Before adding Recommendations, it’s worth reviewing your email campaigns to see where these will most aid your customer, as these will likely see the highest ROI. Understanding your customer journey and the touchpoints within is crucial to effective design and prioritization. Some example questions to ask yourself:

• What automated campaigns are you already running? Adding recommendations to your existing automated campaigns are the quickest way to increase your ROI ongoing. Consider enhancing your lifecycle or Triggered campaigns as priority.
  
  
• What trends can you find in your email Analytics? Which campaigns tend to get the most reach / engagement? Which campaigns could stand to improve the most?
  
  
• What is your Campaign Goal? Each campaign will have it’s own purpose, being clear on what that is will help you align the best tactic(s) to leverage. For example a welcome campaigns might be to increase product exposure using social proof, whilst a post-purchase email might focus on product replenishment.
  
  
• What do you already know about your customers? Each customer base will have different motivations that you can leverage. For example, do your customers have strong category affinity? If so, we should consistently target those preferences. Do your customers have a long consideration phase? If so, showing recently or most viewed products can be effective.
  
  
• What common objections do you have? Consider displaying products to address these e.g. if Price points are highly compared with other brands, we could recommend lower priced or price dropped products.

Remember that you can use multiple SmartBlocks of recommendations on the same page e.g. In cart abandonment emails, show Similar Products to the current cart AND items that were recently browsed, but not carted, to help customers discover new products and re-evaluate alternatives.

Top tip

Optimize your ongoing email campaign recommendations by using our Multi-Armed Bandit tool