Create a Product Recommendations for Email Experience

Follow these steps to create a Product Recommendations for Email experience.

1. Click EXPERIENCES in the top navigation bar, and then select Web.

   

2. Click the drop-down arrow to the right of CREATE EXPERIENCE, and then select Product Recommendations for Email.

   

3. Click the pencil icon, enter a name for the experience, and then click the green checkmark icon to save the name.

   

4. Click WHAT and then click ADD ACTION.

   

5. Click Product Recommendations for Email on the Action Type panel.

   

6. Click the action template that you want to use.

   

7. Configure the required recommendations-related inputs for the action.
   1. Select up to four recommendation strategies to populate the recommendations.
   2. Set the number of times the action displays recommendations from one strategy before displaying recommendations from the next strategy. For example, an action using recommendation strategies A, B, and C with a set sequence of 2 would pull from result in recommendations pulled in the following order: A, A, B, B, C, C, A, A….
   3. Set the minimum number of products the action must display before a fallback recommendation fires.

      Setting Minimum Items to zero prevents the fallback from firing and email recipients from seeing any recommendations.

   4. Set the maximum number of products the action can recommend.
   5. Input into Pinned Products the product IDs for any items that you want to always appear at the beginning of the recommendations.

   

8. Optionally, select one or two fallback recommendation strategies.

   If the action has not met the minimum number of products after depleting its ability to draw recommendations from the strategies you selected in step 6a and then still failed to meet the required minimum number of items using the first fallback strategy, then it uses the second fallback strategy to fill out what remains, if possible. If the action cannot meet the minimum products threshold using the primary or fallback strategies, then the action doesn't fire.

   

9. As necessary, modify the HTML code for the recommendation item template.

   

10. Optionally, add dynamic text to the HTML by selecting an option from the selector and then pasting the snippet into the HTML code editor.

    

11. As necessary, adjust the size of the image container.

    

12. Click CREATE.

    

13. Click GENERATE EMAIL HTML.

    

14. Click COPY TO CLIPBOARD and then paste the HTML into your ESP email template.

    

15. Replace all references to the $customer_idtoken, found in both image URLs and link URLs within the generated HTML, with your ESP's customer identifier.

    You must replace $customer_id before sending the email. Often you can do so by inserting a subscriber merge token that dynamically resolves to the ESP identifier. For this identifier to be used to personalize experiences, the ESP's identifier must be sent to Monetate as part of the Web Track process or some equivalent means.

    

Unlike Web experiences, a Product Recommendations for Email experience requires no activation because you send them to customers using your ESP.

See Run-Time Filters for Recommendations Email Experiences for information about using pass-through parameters from a recommendation strategy in a Product Recommendations for Email experience.

Previewing the Email Experience

You can preview a Product Recommendations for Email experience complete with the context of a customer ID by clicking PREVIEW on the Experience Editor page.

After you click PREVIEW, enter a value for a customer ID in the Preview modal. This identifier is equivalent to the one used by your ESP to identify users. If you enter a valid customer ID, then the preview represents the experience seen by that customer. If you enter an invalid or imaginary customer ID, then the preview appears as if it would for an email recipient with no history.

If a preview appears blank, a likely culprit is a syntax error in the template. Another possibility is a lack of returned recommended items due to either an empty catalog or the configurations of the set recommendation strategies.

Tracking Purchases from a Product Recommendations for Email Experience

You can configure a Product Recommendations for Email experience so that you can track page visits and product purchases that result from it. Follow these steps to append the HTML you generate for a a Product Recommendations for Email experience with query string parameters for tracking purposes.

1. Open the a Product Recommendations for Email experience, and then click GENERATE EMAIL HTML.
2. Add the query string parameter at the end of each href attribute for each link (for example, monetate.mybigcommerce.com/?customer_id=$customer_id&campaign=Spring2021).

   

3. Click COPY TO CLIPBOARD and then paste the code into your ESP email template.

When the email recipient clicks a link in the message, they are redirected to its corresponding page on your site as expected, with the query string parameter that you'd added preserved.