Over the last year, Tesco has been innovating with its customer emails, driving upticks in clickthrough rate by incorporating a range of personalised content and promotions. The approach has seen behaviour-based offers increase customer engagement, and the retailer’s use of dynamic content means any one send can now comprise of as many as 10 million different creative versions.
Earlier this month at Think Summit (October 15), Elly Hancock, then lead email marketing manager in the Tesco direct-to-customer communications team, shared examples of these emails, powered by Movable Ink’s platform, which have provided efficiency for the retailer and delivered helpful experiences to its shoppers.
Hancock, who has since moved to a role heading up CRM and personalisation for the supermarket’s retail media business at Dunnhumby, started by setting the scene as it was back in early 2023 and outlining the challenges that faced her team.
“We’re a huge business; we get so many stakeholders asking for solus emails constantly and it just wasn’t giving the team enough time to step back and think above the day-to-day. It really felt like we were sending too many emails, very much one-size-fits-all,” she said.
According to Hancock, Tesco was sending around 10 emails a week to customers, on top of all the triggered emails that were going out daily, with the knock-on effect that the comms team were “constantly underwater” dealing with “constant rounds of amends, constant quality sign-off”, whilst email clickthrough rates were “pretty much flat year-on-year”.
“Yes, we may have been sending a higher volume [of emails], but as a team we strive for greatness and we want to be delivering more [value to the business] than that,” said Hancock.
“How do we actually take personalization from a buzzword that we’re hearing in all these different meeting rooms and zoom calls into a reality? How do we translate it into an actual action?” she asked.
Hancock talked about the need to take a “really considered approach” to personalisation, to deliver “something helpful” to the >20 million Tesco Clubcard members. She explained two such initiatives launched in the past year involving dynamic email content.
The first was the retailer’s weekly email newsletter, titled ‘Bringing everything together for you’.
“The real objective behind getting this email live was having a one-stop shop, a customer-centric email that we were sending out on a weekly basis to reduce the number of [solus requests],” explained Hancock, who shared how the team sold the benefits of this approach to internal stakeholders.
The email, which featured a design refresh to ensure consistency with the Tesco app and website, was the retailer’s first to show live Clubcard points in the header banner and also included one-to-one product recommendations and segmented content throughout.
…we can look at people that have purchased asparagus in the last seven days and show them an asparagus recipe…
“There’s lots of powerful dynamic elements to this email,” said Hancock. These included a personalized, time-targeted greeting banner (‘Good morning, Elly’), which changes depending on time of open, as well as live loyalty points, vouchers and coupons.
“We’ve also got some nice data visualization in there as well to try and encourage people to spend that little bit more to get their next voucher,” said Hancock.
The email also includes an order personalisation banner, which varies dynamically according to whether the customer is expecting a home delivery or has booked a click-and-collect, reminding them of cut-off times for order amends or that their order is on the way, for example.
Perhaps the most impressive impact delivered by the new design is that made by the inclusion of product stamps featuring one-to-one product recommendations based on customers’ website activity. Hancock revealed that, “in comparison to our trade-nominated standard Clubcard Prices offers, we actually saw a lift of over 250% in click-through rate of these modules when we’ve used the website-behaviour targeted options instead.”
To round off the newsletter, Hancock said, “We like to be a bit more inspirational… and to drive traffic to our Tesco website,” using recipes tailored to customer segments.
“We’ll use data such as dietary preference, if a customer has told us that they’re vegetarian [for example], or if we know we’ve got a particular product that’s seasonal, let’s say asparagus, we can look at people that have purchased asparagus in the last seven days and show them an asparagus recipe as well,” added Hancock.
Lastly, the Tesco customer comms team includes a star-rating poll (driven by personalisation platform Movable Ink’s live polling functionality), to drive engagement and collect data about the quality of the email. Hancock said they are seeing feedback that the design is easy to navigate, relevant, inspirational and informational.
Indeed, some key stats shared by Hancock bear this out. The email is being rated over 7 out of 10 on a weekly basis, and having introduced a customer’s live coupon count into the hero banner, the click-through rate of the whole email has risen by over 26%. Hancock said this “cements the value of showing something tailored to that customer,” but also that the email is working for customers “beyond just looking at typical engagement rates”.
This dynamic newsletter is now delivering over 10 million different creative variations each week, according to Hancock, who says “it really is a one-to-one experience for our customers,” and something Tesco is continuing to optimise.
The second project outlined by Hancock was the move away from a batch-and-blast weekly send of relevant promotions, which a year ago consisted solely of standard Clubcard Prices, to something more personalised.
“We thought this was a really big opportunity for us,” said Hancock. “We changed the template slightly, so we still had two core trade deals… but there’s also now four product stamps, which are personalised to a customer. We use one-to-one product recommendations from an internal engine that Tesco have built that’s actually used already across the website and the app experience, and now using Movable Ink and plugging into the API, we’re able to pull that into the email as well.”
“It allows us to achieve creative consistency with the template across all the emails,” Hancock explained, adding that the email is, again, live at the moment a customer opens. The team has also utilised brand filters. “So, for example, if we were pushing Tesco Finest one particular week, we can add that in and the stamps would show Finest products, but still would be personalized,” she added. Similar filters are available for price point and percentage discount, offering greater flexibility.
Over the last 12 months, we’ve built brilliant, relationships with tech colleagues and beyond…
Hancock shared a promotion email that also featured a category retargeting banner (the example shown was for picnic food) that can be displayed based on website browse and search behaviour.
The result is a promotions email that is “highly personalized” and “actually really easy to produce,” reducing the demand on the Tesco Creative Studio and giving time back to the customer comms team.
Again, the results have been striking. “Before going live with this permanently, we robustly AB split tested over a six week period,” said Hancock. “We actually went live last year just to our online shopper audience to begin with and we saw orders per customer increased by 0.4%, items per customer increased by 0.5%, and ‘basket adds’ (the number of times a customer comes back to amend their online order) increased per customer by 0.7%,” explained the marketing manager. She described these results as representing multi-million pound incremental revenue if scaled over a 52-week period for a retailer the size of Tesco.
Hancock left the audience with some guidelines for innovating with personalised comms:
“Don’t make any assumptions on what will work, because honestly, you’ll be surprised by the way something might be successful or very unsuccessful, so test, test and test again.
“The second is the importance of bringing stakeholders along the journey with you. I know everyone probably hears this a lot but… having that communication and celebrating the success when you need to is huge. Over the last 12 months, we’ve built brilliant, relationships with tech colleagues and beyond, and Movable Ink themselves, just to get this driving forward.
“And the third is just ‘be brave’. Yes, we’re [at] a really pivotal time in this industry. …There’s lots going on in terms of delivering personalization and change can be scary, right? I know that. And that’s exactly why I’d recommend starting small, testing and learning.
“…If something goes wrong, we just pause it or we stop it. We can change it. It’s fine. So, be brave and just take the leap of faith. Nothing has to be permanent.”
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