Staples Canada automates email promotions

Staples Canada is aligning its email marketing efforts with offers made on its e-commerce site.

The Canadian division of the Staples office supply chain is leveraging personalized customer engagement software from Movable Ink automatically cropping the most up-to-date promotions from its website into its weekly flyer emails. The purpose of these emails is to showcase the week’s featured deals.

Initially, Staples Canada captured zero-party data (information voluntary shared by consumers) through a poll asking customers about their job roles. This allows marketers to target the information that matters most to individual customers, providing additional opportunity for engagement.

Based on their initial poll response, the customer receives follow-up messaging tailored to their unique needs. Each variation of the follow-up communication uses automation to influence communications the individual customer receives moving forward.

The retailer also includes banners in promotional emails for all customers who recently abandoned or browsed items on the website, giving them an extra call to action to return to their carts. Additionally, the banners include the promotions and products, as well as hours, location and contact information, each store offers.

Other features of the automated, personalized emails include visual displays of the nearest Staples Canada location to the customer via Google maps. Recently, Staples Canada offers co-working and event spaces at specific locations that it has also promoted through the store locator module.

[Read more: First Look: Staples Canada combines retail, working space at new store in Toronto]

“The dynamic abandon and browse banners have been working very well for us and we now add them to every email because the impact on revenue is so good,” said Ariana Biagi, email marketing manager, Staples Canada. “With Movable Ink, we’ve included targeted value props to specific audiences.”

Farfetch optimizes email language

In another example of personalized email promotions, London-based online luxury fashion retailer Farfetch optimizes the brand language it uses in its digital marketing campaigns. To enhance customer engagement, Farfetch utilizes the Phrasee Engage solution, which creates optimized, on-brand content for use across email, push, and SMS text broadcast campaigns.

Initially, the company piloted Phrasee Engage to optimize the subject lines in broadcast campaigns targeted to a chosen group of customers or subscribers, such as promotional messages to promote purchasing a specific item.

After seeing positive results from Phrasee Engage, Farfetch started piloting Phrasee React, which leverages real-time brand language optimization to create personalized short-form content for trigger and lifecycle campaigns across email, push and SMS.

Trigger and lifecycle campaigns are communications that are automatically sent based on a subscriber's particular action or behavioral pattern. These can include welcome messages to a customer after signing up or post-purchase. These campaigns included its welcome emails, abandoned basket, browse, and wishlist.

Headquartered in Framingham, Mass., Staples operates more than 1,000 stores across the U.S., as well as over 300 Canadian stores.