In this article, we will elaborate on the different choices you have for Engage product recommendations.
In the onboarding project, you will receive a few questions to answer regarding what and how you want to recommend products.
Exclude and Promote & Demote
Are there products that you never want to recommend?
It’s possible to exclude products that you never want to recommend. It could be gift cards, tobacco, gambling, etc. The promotion engine will recommend all products that are in the product feed used for product recommendations, so if you have products that should never be recommended, they should not be part of the feed. In this case, we need you to provide us with a separate feed containing only products that you want to recommend.
Are there products that you wish to promote or demote in your product line?
If you promote a product, there is a higher probability that it will be recommended to your customers. This could be useful if you have your own brands that you want to promote, or products with higher margin. If you want to promote or demote, we need you to provide us with a list of these brands in a scale of -100 (demoted products/brands) to +100 (promoted products/brands).
Fallback products
Do you want to spread the fallback products across different categories for maximum spread?
This setting decides if the customer should be recommended a variety of top selling products or if it’s ok that they are recommended top-sellers from only one category. If you choose to spread the fallback products, the engine will pick top sellers from different categories, meaning that the customer can be recommended the top selling shirt, the top selling sock and the top selling pant.
If you choose not to spread the fallback products into different categories, the customer can, for example, be recommended 3 different shirts (if shirts are your top selling category).
In addition to this, you can decide how far back you want the fallback top-selling products to be calculated. We recommend 30 days but it depends on your customers purchasing cycle.
Variation of recommendations
Do you want to alternate recommendations between send-outs?
If you alternate the recommendations, you will expose each contact to a broader range of products and not just the same top recommendations for that contact every week.
Additional possibilities
Depending on your end goal, it’s possible to control what is recommended to your customers. Here are two example use cases:
Company A
Background: Sell consumables like health and hygiene products
Our customers buy the same product a few times per year. We want to recommend the same product that the customer has bought several times, but we want to show the customer that several brands make the same kind of product by recommending this product from other brands.
At the time of the recommendation we want to limit the output to not only show highly likely repurchases, but instead ensure some product variance in the output by enforcing the rule "Brand and product name cannot be the same within the recommendation"
Company B
Background: Sell a wide range of outdoor products such as tents, boots, clothing, canoes, etc.
Our customers do not shop often but when they do, it’s an investment for them. We want to show the customer a wide range of products and make sure that we don’t recommend products from the same subcategory in one email.
Therefore we want to enforce a rule that ensures that subCategory differs for all products within the recommendation.
Comments
0 comments