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Firstly, let me say that I’m not intentionally promoting eBay (my last post being on just that), however, I was once again really impressed with their ‘Great Selection Tailored To You!’ personalised email.
A couple of days ago I got one of these emails from eBay, with the subject line ‘Your personalised recommendations, eBay username!’. I scrolled through and saw some related products based on items I’d clicked through in the last couple of months; some of which I was no longer interested in, and others which gave me some ideas on products related to what I was interested in but didn’t know about. I therefore clicked through and had a look around at these and other products. And now for the clever bit…
When I went back to the original email minutes later I noticed that some of the products in the email had disappeared and been replaced with products related to a (search and) click through I’d done seconds before. Amazing. On the one hand, it was frustrating, because I wanted a reminder of the products that I was prompted to look at but on the other hand, how brilliant that eBay was dynamically updating the email based on my most recent, and therefore assumed most relevant, items clicked through.
Attempting to delve into the ‘how did they do that’, it would appear eBay’s email dynamically pulls in products as a groups of images from a category, under the headings:
•Still interested in what you recently viewed? Grab it now!
•Based on what you’ve last watched, we recommend these…
•Based on what you last looked at, you may like these…
•These are our most watched items…
•Popular items in the last category you accessed
…aside from the final ‘Popular keywords’ sections – which I found to be extremely relevant.
Have you seen anyone else doing live dynamic product association in their email marketing? What do you think are the pros and cons of eBay’s way?
Based on my click throughs of, in order, 1) an iPad Case; 2) Nail Varnish; and 3) a Samsung Monitor, this is the dynamically updated email:
Nikki is a Client Service Manager & Senior Online Marketing Executive in the Online Marketing team at Coast Digital. She joined the team in January 2008 and is focused on being the interface between the client and the Online Marketing team, running email marketing campaigns for her clients, as well as driving quality and structure throughout the business. Her clients include Wiltshire Farm Foods, apetito, and Slendertone.
Having spent 9 years as a Printed Circuit Board Design Engineer, she ‘fell’ into Digital Marketing in 2003 and has been passionate about it ever since. As such Nikki enjoys playing an important role in a growing company with technology at its heart.
(2) comments
Comments
Sadly, that is also a downside, since it does a number of things. For one, some people might find it rather unnerving that a simple email can monitor what you have been observing so easily and change to allow you to see new recommendations almost at will. The other aspect is the change. Most people might not realise what it was that they were originally viewing when seeing the first recommended link, so any attempt to return to the original email would be moot since the content is updated and you have lost the original.
I can imagine that a database system that contains recent and related item data for all users would be a massively powerful tool - you can imagine the applications, both on and off site - Custom EBay homepage items, targeted products in searches, for example.
One of the pro's for the user, is that the practise keeps the email current - the nature of eBay is that product listings expire. This increases the valid period of an email from a number of days, to an endless length of time. There has to be a certain amount of logic behind making this decision - any products can then be shown to the user by email, without any worry of it going out of stock, or expiring.
Looking at a slightly more negative tack, it has the potential to be off-putting for the user - the public often feel 'snooped on' by directly targeted adverts - especially by a store like e-bay, which, by nature has a huge range of products - it is very obvious if the last searches you carried out appear in an email. This would, for example, be less 'obvious' from a retailer with a much narrower range of products, and could be dismissed as coincidence.
I suspect that this is the kind of practise that would work best for Amazon, eBay, Large department stores and similar sites - perhaps not so applicable to the smaller, more niche retailer.