AMPed Up Email Series: Ecommerce Product Campaigns

⏱ 10 minute read

While pundits love to herald its imminent demise, email continues to be the ultimate channel for ecommerce product campaigns. According to the Data and Marketing Association’s 2019 Email Tracker Report, B2C promotional emails return an average of $48 for every $1 spent.

But why settle for average? With AMP for email, traditional ecommerce product campaigns are going to be radically transformed. And brands that stay ahead of the curve are going to win big. In this article, we’ll look at five classic promotional email campaigns, and how they can be upgraded with AMP.

The Discount Email

Discounting is a highly effective ecommerce marketing tactic. According to Statista, 88% of US consumers used discounts for shopping in 2020. And over 50% of 18 to 39-year-old shoppers considered digital coupons to be especially important in their purchase decisions.

Not only does discounting have time-tested appeal, it’s also extremely versatile – it can be used in general promotions, cart abandonment emails, and as a way to encourage new customers to make their first purchase. For example, meal delivery service Blue Apron regularly offers discounts to encourage email subscribers to make more orders:

This is a classic format that is simple but effective. Not only does it offer a discount, it also evokes scarcity and fear of missing out, so that customers are compelled to act right away. This email doesn’t require much segmentation or targeting, as the appeal is likely to work on most subscribers.

Discount emails can also get much more sophisticated than this. Consider this email from underwear and lingerie manufacturer Triumph:

This is a highly targeted email based on the customer’s past shopping behavior. Provided the customer is still interested in the item, they are highly likely to buy now that there’s a discount.

Of course, while discounting can be a very powerful tool, its main downside is also well understood. Namely, frequent discounting can cause customers to de-value your brand over the long term, as they come to see the discounted price as the “true” price of your products.

How AMP Changes The Game

AMP for email offers a great solution to this problem: gamified discount codes. Check out this example from Stripo:

This email requires customers to crack open some virtual easter eggs to unlock a special easter discount. It’s simple and engaging, but still requires some “work” from the customer.

This taps into the IKEA Effect, which causes people to place a higher value on items they’ve invested effort to obtain. By providing a fun way for customers to “earn” the promo code, the brand is able to offer them a discount, while protecting the perceived value of their products.

This gives you a completely different way of framing your discount emails. In one stroke, AMP does several things for your promotions:

• Turn them from transactional messages into novel entertainment, thus boosting open rates
• Improve engagement with the email itself, leading to higher clickthrough rates
• Elevate the perception of the discount from a matter of dollars and cents to a memorable brand experience

Fundamentally, customers don’t buy because of numbers, but because of emotions. A regular discount code might seem exciting today, but in the brave new world of AMP emails, gamification will be key to standing out. 

The Individualized Offer Email

Savvy ecommerce marketers have long understood the importance of a customer-centric shopping experience. Today’s consumers expect content that is tailored to their specific activities and preferences, and quickly lose interest in one-size-fits-all messaging.

When it comes to email marketing specifically, personalization is even more important, as the customer has already opted in to an ongoing relationship with you. According to research from Epsilon, 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer individualized experiences. And a study from Harvard Business School found that when customers were given recommendations based on information they had shared with the brand, they were 40% more likely to click on the items, and spent 31% more time on the product page.

Traditionally, ecommerce companies have tailored offers to specific customer segments through highly targeted emails. Take this email from men’s gear retailer Huckberry:

Customers that have extensively browsed or purchased bike accessories will be sent more products in this category. Then, based on customer’s engagement with these emails, they might be further segmented and targeted for even more specific offers.

While this approach does work, it also has a number of limitations. For one, it requires a fairly large customer list for segmentation to be worthwhile. It can also be time-consuming, as many offers have to be tested before the customer’s true preferences can be established. And finally, there’s a limit to how granular the personalization can be. Even the most specific targeting can’t quite segment each customer into a category of one.

Choose Your Own AMP Adventure

AMP for email turns the entire classic targeting paradigm on its head. , Instead of trying to segment customers more and make increasingly specific predictions about their preferences, why not let customers tailor their own experience? After all, no one knows the customer better than themselves. 

As a basic example, check out this AMP email for an Apple iPhone:

Conventional segmentation can identify likely iPhone customers, but can’t determine the best model and color for each of those customers. So why not let the customer choose for themselves, without leaving their email inbox?

Apart from product customization, there are endless creative ways to apply this same principle. Here’s one example:

This email recommends web templates for customers based on the design element that appeals to them most. The “fortune cookie” format creates some anticipation and natural curiosity, as the customer doesn’t know what result they’re going to get. This can be an effective technique for any product whose appeal depends on subjective taste.

Today’s customers might still be pleasantly surprised by a well-targeted offer. But tomorrow’s customers will expect to be the authors of their own unique buying journey – and AMP is what makes this possible.

The Back in Stock Email

Often, customers will come across a product they really like in your store, but it will be out of stock. The bad news is that you won’t be able to make an immediate sale, but the good news is that the buying intent is still there. All you need to do is send the customer an email when the item is back in stock.

Here’s an example from Uniqlo:

This email uses dynamic insertion to display the relevant product image. It also employs session regeneration, so the customer can step right back into the checkout flow (assuming they abandoned their cart). In some cases, if the product won’t be replenished for a long time, similar items might be recommended instead.

Upgrade to Real-Time With AMP

AMP for email improves every one of these elements, creating a more seamless customer experience. Not only can the relevant product image be displayed, but it can be shown from various angles on a carousel, along with a real-time update of the remaining inventory. And instead of recommending one similar item, the customer can be presented with an array of possible alternatives.

This can even work for complex products like hotel room bookings, as showcased by this Booking.com email:

The customer can click through a series of photos of the available room. If that doesn’t appeal to them, they can scroll down and cycle through available hotels in a variety of nearby cities. The customer can even select the frequency of email updates, depending on when they’re planning to have their vacation.

Most importantly, room availability can be updated within the same email in real-time, meaning the customer won’t ever have to place a booking for a room that’s already taken. With AMP, out of stock cart abandonment can be a thing of the past.

The Cross-Sell Email

Cross-selling is one of the most effective ways to grow ecommerce revenues. It’s 5-25x more expensive to acquire a new customer than to sell to an existing one. And research from Bain shows that the average repeat customer spends 67% more in months 31-36 of their relationship with a brand than in months 0-6.

This is why Amazon displays products that are frequently bought together:

Customers who are purchasing a home security camera are likely to be interested in other smart home security products as well, such as camera-compatible wall mounts and a video doorbell from the same company.

The important thing is to avoid recommending unrelated products. If not done well, cross-sell emails not only fail to convert, but can also annoy the customer. Remember, customer lifetime value is always maximized by building a long-term relationship, one that’s based on permission and trust. Cross-sells should be viewed as a way of adding value to the buying experience, not just a channel for hawking random products.

Here’s an example of how to do it right, courtesy of luxury car audio system company Bavsound:

These upgrades are highly relevant to the customer, as they would only be useful to someone who already owns a Bavsound speaker system. It also describes precisely how the add-on product will augment the original purchase – double the bass in one hour. For a certain type of customer, this email makes for a very compelling and targeted value proposition.

Show, Don’t Tell

But it’s one thing to tell the customer what they’re going to get, and another to show them directly. That’s what AMP for email can do, especially for highly visual products. For instance, here’s an AMP email that allows customers to match various items of clothing for a complete look:

By allowing the customer to visualize how the complete outfit will look, this apparel retailer makes it much more appealing to purchase multiple matching items.

The reason this is so powerful is that it incorporates several other AMP-enabled benefits, such as the IKEA effect and deep personalization. It also eliminates the time lag between the initial purchase and receipt of the cross-sell email, thus making the customer more likely to buy.

Just as importantly, AMP-enabled visualization has the potential to significantly reduce returns. On average, 25% of all retail ecommerce purchases are returned by customers, and 22% of these returns are due to the received product looking different than expected. With $4.13 trillion in global ecommerce sales in 2020, that works out to potential savings of $227 billion per year.

With numbers like that, it’s no exaggeration to say that AMP has the power to re-shape the ecommerce landscape.

The Video Email

By now, the power of video marketing has been well-established. This is especially the case in ecommerce, where product videos have been shown to increase purchases by up to 144%. In theory, video can also be great in promotional emails – boosting open rates by 19% and clickthrough rates by 65%.

So why are they still so uncommon in ecommerce email campaigns? The main reason is that video is much more poorly supported in email than it is on the general web. Major email clients like Gmail, Outlook, and Thunderbird either provide no support, or only partial support for video. And many spam filters and antivirus programs still flag emails with embedded video, resulting in lower deliverability.

In addition to these technical challenges, embedding video into your email is not the most user-friendly process. Unlike a website, you can’t embed streaming video from sites like Youtube, Vimeo, or Facebook directly into your emails. Instead, you need to host the video on your own content distribution network (CDN) and serve it to subscribers. This can lead to bloated email sizes and significant hosting costs, especially if you’re sending to a large list. And if you’re planning to share a video you don’t own, self-hosting is rarely a viable option without the copyright holder’s permission.

This often leads to awkward compromises, such as this email from hair products brand Oribe:

Oribe was featured on TODAY, but did not own the relevant clip. So instead, they included a video thumbnail that subscribers could click on to watch the video on the TODAY site. This disrupts the user flow and makes for a poor customer experience.

AMP Makes Video Easy

Fortunately, this is all going to change with AMP for email. AMP allows you to directly embed videos into emails with a small snippet of code:

This functionality isn’t limited to Youtube either. You can embed videos from Instagram, Twitter, Vine and other sites just as easily. Imagine being able to display product videos, instructional videos or media appearances in the promotional email itself, linked directly to your social media accounts for convenient cross-promotion.

And not only does AMP broaden the functionality of email-based video, it’s also going to make it universally accessible. With the might of Google behind it, widespread AMP support is coming soon. The technology is already compatible with Gmail, Yahoo, AOL and Mail.ru, and Outlook is not far behind.  

Simply put, this is going to be a game changer. And as with any new marketing channel, companies that embrace it early will reap the rewards.

Supercharge Your Ecommerce Product Campaigns With AMP

The easiest way to get started with AMP for email is with our user-friendly, drag-and-drop AMP email builder. Start creating beautiful AMP emails today – absolutely no code required.

All AMP emails created in Dyspatch also come pre-loaded with HTML fallbacks. So your subscribers will always get personalized content, whether their email service provider supports AMP or not.