🧠 Email Personalization That Feels Magic (But Isn’t)
Let’s talk about how to NOT sound like a robot in your emails.
📆 Tuesday, 21 May 2025
Hey — It's Rhythm. Thrilled to have you back in Ecom Circle, where I spend my time scaling ecom brands & finding best growth strategies to share with you.
DEEP DIVE 💡Let me guess—you’ve probably got flows set up, maybe even a few decent abandoned cart emails doing their job.
But…
When was the last time you opened a brand’s email and actually thought,
“Damn, that felt like it was written just for me”?
That, my friend, is the holy grail of email personalization.
And no, I’m not talking about slapping on a {FirstName} tag and calling it a day. We’re past that.
I’m talking about personalization that feels personal.
The kind that knows if I’m a first-time shopper or a loyal customer. If I left dog treats in my cart or just joined your VIP rewards program.
It’s 2025. Your email should know me better than my barista.
Let’s get into it 👇
Let’s break it down — real personalization in action:
1. Show different content to different people.
If Michael abandoned his cart, remind him.
If Jason just subscribed, welcome him in with a sweet little discount and a brand intro.
Same email flow. Different messages. Smart segmentation = better conversion.
2. Make your emails look like they care.
A loyalty email that says “You’ve earned 1,100 points” hits way harder than a generic “Join our rewards program.”
That’s what Everlane did, and they saw 12x revenue just from that targeted nudge.
3. Recommend smarter.
As a pet products brand, Petsy knows its customers’ buying patterns and history.
They knew, for instance, that cat parents buying cat food might also want to look for cat treats. So they sent out the email below to them.
Voila! As many as one in every three receivers of the product recommendation email went ahead and converted.
4. Match the message to the moment.
Each customer needs to receive a series of emails based on what part of the customer journey they are at.
A new user would receive a welcome email, while someone who has abandoned their cart should receive a reminder about what they are missing out on.
Keeping this in mind, Nordstrom sent out the following abandoned cart email to users. This email is triggered 10 minutes after the user abandons their cart.
So how do you do all this without losing your mind?
Honestly, unless you have a massive marketing team…
…it’s nearly impossible to scale this kind of personalization manually.
That’s where tools like RetainIQ come in. Check out their recommendation engine below:
They make this kind of smart, segment-based, behavior-driven personalization simple—without needing to clone your team. Want to see this in action for your brand? Book your demo now.
You still get to control the tone and strategy. But the boring, complicated part?
Handled.
Want to see how it’d work for your brand?
👉 Book a free strategy call with RetainIQ — even if you don’t buy, you’ll walk away with solid email ideas.
Let’s stop sending emails at people.
And start sending emails to people.