Our Email Best Practices
Products:
You have subscribed to Clerk.io’s Email tool and now you want to make the most out of it!
This article will guide you throughout our Best Practices for the Email tool that will make your Email Marketing Strategy successful in no time!
1) Add Email Recommendations to existing flows
You likely already have an email marketing strategy in place within your email client.
You can easily integrate Clerk.io’s AI based recommendations through snippets embeddable in your existing email templates.
With these, your own email client sends the emails, but Clerk.io decides which products to show to each recipient.
With 23+ smart logics you can automate and personalise the products shown in any email you send. We recommend getting started with the below types
Emails | Purpose | Product Logic |
---|---|---|
Themed newsletters | Show the most relevant items for themes like “Bulletproof supplements”, “Star Wars Lego” etc. | Keyword Recommendations, using free text for the theme |
Category based newsletters | Same concept as above, but using a dedicated category from your webshop | Bestsellers In Category, using the ID of the category |
Welcome Email | Catching attention based on browsing before signing up | Visitor Recommendations |
2) Create Campaigns
Campaigns are completely automated and AI driven.
With this feature, you can pair customers segmented by interests, life cycle, amount of purchases and many other parameters, with specific products they are interested in buying. Clerk.io’s AI will then continuously find out who should receive these emails and the best time to send them, depending on each customer’s purchase behaviour.
We advise you to create at least 20 different campaigns: the more campaigns the AI has to choose from, the higher the chance of showing the right products that lead to conversions.
The criteria for setting up your Campaigns in Clerk.io should be pretty similar to other marketing and conversion campaigns you likely run with your advertising partners (such as Google and Facebook).
For your inspiration, you can find in the table below some best practice Campaign types, often pairing Email with Audience (*).
Campaign Name | Audience | Recommendation Logic |
---|---|---|
Best Sellers | All | Best Sellers |
Sales | All | Best Sellers + filter on sale is true |
Personal Recommendation | All | Visitor recommendations |
Personal Recommendation - New | All | Visitor recommendations + filter age < 30 days” |
Personal Recommendation - Orders | All | Recommendations based on Orders |
Personal Offers | All | Recommendations based on Orders + filter on sale is true |
Hot New Products | All | Hot products + filter age < 30 days |
Campaign category - New | Audience interested in this category | Newest Products in Category |
Campaign category - Sales | Audience interested in this category | Best Sellers in Category + filter on sale is true |
Campaign category - Popular | Audience interested in this category | Best Sellers/Hot Product in Category |
Campaign brand - New | Audience interested in this Brand | Newest Products + filter on brand |
Campaign brand - Sales | Audience interested in this Brand | Best Sellers + filter on brand and filter on sale is true |
Campaign brand - Popular | Audience interested in this Brand | Best Sellers/Hot Products + filter on brand |
(*) This requires an active Audience tool subscription in Clerk.io
3) Setup Recurring Emails
With our Recurring emails feature you will be completely in control over when the mail will be sent and to which Audience.
As a unique feature, Clerk.io allows you to set up recurring emails that will be sent out at the frequency of your choice.
Choose among our many pre-built product recommendation logics and send highly personalised recommendations that are updated automatically without the need for any maintenance.
Scheduling a recurring email
Some examples of great recurring emails are:
- monthly email containing product recommendations based on the Order History of each recipient. This will keep your returning customers engaged with recurring personalised product recommendations.
- monthly email containing your Hot Products. The communication will update your customers with the latest trends on your webshop. Since shoppers tend to buy alike because of the security of social proof, this will turn into a great source of profit
- weekly email with your Newest products. Inform your customers about the latest additions to your catalog. You will be able to both increase the stickiness of Active Customers and possibly regain the attention of Slipping Away and Lost customers
- weekly email with products on sale. Push your customers with time limited offers that drive great conversions
You can, of course, also send one-time email for special events, such as Black Friday, Christmas, Spring Sales and so on, with the products that you want to promote.
4) Implement Triggers
Triggered emails are completely automated and will be sent out by Clerk.io’s AI based on a given event triggered by your visitors or by changes to your catalog.
Triggers are an essential part of a successful email marketing strategy and they can generate up to 75% of the total email revenue. By setting up Triggers, you will save time and maximise the ROI of your email marketing.
Clerk.io offers six pre-built Triggers which allow you to send high-converting emails according to customer behaviours and purchase history.
When creating a Trigger, Clerk.io will present you a list of the most effective product recommendations logics for each type of event.
Trigger | Trigger event | Recommendation Logic |
---|---|---|
Abandoned Session | A visitor browses the webshop without placing an order |
|
Abandoned Search (*) | A visitor made a Search without buying anything |
|
Abandoned Cart | A visitor added at least 1 product to the cart, but did not finalise the purchase |
|
Made an Order | A customer made an order |
|
Welcome Email | A user became a subscriber |
|
Newly Available Products | A new product is added to the catalog. The mail will be sent to any recipient that is interested in this product, based on Clerk.io AI’s knowledge | Specific Products |
(*) This requires an active Search tool subscription in Clerk.io
5) Create customised designs
The consistency of email templates is a crucial part of building a successful email marketing strategy. As we know, consumers prefer to interact with brands that they can easily recognise or already know.
Whether you want to make a new design from scratch or edit a pre-built one, with Clerk.io’s intuitive Design Editor, you can create a completely customised design for your email that matches your company branding in just a few clicks.
The designs are fully responsive and they are ready to be used with any mobile devices.
Clerk.io’s Email Design Editor
Remember to include rich product information such as images, names, prices, a call-to-action button and customise the template with your logo, header and footer.
Clerk.io’s design editor offers you also the possibility to include links to:
- Category pages. This will allow you to expose your catalog even more
- CSM and Blog pages. This addition allows customers to find great contents that match their interests and will often lead to more conversions by placing you as an expert in your field.
6) Analyse and Optimise
Finally, it is time to analyse the results.
With Clerk.io’s intuitive dashboard, you can keep track of all the important metrics, such as open rate, click rate, conversion rate and unsubscribe rate.
You can then apply small tweaks and optimisations to your email marketing strategy as you go and achieve even higher conversion rates and return on investment.
Clerk.io’s Email Dashboard
Got any questions?
Our support is ready to help you! Just use the live-chat in the corner of this page.