Enterprise retail email is changing - Are you prepared?

Enterprise retail email marketing is entering a new era, defined by more competition for visibility, widespread adoption of the email inbox’s Promotions tab, and unique opportunities for innovation given this reality.

These shifts aren’t just trends. They’re reshaping how enterprise retail brands approach email marketing.

Our recent webinar focused on identifying these challenges and opportunities, offering actionable strategies for enterprise retailers to adapt and thrive in this new environment for email marketing.

We’re in a new era for email

As inboxes become increasingly crowded, retailers face a critical challenge: visibility. 

The introduction of the Promotions tab, first adopted by Google in 2013, is now standard across major email clients.

Promotional emails are funneled into a designated space, competing for attention with dozens of other brands and changing how consumers engage with retail marketing emails.

Email has gone through several major industry shifts since 1998:

Email send costs have also plummeted through the years, dropping 100x since 2000 to just $0.10 CPM. That dramatically changed email economics, allowing for email volume to increase.

In the past, sending one or two emails a week was enough to maintain visibility. Today, many enterprise retail brands send three or more daily emails to stay at the top of customers’ inboxes and top of their minds.

Otherwise, it’s a missed revenue opportunity: if your brand is not seen, it risks being forgotten or an afterthought. Email frequency is now essential to capturing attention.

However, with higher email send volume norms, it brings new challenges: retailers must ensure every email optimizes for the moment of open, and the customer’s attention has been captured.

Another factor to consider is send time optimization (STO). STO helps email marketers determine the optimal time to send each email. Today, the increase in emails sent and the competition in the Promotions tab is much more significant than in the past.

Enterprise retailers can benefit from testing STO to ensure they’re hitting the right mix of frequency to optimize visibility. Increasing send volume for a period of time creates an opportunity for STO testing and observation.

How do enterprise retailers adjust?

Retailers need to change their strategies to meet this new reality.

That requires two critical shifts:

1. Add triggered content to every email

Retailers need to integrate personalized, triggered content into their daily email send so the right message reaches the right person at the right time, no matter how many marketing emails are sent daily.

Our Dimensions™ product offers solutions like Smart Banner™ and Smart Kicker™ which allow brands to send emails with dynamic, personalized customer elements that update in real-time, boosting visibility and driving revenue lift while maintaining image efficiency. These tools deliver 11x-41x return on spend and 17-30% more email revenue.

Longitudinal testing allows retailers to determine the personalized triggers driving revenue performance and validate them instead of relying on metrics that provide false confidence, like open rates, attribution, or single-send A/B tests. Four-week testing provides a source of data-driven truth, with statistical significance, on what’s really behind revenue lifts.

2. Automate daily email content production

The Promotions tab era means that email send volumes increase, but the operating reality is that production budgets remain stagnant or get cut. Manual production to scale for this volume isn’t sustainable.

Enterprise retailers must strategize on how to automate creating cohesive, branded emails against the new email send volume expectations that account for promotions and merchandising requirements. When you’re producing three to five or more emails for every day of the week, every day of the year, that becomes a huge challenge. Production cost is the bottleneck all enterprise retailers will face over the next decade.

By leveraging automation, retailers can integrate daily merchandising, promotions, and personalization while reducing production costs. Zembula is excited to continue releasing automation solutions in the coming year.

Images are the content

In today’s retail emails, images are the content. But where is the content actually being created? Many people think it’s HTML in the email editor, but if you turn off images in retail emails from almost all brands, you’ll find content is created by Photoshop, Figma, or some design tool. Retailers rely on image-based designs to display products, promotions, and branding. 

The challenge is scaling image-based content creation to meet the demands of daily email sends.

Here’s where AI-powered tools like Zembula’s Composition Engine become game changers. With them, you can combine Photoshop-level design capabilities with data-driven personalization, creating on-brand, visually engaging emails at scale.

Features like AI-driven photo cropping, automated image extensions, and real-time quality assurance reduce manual bottlenecks while ensuring every email looks polished and performs.

Test your way to automation

Full automation takes time. The key to success will be testing and gradual adoption. For example, brands can start strategically by focusing on personalized product grids based on daily merchandising requirements.

From there, move to category banners and heroes over time. Eventually, everything within each email will account for promotions and merchandising automatically, while personalizing to the reader when appropriate. This will all be achieved while maintaining the retailer’s brand requirements and removing manual production bottlenecks.

Combining triggered content with AI-driven automation allows retailers to:

• Increase daily email revenue performance
  
• Substantially reduce production costs
  
• Deliver personalized customer experiences

As AI continues to advance, retailers will be able to automate the creative decisions behind emails with fully customizable templates, dynamic layouts, and personalized content that adjusts in real-time to customer behavior.

Eventually, automation will help email marketing teams focus on building strategic campaigns that deliver a seamless customer experience and improve revenue performance, with automation handling the execution.

Automation + triggered = daily email perfection

Production costs are driving the future of email. Currently, the bottleneck is production — but it doesn’t have to be moving forward.

To compete in the Promotions tab, retailers must move out of the prior era of sending batch emails a few times a week, and instead focus on sending personalized triggered events within daily emails. This should be alongside existing batch sends and triggered sends – that way, a customer will never miss you. Enterprise retail brands already do this today with our Smart Banner and Smart Kicker solutions.

Inbox visibility and production constraints are what will define a retailer’s brand moving forward in email marketing. If customers can’t see your brand, you’ll lose out on revenue to the retailers that understand the new way consumers engage inside the Promotions tab.

Consumers aren’t specifically seeking triggered emails in their inboxes; they’re opening what’s immediately visible to them. So, having personalized triggered events in every email ensures they always get the right message at the right time.

Automation simplifies sending multiple personalized triggered emails. Instead of taking days, it can be cut to 10-15% of the time previously required. This helps deliver a better customer experience, enable efficient production, and improve daily email revenue performance.

Key takeaways

The Promotions tab has redefined enterprise retail email marketing and increased the visibility challenge, making it essential for enterprise retailers to send more frequent emails daily just to stay top of mind. But higher send volume alone isn’t enough — you need triggered content in every email to ensure personalized, real-time relevance.

At the same time, automation can help meet these new production demands and improve budget efficiency, allowing brands to scale email production under these new market conditions.

Retailers that embrace this shift and blend automation with always-on personalization will thrive in the next era of retail email marketing.

Missed the original webinar? We’ve got you covered. Watch the recording for the deep dive, and learn how enterprise retailers can plan for this new era.