go in and edit the email to add a Recommended Product block. 

You can find more detailed instructions on adding Recommended Product blocks here.

Conclusion

Adding personalized product recommendations in your email campaigns is an incredibly powerful way to increase engagement and make more sales.

That’s why you should incorporate them as an essential part of your email marketing strategy. 

And the best way to start doing this is by including them in the places we’ve mentioned above. 

But you don’t need to stop there. Plenty of other automations like your cross-sell, and thank you emails will also benefit from personalized recommendations. 

Essentially, whenever you set up a new email automation or go to send a newsletter, you’ll want to be asking yourself if you think it’ll benefit from including some recommendations.