A good way to remind customers of their product interests is to include a ‘recently viewed products’ section on your eCommerce site’s pages. Whilst this has a myriad of benefits, it’s worth being proactive by placing this in your email marketing communications too. That way, you will increase their visibility to those signed up to your email marketing.
Here are five reasons why you should include a recently viewed products section in your marketing emails, as well as how to do this.
Email personalisation can grow interaction and revenue by 14%, 30% and more, according to an email personalisation study by Klaviyo. That means creating personalised parameters, such as the customer’s name and links to products relevant to them, will help them engage with your offerings. An effective way to do this is by linking to a customer’s recently viewed products.
You’ll need a connection between your eCommerce shop and your email provider to show recently viewed products in your marketing emails. This includes a feed of product data (images, names, prices) and the history of the customer’s browsing. Once connected, you will often be able to manage this viewed product data.
Adding a ‘recently viewed products’ section can be as simple as placing this at the bottom of a newsletter, announcement email, or even as its own marketing message. Customers have busy lives, so there may have been all sorts of reasons they didn’t complete their purchases. By showing a list of products that the customer has already viewed, you’re presenting products they’ve already expressed interest in, meaning they’re more likely to complete the purchase. All it could take is a tailored email sent at a later time. This may look like this (for a singular product):
Make sure you set this up as an email template that can access the customer’s recently viewed products. This can then be sent and provide recently viewed products for your mailing list, en masse.
Customers may have shown interest in particular products on your website, but been unable to complete the purchase due to lack of time, money, or been pulled away to do something else. It’s then easy to forget about those products whilst they get on with their busy lives. That’s why it’s important to remind them.
Showing recently viewed products can act as a gentle reminder of what they were looking at. Customers can then act on any links to the products they’re already interested in, increasing the likelihood of completing their purchase.
Alternatively, if you include a ‘recently viewed products’ section at the bottom of your email, then it’s worth drawing attention to it. You can do this using a title such as ‘Just for you…’ with perhaps three products next to one another. Make sure the products have a link to their respective webpages, which could even be done using a button in your brand fonts and colours.
Imagine receiving an email with your name in the subject line, recommending a product you’ve recently viewed. Not only is this enticing, but this level of personalisation encourages users to open the email and engage with the content. When presented with more recently viewed products in the email itself, the receiver is also likely to click-through any links to those products, once again.
However, these personalised emails aren’t just important for open rates and click-through rates. The more your emails are engaged with, the better trusted your business will be with DMARC, meaning your emails will be less likely flagged as spam. To help your email sending reputation, we have more details on Gmail and Yahoo’s sending requirements with DMARC.
Whether on your eCommerce website or email, showing the customer’s recently viewed products can improve the user experience greatly. By itself, recently viewed products make it easier for customers to reconvene their shopping journey. When combined with email marketing, this creates a streamlined, cross-channel experience where customers are taken straight to what they’re looking for to complete their purchase.
Customers can view their emails across multiple devices too, meaning recently viewed product links can actually help unify their journey. For example, a customer may browse your website on desktop, step away, receive your email, view it on their phone, then click through to continue their journey.
As alluded to earlier, a customer is more likely to click a link to something they are already interested in. That means a list of tailored recently viewed products will result in a higher chance of customers clicking through to the product page to complete their purchase. For that reason alone, re-engaging registered customers with follow-up emails is important for boosting sales.
You could even take this idea further by showing not just products, but also show related categories in your message. That way, if the customer left the product because they didn’t quite find something suitable, they could be guided towards similar products that may fit their needs better.
In an email, the end result is not only an increased open rate, but also an improved click-through rate and sale.
Before sending emails with recently viewed product information, you will first need to sync your product catalogue with an email service provider’s platform. We often use Klaviyo for our clients, thanks to its eCommerce focus and strong integrations with leading eCommerce platforms.
Klaviyo offers a guide on how to display recently viewed products in emails, but you will first require that integration. Our expert team of eCommerce specialists provide an integration service between Klaviyo and your chosen eCommerce platform, including Magento integrations and Shopify integrations.
For more information, get in touch with us at magic42.
