2022 Email Marketer’s Guide To: Smart Banner by Zembula

2022 Email Marketer’s Guide To:

Smart Banner

™

2022 Email Marketer's Guide To:

Smart Banner

™

Fresh, hyper-relevant, and fully automated content to improve your email performance in 2022.

Written by: Robert Haydock and Garin Hobbs Edited by: Cheyenne Ng and Liz Froment Designed by: Alisa Rosales and Nick Hensley Illustrations by: Nick Hensley

Table Of Contents 09

Introduction

15

Part 1

27

Part 2

35

Part 3

39

Part 4

65

Part 5

The Smart Banner™ Strategy

Data For Smart Banner™

Smart Banner™ Live Example

Smart Banner™ Inspiration

The Glossary

A Letter From Zembula The team at Zembula is always developing and exploring technology to find the very best solutions for our customers to achieve their business goals.

Personalization is a common focus for all of our customers. It has led us to discover the single largest opportunity for every email marketing team to maximize both the performance and coverage of their personalization efforts.

The common challenge we address is how to deliver the best performing personalization across 100% of the annual send volume, while making sure the experience doesn’t feel repetitive to the consumer. We also want to minimize the impact of daily/weekly internal team processes to deploy campaigns (one time work instead of daily or weekly work).

With the right mix of technology, innovation, and customer feedback, we have developed the Smart Banner™ to help brands expand their personalization efforts to the largest part of their annual marketing email send volume while keeping their content fresh. The impact of Smart Banner™ has been a 10+% increase in promotional email program revenue, and we’re just getting started.

The universal nature of our technology means that we are already seeing customers expand their usage of Zembula beyond email. We continue to look for and develop personalization strategies that leverage Zembula in mobile, web, and SMS/MMS that deliver the same performance we’ve unlocked within email.

Regards, Garin Hobbs, SVP Strategy

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Total Annual Email Send Volume

Smart Banners™ deliver your best personalization in 100% of the emails you send.

Triggered Email Journey Email Promotional Email

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8

Introduction

9

Introduction Personalization Works Personalization using the right zero and first party data is a core revenue driver for many brands. Specifically, personalized triggered and lifecycle email programs return the most revenue per email sent. These programs only represent about 20% of a brand’s annual email send volume, but this content can improve the performance of 100% of the marketing emails you send annually. If executed with the right strategy and software, this will lead to a 10+% revenue lift in the entire email program.

Components to delivering the Smart Banner™ personalization strategy: • Expand Visibility - Include top performing personalized email content in 100% of marketing’s annual email send volume.

• Increase Variety - Greater visibility requires more variety of your best performing personalized content so that it doesn’t feel repetitive to the consumer.

• Feasibility - Limiting the impact to the marketing team's daily/ weekly internal process to deploy campaigns.

10

Increase visibility of your best performing personalized content.

Triggered Email Journey Email Total Email Send Volume

11

Introduction Your Email Your Email Your Email Your Email Your Email Smart Banner™ Your Email Smart Banner™ Smart Banner™ Smart Banner™ Smart Banner™

Smart Banner™

12

Smart Banner™ Upgrades Your Personalization Immediately A Smart Banner™ lives in all of your emails and delivers a unique, hyper-personalized experience in every open.

The Smart Banner™ strategy defines a new way to combine existing personalization efforts with Zembula’s unique technology. The result is empowering marketing teams to deliver their best performing personalized content across 100% of the annual email send volume.

The rest of this book will dive more deeply into the Smart Banner™ strategy and how to deploy it. Your path to 10+% in additional revenue from your existing email marketing program is only a few steps away.

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14

Part 1

The Smart ™ Banner Strategy

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The Smart Banner™ Strategy Overview The Strategy Take your best performing personalized messages and expand their visibility. By adding a Smart Banner™ to the top of every email sent, you can increase variety while ensuring that consumers do not become fatigued.

When To Implement This Strategy If your email marketing program already includes triggered emails, and you have 5-7 triggers deployed, you are ready to expand the visibility of that content with a Smart Banner™ personalization strategy.

The Data Required The data is already available if you have a triggered email program in place. There are additional data sources that we will talk about later in the book to enhance performance and create content variety. These data sources can be added, as available, over time.

The Effort Required Implementing this strategy depends on having the right technology. Leveraging Zembula minimizes the effort required to implement and maintain the Smart Banner™ strategy over time. This is a fully automated program that requires a single pixel and link to be added to the bottom of the header of every email you send.

Result Fully implemented programs using Zembula’s Smart Banner™ typically see a 10-20% lift in revenue across their entire email program.

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Increase the visibility of your best performing, personalized content to 100% by adding a Smart Banner™ to every email sent.

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The Smart Banner™ Strategy

PHASE 1: Starting Point

Implementation Road Map To 15+% Email Revenue Lift

10+% Email Program Revenue Lift • Smart Banner™ in all promotional emails sent.

• Six Banners (one version of each banner).

• Top Use Cases: Cart abandonment, browse abandonment, price drop, back in stock, loyalty, shipment tracking.

6 BANNERS

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PHASE 2: Expansion

PHASE 3: Optimize

13+% Email Program Revenue Lift

15+% Email Program Revenue Lift

• Smart Banner™ in all promotional & lifecycle emails sent.

• Smart Banner™ in all promotional & lifecycle emails sent.

• Six Banners (three versions of each banner).

• Twelve banners (three versions of each banner).

• Top Use Cases: Cart abandonment, browse abandonment, price drop, back in stock, loyalty, shipment tracking.

• Top Use Cases: Cart abandonment, browse abandonment, price drop, back in stock, loyalty, shipment tracking, low inventory, add-an-Item, alerts, reminders, anniversary, etc.

18 BANNERS

36+ BANNERS

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The Smart Banner™ Strategy

Increasing Visibility To 100% Of Your Annual Email Send Volume You already have great personalized content that performs extremely well, but what you are missing is full visibility of that content across your entire annual email send volume.

Increasing the visibility of personalized triggered and journey messaging will deliver an additional 10-20% increase in revenue to your email program annually.

Triggered Email Journey Email Total Email Send Volume

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What are your best performing personalized emails?

Every brand and industry will have a different mix of their best performing personalized triggered emails. The key is to figure out yours and then increase the visibility of those messages to 100% of the emails you send.

Below is a typical ranking for email based on revenue generated per email sent (a good metric to rank your email with): 1. Transactional ($2.50+ per email sent) 2. Shipment Tracking ($2.50+ per email sent) 3. Back In Stock ($2.35+ per email sent) 4. Cart Abandonment ($2.30+ per email sent) 5. Welcome Series ($1.00+ per email sent) 6. Price Drop Alerts ($0.80+ per email sent) 7. Low Inventory ($0.80+ per email sent) 8. Browse Abandonment ($0.70+ per email sent) 9. Replenishment ($0.50+ per email sent) 10. Loyalty ($0.50+ per email sent) 11. Post Purchase ($0.50+ per email sent) 12. Journey (lifecycle) ($0.10+ per email sent) 21

The Smart Banner™ Strategy

Increased Visibility Requires More Content Variety Why Content Variety Is Important When you expand content visibility to every open, it's important to think about the customer's experience when they see the same message multiple times.

Consumer Content Blindness If a consumer sees the exact same creative multiple times in a row, it will begin to fade into the background, and attention will be lost. Variety is a key component to keeping content fresh with each email open.

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Variety Approaches There are three ways to deliver variety, and at Zembula, we like to call this delivering freshness: • Change the content with different product images, different reviews, etc., so that each view is unique.

• Change the layout and design for the same message. An example would be multiple cart abandonment designs utilizing the same data.

• Change the data mix. For example, try different financing options vs. discounts vs. loyalty points and promotions within cart abandonment.

The mix above can be changed in combination to create a vast array of different experiences for the consumer.

How Many Versions Of Any One Message Do I Need?

Having 2-3 versions to start with is ideal. The reality is that every email program is a little different. You can always build over time to both add versions of a banner and add more trigger use cases to the mix.

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The Smart Banner™ Strategy

The Halo Effect Of Smart Banner™ Personalization One of the additional benefits of using a Smart Banner™ at the top of every email sent is a halo effect. This halo effect improves the performance of the entire email, increasing click-through rates beyond the Smart Banner™ and throughout the body of the entire email.

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Part 2

Data For ™ Smart Banner

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Data For Smart Banner™

Data for personalizing the banner that’s picked.

Each banner has: • Customer Data • Data for Variety

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Data for picking the right banner.

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Smart Banner™ Personalization Is Automated With Data Data is at the heart of delivering personalization, and there are two core places data is used for personalization.

• Data for picking the right banner out of a pool of banners.

• Data for personalizing the banner that’s picked.

1. Customer Data - Drives personalization.

2. Data for Variety - Amplifies and differentiates.

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Data For Smart Banner™

1. Data For Picking The Right Banner From A Pool Our Smart Banners™ are powered by a single snippet of code that can be placed in all your email templates. That snippet can deliver any personalized banner from a pool of banners that you create.

Zembula’s unique Campaign Decision Engine picks from that pool of personalized banners to deliver the right one, to the right person, at any given moment in time.

Zembula’s decision engine leverages your customer data to understand the individual and their current status. This means the most relevant banner is prioritized, picked, personalized, and delivered in every email open.

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Campaign Decision Engine

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Data For Smart Banner™

2. Data For Personalizing The Banner That’s Picked Once a banner is picked, the individual banner is personalized with two types of data. Each provides a different value to the individual’s experience.

A. Customer Data - Drives personalization This is the data that drives the use case and determines which banner should be displayed. The data might be customer shopping cart data for cart abandonment, or customer browse data for browse abandonment.

In addition to use-case logic, customer data points are often used as injectable personalization elements.

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First Name

Offer

Adrian, finish your order today with FREE SHIPPING!

Key Data for Variety

This is a nice, quality running hoodie.

I’m buying one in every color!

Customer Data

Cart Abandonment Item

GET FREE SHIPPING

Review

B. Data for Variety - Amplifies and differentiates This data provides variety and enriches a use case like cart abandonment.

Add one or more of these types of data: • Customer reviews & ratings.

• Customer UGC pictures.

• Klarna, Affirm, or any other financing option.

• Weather, if it provides incentive or a reason to purchase an item.

• Time, if a promotion or sale is ending on an item in the cart.

• Inventory levels, if inventory is low.

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Part 3

Smart Banner Live Example

™

35

Smart Banner™ Live Example

Smart Banner™ In Action Thrive Causemetics has a growing pool of personalized banners that live in their Smart Banner™ at the top of every email they send. Every time an email from Thrive Causemetics is opened, business rules within Zembula determine the right banner for an individual and personalize that banner with zero and first party data.

All Thrive Causemetics’ top performing triggered emails are represented in the Smart Banner™. The banners display to email recipients based on individual customer data and the business rules that Thrive Causemetics has in place within Zembula.

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+ More 1:1 Smart Banners™

Smart Banner™ examples courtesy of Thrive Causemetics.

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Part 4

Smart Banner Inspiration

™

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#1 Smart Banner™

Cart Abandonment

40

Overview Cart abandonment is one of the highest value banners to include within your Smart Banner™.

Visibility Increase the footprint and actionability while providing a compelling abandon experience that also improves conversion intent.

Variety There are many reasons carts are abandoned. Providing variety in the banners to address all the potential reasons will improve performance and keep the banner fresh.

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Smart Banner™ Inspiration: Cart Abandonment

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Name + Cart Abandonment + Top Item Review

View animated version:

Name + Cart Abandonment + Financing Offer

View animated version:

Name + Cart Abandonment + Review + Offer

View animated version:

Name + Cart Abandonment + Loyalty Redemption

View animated version:

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#2 Smart Banner™

Back In Stock

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Overview Back in stock is one of the highest intent messages in your personalization program.

Visibility Not every email gets opened, and increasing the visibility of back in stock messaging to every email sent is highly effective.

Variety Back in stock message variety includes adding reviews, loyalty status, or any promotions an individual may qualify for.

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Smart Banner™ Inspiration: Back In Stock

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Name + Back In Stock + Review

View animated version:

Name + Back In Stock + Discount

View animated version:

Name + Back In Stock + Loyalty Points

View animated version:

Name + Back In Stock + Review + Discount

View animated version:

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#3 Smart Banner™

Shipment Tracking

48

Overview Shipment tracking in a Smart Banner™ moves the focus of individuals to your latest promotional email sent rather than digging through their inbox to find a dedicated tracking email.

Visibility Increasing the visibility of shipment tracking adds incredible value and trains your customers to open the latest promotional email.

Variety Shipment tracking is an experience that should feel familiar and be easy for the customer to glance at and understand. The variety for this experience should be limited to the stages of package tracking, but advanced implementations benefit from animated stories.

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Smart Banner™ Inspiration: Shipment Tracking

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Name + Preparing Order

View animated version:

Name + Shipped

View animated version:

Name + Out For Delivery

View animated version:

Name + Delivered + Leave A Review

View animated version:

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#4 Smart Banner™

Transactional

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Overview Transactional messages that include order confirmations, order cancellations, returns, etc., contain important pieces of information that are great additions to Smart Banners™.

Visibility Keeping customers updated about transactions and expanding that visibility to promotional emails keeps customers informed and engaged with your brand’s latest promotions.

Variety These messages require variety to cover all the different transactional scenarios you may have.

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Smart Banner™ Inspiration: Transactional

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Name + Return Status

View animated version:

Name + Return Status + Rate Experience

View animated version:

Name + Rate Experience

View animated version:

Name + Order Status

View animated version:

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#5 Smart Banner™

Welcome Series

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Overview Expanding the visibility of welcome messaging enhances the individual’s experience with the first few promotional emails, acknowledges they are new and provides a venue for special welcome promotions and content.

Visibility Welcome series messaging commonly has promotions or incentives to join loyalty programs that benefit from increased visibility beyond their dedicated emails.

Variety The variety within a welcome series is often created by a diverse set of messages that represent the actions you would like new subscribers to take.

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Smart Banner™ Inspiration: Welcome Series

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Name + Discount

View animated version:

Name + Preference Gathering

View animated version:

Name + Loyalty

View animated version:

Name + Birthday

View animated version:

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#6 Smart Banner™

Browse Abandonment

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Overview Browse abandonment is a great initial signal of intent by a consumer, and adding personalized abandonment content to the Smart Banner™ will increase the performance of all your promotional emails.

Visibility The more visibility you give to abandonment messages, the more likely you are to convert. Constraining this content to dedicated emails is limiting its revenue impact.

Variety Providing numerous different designs will increase the engagement with browse abandonment when it’s shown numerous times in promotional emails. The variety can include tying the abandonment with loyalty, promotions, product reviews, etc.

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Smart Banner™ Inspiration: Browse Abandonment

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Name + Browse Abandonment + Review

View animated version:

Name + Browse Abandonment + Discount

View animated version:

Name + Browse Abandonment + Financing Offer

View animated version:

Name + Browse Abandonment + Loyalty

View animated version:

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Part 5

The Glossary

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The Glossary Terms Banner Static content served at the top of a message.

Campaign Decision Engine A feature of the Zembula platform that allows marketers to determine which banner or content is served to an individual under different circumstances or data conditions.

Journey Message A triggered message (or series of related messages) relevant to the particular sales/funnel stage of the buying process.

Mobile Message A message sent on mobile channels, most typically SMS, mobile-push, or in-app messages.

Promotional Message A message with the primary purpose to promote and merchandise products or services. These are typically unsegmented and/or not personalized and are sent with regular frequency, such as daily or weekly.

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Smart Banner™ A dynamic banner programmatically serving different content and use cases per-individual recipient as determined by the Campaign Decision Engine.

Transactional Message A message sent, most often as a confirmation or update after a conversion event, such as a registration, enrollment, or purchase.

Triggered Message A message initiated by factors such as time, and/or the action or inaction of a customer. These are most often (though not always) in the form of journey messages.

Variation(s) Different versions or treatments of a Smart Banner™ that serve(s) the same CTA.

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Want to learn more?

Send us an email! sales@zembula.com

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