Email marketing example: Cross-sell in confirmation emails (+111% conversion)

The Retailer "Isabella"3 years ago, the company moved from catalogue-based sales to online sales in its ecommerce. For a year, they implemented a cross-selling strategy which consisted of product recommendations in some strategic areas of the website and in the weekly newsletter. In the last period of this initial implementation year, the team reported an increase in conversion from 5.6 (before the cross-selling strategy) to 6.2%. In addition, they found that 7.8% of users who clicked on the weekly email ended up purchasing a product.
Based on these results, the Isabella team decided to deepen the analysis and extend the positive effect of cross-selling to other areas in order to optimise its potential. One of the tactics on which the following strategy was based was to include the product recommendation in the order confirmation emails.. This would help to encourage the user to repeat the purchase and also to get information on which recommendations could get the most response. The steps they followed are as follows:
Step 1: Establish a referral system
The team developed a system with recommendations based on
- Browsing history
- Purchase history
- Products added to your shopping cart
- Products similar to those in which the user has shown interest.
The system also analysed which recommendations garnered the most sales and used the information for future suggestions. It was not a fully automated system, but the human team modified the preferences based on their analysis.
Step 2: Start safe
After creating the referral system, the key sections of the e-commerce and weekly email were added to the key sections of the e-commerce and weekly email that were known to get results. This is a good way to start a cross-selling strategy. Use it first in the areas that have proven to work in other cases (product pages or shopping cart, for example) and once we start to get results, test other areas to observe user behaviour and apply the information obtained to improve the strategy.

Product page with recommendations

Shopping cart with recommendations

Step 3: Redesign the order confirmation email
Until now, the company had been using only text-formatted emails for these confirmations, so the first step was to convert it into HTML that included images of the recommended products. Here is an example:

Suggestions were displayed based on the previous behaviour of the email recipient through the recommendation system created in the first phase.
Results:
Finalising the implementation of the strategy, Isabella's director, Stephen Fuller-Rowell, equated the recommendations to its SEM strategy in terms of results, being the strategy that had had the greatest impact on increasing turnover..
- 19% of users who click on a recommendation end up making a purchase.
–          Recommendations in transactional emails (purchase confirmation) have a 111% higher conversion rate than recommendations included in the weekly newsletter.
- The information obtained from the best converting products is routinely used to refine the strategy.
 
Source: Marketing Sherpa