Why Smart Banners™ & Smart Kickers™ are key to standing out in the Promotions tab era

In the Promotions tab era, inbox visibility drives revenue. Smart Banners and Smart Kickers can help enterprise retail brands stay visible, relevant, and ready to convert.

Smart Banners and Smart Kickers are more than just dynamic content blocks. It’s a strategic way to drive incremental revenue by ensuring your emails show the most relevant, personalized message to shoppers at the moment of open. Powered by Zembula Dimensions™, Smart Banners and Smart Kickers make it easy to scale real-time personalization across campaigns, removing bottlenecks without adding production overhead.

Whether you’re sending batch or triggered campaigns, Smart Banners help you stay visible, personalized, and revenue-focused — especially important at a time when email volume is at an all-time high.

What are Smart Banners & Smart Kickers?

A Smart Banner is a content block that sits at the top of your emails and automatically updates in real time based on information from customer behavior, inventory, and promotional triggers. That includes things like loyalty points, abandoned carts, back-in-stock alerts, and personalized product recommendations. Smart Kickers operate the same way, but they book-end your email at the bottom.

Smart Banners and Smart Kickers are built to work with the emails you already send. There’s no need to redesign your templates or touch code. A snippet of code powered by a single pixel is all you need to get started. What makes Smart Banners stand out is they are incredibly easy to insert into your emails. Just drag and drop a Smart Banner™ right to the top of your layout, and you’re good to go.

Because the content and images are rendered at the moment of open, they’re always current, accurate, and tailored to each individual shopper. That helps enterprise retailers stay relevant and increases the likelihood that your emails convert.

It doesn’t get much easier than that. 

Why visibility matters now more than ever

Enterprise retail email has entered a new era. With the universal adoption of the Promotions tab, consumers engage with marketing emails differently. They treat their Promotions tab like a curated shopping feed.

That means the top of the inbox is prime real estate. If your brand isn’t there when a customer checks, your message probably won’t be seen. On mobile, only 6 or 7 emails appear above the fold, and consumers are scanning, not searching for the messages that appeal to them.

Smart Banners and Smart Kickers help maximize visibility by putting your most relevant messages front and center in every email — no matter what time your readers open it. From newsletters to product updates to sale announcements, Smart Banners and Smart Kickers put your most important personalized messaging in every email.

This gives you more opportunities to drive incremental revenue and return on spend.

Use cases that drive revenue

You can use Smart Banners and Smart Kickers in a variety of ways, too. Some of our most powerful, revenue-driving examples used by brands like J.Crew include:

• Shipping tracking
• Abandoned cart
• Loyalty
• Back in stock
• Product refill
• Flash sales
• Special events
• Product announcements

The key isn’t what you send; it’s when and how. These banners allow enterprise retailers to embed triggered content inside every email, including batch campaigns. That means you’re not relying on siloed triggered sends to deliver personalized content, you’re doing it consistently, across your entire program, at scale.

Smart Banners & Smart Kickers eliminate bottlenecks and automate performance

Behind every Smart Banner and Smart Kicker is Dimensions, Zembula’s platform for automating retail email content. Smart Banners and Smart Kickers offer a powerful solution that is driven by a decision engine that selects the best content for each shopper based on their behavior, status, or activity.

This helps eliminate the need to manually build and QA dozens of email variants. Your team gets more done faster without compromising personalization or creative standards.

And because banners update in real time, you can make last-minute changes, like price drops or inventory updates, without stopping or resending your campaign. This flexibility helps you respond to merchandising changes instantly while still staying relevant to each customer.

Smart Banners and Smart Kickers are designed to help enterprise retail marketers:

• Drive incremental revenue with every email sent.
• Improve return on spend by increasing the visibility of high-performing content.
• Streamline production by automating personalization at scale.
• Make better decisions using longitudinal audience testing, not just A/B tests or open rates.

It’s time to shift away from measuring success by opens and clicks. Smart Banners make it easy to track real revenue lift over time so you know exactly what’s working.

Ready to increase revenue with every send?

If you’re sending emails without Smart Banners and Smart Kickers, you’re missing the opportunity to stay visible and convert at scale. In the Promotions tab era, the brands that stay visible in the inbox with personalized content that delivers real value will win.

Want to see how it works? We’ll demonstrate how enterprise retailers are using our solutions to scale personalization, reduce production bottlenecks, and drive incremental revenue growth. Book a demo with us and we’ll show how we’ll be your most efficient next marketing dollar spent.

See how we’ve helped enterprise retail brands like J.Crew generate 41x return on spend by working with Zembula here.