Now’s the time for your retail email marketing strategy to shine! So what’s your game plan?
The National Retail Federation forecasts that total holiday sales will grow up to 3.5%, while online sales specifically will grow 8% to 9%, compared to last year. In fact, online sales are expected to represent about 30.1% of total holiday sales in 2024, up from 28.6% in 2023.
And what is one of the biggest drivers for retailers to net these online sales? Email.
Now more than ever—and particularly throughout this holiday season—email offers retail and marketing teams opportunities to personalize content that truly speaks to consumers. Many retailers are cashing on its opportunities, and with good reason. A whopping 80% of consumers say that they are more likely to purchase from brands that offer personalized experience.
Building a revenue-generating retail email marketing program is simple with the right tools. Backstroke’s AI email generator drives 31% more revenue per send, boasting a quick upstart time and outputs that are personalized based on your subscriber segments’ preferences. Here, we’ll look at how the AI email generator and its AI messaging outputs create highly effective:
- Full email designs, based on your selected products, offers, and more
- Descriptive, conversion-driving copy throughout your campaign
- Effective email subject lines and pre-headers that stand out in crowded inboxes
How Retailers Can Use the AI Email Generator for 31% More Revenue Per Send
Let’s look at how Backstroke’s email AI generator informs the retail email marketing strategy of one of our own customers—Lyssé New York. In fact, Lyssé’s case study details how they received a 47% lift in revenue per recipient with AI message recommendations from Backstroke, which is even higher than the 31% average.
Backstroke’s proprietary dataset is built from 12,000+ brands’ and retailers' email marketing data. When coupled with Lyssé New York’s own subscriber data, it generated the most effective retail email marketing outputs for their campaigns. Here’s how it works.
Describe Your Retail Email Marketing Campaign Offerings
In the AI email generator, retailers can customize their campaign’s goals. In the screenshot below, you can see that users can personalize their:
- Campaign Type: Is your email promoting a sale? A new collection? Or something else?
- Promotion Type: Give the details on the timing of your promotion.
- Seasonality: Select if your campaign should include seasonal creative. This is especially helpful as the holidays, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday approach!
- Theme: Classify what type of vibe you’d like the email AI generator to craft in your retail email’s theme.
- Offer: Here, you can customize exactly what you want your email to promote to subscribers.
Add Products to Highlight In Your Retail Email Marketing Campaign
Next, paste in the URLs of the products you’d like your email to drive customers to! In this example, we’re showing off some cool weather clothing favorites. By adding each product’s online store URL, Backstroke will include its imagery and information in your retail email!
You can also select which product you want featured at the top of your email, in its header and primary offer.
Generate AI Messages for Your Specific Subscribers
Backstroke also creates the most effective email subject lines and pre-headers, based on your email segmentation strategy and custom audiences you choose. Nailing your subject line and body copy are critical, as personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened and personalized calls-to-action in emails can increase conversion rates by 202%.
Remix the Look & Feel of Your Retail Email Marketing Campaign
After taking a look at your AI-powered email, and getting a sense for its design and offerings, you can choose to remix its contents.
The email AI generator’s Remix feature allows retailers to change layouts and looks of different sections of their emails. For example, you can:
- Remix section layouts
- Change out product images
- Update body copy and CTAs to your liking
Now that you’ve nailed the visuals of your retail email marketing campaign, let’s get into how targeted and personalized your copy can be . . .
How to Generate the Best Email Subjects for Each Retail Email Marketing Campaign
If you want to test out AI messages before you commit to using it on a full campaign, Backstroke’s Sandbox toolkit offers three free AI-powered solutions to help retailers develop their most effective email marketing strategy. Here, we're taking a look at its email subject line generator and how it creates hyper-personalized, super-clickable email content.
Since women control or influence 70-80% of all consumer purchasing decisions, we’ll set our audience targeting to focus on millennial moms who are shopping for family holiday party fashion.
In Backstroke’s email subject line creator, select your Audience and Tone settings. This is your opportunity to highlight the millennial woman audience, in order to customize your retail email marketing campaign to peak their interests! For this example, our data shows that millennials love slang, emojis, and copy that’s a bit silly and fun, so we’ve accounted for these settings in the Tone filters.
They also love a discount, as millennials are a very thrifty generation, so we’ve set the campaign and promotion to message a limited time sale.
You can see a select few examples of what the email subject line generator’s outputs look like below.
Create the Most Compelling, Revenue-Driving Retail Email Marketing Program
The retail email campaigns and effective email subject lines we’ve showcased above are only a small part of the story. Backstroke generates full email campaigns for brands across several other industries, such as fashion, cosmetics & beauty, and pets.
Email designs, contents, and subject lines can also be personalized to appeal to peoples’ interests across location, age, device types, and more!
For brands who are wondering how to drive more revenue from their email programs—and honestly, who doesn’t want to do that—this is your answer.
Backstroke’s AI email generator is currently driving 31% more revenue per send . . . And while any time is the perfect time to use it, this holiday season provides the ultimate opportunity for retail email marketing teams to cash in.
