What is a Smart Kicker™?

Enterprise retail marketers are under pressure to do more with every email send. Not just drive opens but revenue as well. And in the Promotions tab era, where visibility matters more than ever, it’s a challenge to do, especially at scale.

But that’s where the Smart Kicker™ comes in.

A Smart Kicker is a dynamic content block that lives at the bottom of your email, just above the legal footer. Along with Smart Banners™ and Smart Blocks™, it’s designed to increase incremental revenue while streamlining production. Each of these ‘smart’ content blocks are solutions within Dimensions™, Zembula’s platform for automating real-time personalization across daily enterprise email sends.

Why it works

The Smart Kicker gives you a second opportunity to deliver real-time, personalized content. Just like a Smart Banner, it can feature anything from loyalty data to product recommendations to personalized triggered offers.

But instead of leading the message, the kicker anchors it.

We often recommend using the same content in the kicker as the banner in both the header and the footer. This bookend strategy reinforces your most valuable messaging, increasing visibility and driving more clicks. And Smart Kickers work in both batch and triggered emails, ensuring visibility for your highest-performing messages. Learn why visibility matters in the Promotions tab era.

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

This approach also has twofold benefits. First, readers often skim Promotions tab emails, so it ensures they have multiple opportunities to see key messages. Second, in our testing, we’ve found that some consumers read from the bottom up instead of the top down. That behavior makes it even more important to surface personalized, revenue-driving content wherever attention might land.

Make your best content work harder

Smart Kickers don’t require new creative content; they simply let you do more with the messaging you’re already producing. By lightly reformatting the content used in your Smart Banner, you can bookend each message with a consistent, revenue-driving trigger.

This approach reinforces visibility, especially in the Promotions tab, and makes it easier to increase revenue per send without adding production work. That’s why it’s quickly becoming a best practice for the enterprise retail brands we’ve worked with, like Thrive Causemetics and Forever 21, looking to scale personalization across daily sends.

Smart Kickers make it easy to extend the reach of your highest-performing content without slowing down production. In the Promotions tab era, where every message needs to earn its revenue, adding a second point of visibility can make all the difference.

If you’re interested in seeing what the Smart Kicker and Dimensions can do for you, request a demo.