Two subscribers look at the same sofa three times. One is comparing fabrics and checking whether it will fit through the front door. The other is collecting ideas for a house move six months away.
Both qualify for your browse abandonment flow, but would the same follow-up help them both?
Your email programme might already account for purchase history, product interests, lifecycle stage and engagement. It might use dynamic segments and predictive analytics, too. Those are useful foundations. The opportunity is to add more context to the decisions they support.
Because knowing someone qualifies for a campaign is only part of the job. You also need to understand what they are trying to do, how close they are to a decision, and whether a message would help.
Email marketing campaigns in ecommerce
An email marketing campaign is an email, or a coordinated series of emails, sent to a defined audience to achieve a particular goal. In ecommerce, that might mean introducing a collection, encouraging a repeat purchase, recovering an abandoned basket or helping subscribers understand a product.
Some campaigns are scheduled broadcasts. Others run through automated flows where individual subscribers enter when they meet certain conditions or complete an action.
The creative, offer and subject line all matter, and so does the decision underneath them: who should receive this message, and why now?
A campaign can be well written, beautifully designed and sent to a relevant audience, yet still arrive at the wrong point in someone's buying journey. Improving that decision is an email marketing strategy in its own right.
Most retailers run several types alongside one another. Each has a useful role, and each starts with an assumption worth checking.
These assumptions are reasonable starting points. But two people can meet the same eligibility criteria and need different things from the next email. That is where targeting needs more context.
Email segmentation can be current and still lack context
Static segments have legitimate uses. An event attendee list, a fixed research cohort or a hand-picked audience for a one-off campaign does not always need to update automatically.
For ongoing targeting, however, a frozen list can become less useful as behaviour changes. Someone selected for a win-back campaign might purchase before it goes out. An exported audience will not reflect that unless you update it or apply a purchase exclusion before sending.
Active segments address much of this problem. They add and remove people as they meet or stop meeting the conditions you set. If your criteria exclude recent purchasers and the purchase is recorded, the audience can adjust accordingly.
But keeping membership current does not automatically make the underlying criteria sufficient.
Let's think about a segment built around three product views in seven days. It identifies repeated interest. It does not, by itself, distinguish someone checking specifications before buying from someone casually returning to a product they like.
You can, of course, add more conditions. Checking delivery information, choosing a size or exploring alternatives may all be useful clues. The question is how those signals fit together, and whether their sequence suggests progress, uncertainty or disengagement.
The opportunity is to give your existing segments a more useful account of the shopper's journey.
What behavioural triggers tell you, and what they leave open
Many ecommerce retailers reading this already run browse and basket abandonment flows in Klaviyo or other tools. Those flows work and you are already acting on behaviour. That is a useful foundation to build on.
A trigger identifies an event that makes someone eligible to enter a flow. This could be someone signing up, viewing a product or starting checkout. The flow can then branch using further information, change its content, apply exclusions or stop when someone purchases.
Modern email platforms can also use predictions. These programmes can already anticipate aspects of customer behaviour.
Even so, leaving without purchasing leaves an important question open: what did leaving mean for this shopper? Someone might have been making steady progress before stopping at delivery information while another visitor might have explored several unrelated categories without settling on a product. Both left without purchasing. The context suggests you might need different follow-up emails.
It also helps to distinguish three things:
- A segment groups people according to chosen criteria
- A trigger identifies an event or condition that starts an action
- An intent prediction estimates purchase readiness from the behavioural evidence availabe
These can work together. Intent can inform segment membership, trigger a flow or help determine which path someone takes once they enter it.
Ecommerce email marketing with more purchase context
Adding intent to your email programme helps you decide who receives a message, what it says and whether an incentive is appropriate.
For emails sent after a visit, this means using the shopper’s latest on-site behaviour to inform the follow-up. It reflects their intent when they left, rather than assuming you know their mindset while they’re away.
Let’s take a look at three practical decisions that additional context can support.
Who needs reassurance before an offer?
Imagine a shopper who has narrowed their choice to one sofa, selected a fabric and checked delivery details before leaving.
A follow-up explaining delivery arrangements or returns could be more useful than immediately offering money off. That is a hypothesis to test against the current flow, rather than proof that delivery was the obstacle.
The aim is to make your message more relevant while finding out whether a discount adds enough value to justify its cost.
Who needs help exploring?
Another shopper has browsed several sofa styles without showing a clear preference. A room-planning guide or comparison of materials may give them a better reason to return than a purchase-led reminder about the last product they happened to view.
They still deserve attention. Their next useful step may simply be different from the one your standard abandonment email assumes it would be.
Who should be left out?
More information can also support a decision to hold back. Depending on the campaign, someone may have purchased, received another relevant message or shown little evidence that this follow-up would help.
High purchase readiness alone is not a reason to send a discount. Someone likely to buy may respond perfectly well to a reminder without one. Equally, low readiness is not a reason to write someone off. They may simply need a bit more education rather than an immediate sales push.
The commercial question is whether the message changes the outcome enough to justify sending it.
Not to brag, but this is the thinking behind our approach to ecommerce email marketing. Made With Intent uses real-time on-site behaviour to understand each shopper’s purchase readiness, then passes that context into the email platform you already use. Your existing segments and flows get a clearer picture of the person behind the signup, product view or abandoned basket, helping you decide who needs a reminder, who needs reassurance and who’s better left to it.
Email personalisation beyond the first name
Email personalisation is already familiar territory for most ecommerce teams. Addressing someone by name, showing relevant products, recognising loyalty status and adapting content to previous purchases are all useful practices. But on their own, they don’t tell you how close someone is to buying or what they need from your next email.
Purchase context adds that other dimension. It helps you decide what the message should help someone do next.
A shopper researching their first pair of walking boots might benefit from a guide to fit and terrain. Someone who has already compared models and checked sizes may be ready for a more direct route back to the product.
Le Chameau put this into practice by adapting its welcome email flow to each subscriber’s intent at signup. Those closer to purchasing received product-led content that helped them pick up where they left off. Those still exploring received brand storytelling, giving them more context before asking them to buy. The result was an 18% increase in open rates and a 33% reduction in unsubscribe rate.
Your list starts at the sign-up form
Every segment you build is made of people who handed over their email address at some point. So the quality of your list starts taking shape long before anyone builds a segment, in the moment a visitor chose to sign up or chose to leave.
Email capture often relies on predefined rules: show a pop-up when someone arrives, after 30 seconds, or on their third page view. These rules are straightforward to set up, but they tell you little about whether the visitor is ready to hear from you.
Ask too early and they may not have found a reason to sign up. Lead with a discount and the offer may attract more interest than the relationship that follows.
Instead, timing the ask to what a visitor is actually doing changes both how many people you capture and who they are.
For example, Bensons for Beds used to show one email capture to every visitor, fired on page counts. Once they started showing it when a visitor’s behaviour suggested they were about to drop off, they captured 6x more emails. Across our customers, readiness cues drive up to 40% more sign-ups. And the opportunity carries through to the welcome email: use the context behind the signup to make the next interaction relevant, too.
How to tell whether any of it worked
Opens and clicks help you understand engagement. Unsubscribes show whether your messages are costing you subscribers. Purchases and revenue connect email activity to commercial outcomes. But a purchase after an email doesn’t necessarily mean the email caused it.
That distinction matters particularly for promotional campaigns. A discount might encourage an additional purchase, bring an order forward or reduce the margin on something the customer would have bought at full price. Attributed revenue alone can’t tell you which happened.
A randomised holdout test helps separate those outcomes. Divide the eligible audience into comparable groups: one receives the campaign and the other doesn’t. Measure the difference over the same period, allowing enough time to reflect your customers’ buying cycle.
Look beyond conversion rate. Revenue and profit per eligible recipient help reveal whether additional purchases justify the cost of the incentive.
You can also test the targeting itself. Compare your existing flow with an intent-informed version, keeping other elements consistent where possible. Does changing who receives the message improve results? Does adapting the content help? Can you achieve a similar outcome without a discount?
The same standard applies to every approach, whether it uses static segments, dynamic segments or intent. Success means understanding what your email changed, rather than counting every purchase that followed it.
If you want to see what a live read of intent changes in practice, book a demo and we'll walk through it against your own email programme.
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