Recommend products
Note
Email and SMS channels are legacy features and not offered to new customers.
Note
On-Site Recommendations is an optional platform add-on. If you are interested in the functionality, contact your customer success manager.
Personalize product recommendations to encourage sales, improve conversion rates, and increase order value. In Optimizely Data Platform (ODP), you can dynamically generate entire sections of emails or web content to make campaigns more relevant to customers.
ODP uses the behavior of each customer to determine dynamic, personalized recommendations. This feature is ideal for:
- Campaigns for long-time customers with a history of interaction.
- Relatively stable product catalogs and consistently visited or purchased products.
This feature is not ideal for:
- Campaigns for customers without much activity, such as new customers.
- Campaigns for customers with outdated activity.
- Highly diverse product catalogs where many products receive little interaction or sales and only a few attract much of the activity.
- Seasonal product catalogs where recommendations based on past customer interactions might not be applicable.
ODP has the following default product recommendation options:
- Zaius Recommendations
- Best Selling Products
- Most Viewed
- Revenue Generators
Zaius Recommendations
Zaius Recommendations creates automated recommendations based on each customer's behavior compared to similar customers by using collaborative filtering and matrix factorization to predict a customer's response to another product. The machine-learning algorithm runs nightly using event data from the previous 180 days and then recommends products with the highest predicted response.
If a customer does not have enough behavioral data to make a prediction, ODP uses default recommendations instead, which are defined by the best-selling products from the last week.
As ODP collects additional behavioral data, the default recommendations are replaced with more specific ones.
Other product recommendations
If you understand your customers or want to control your customer product journey more, consider using Best Selling Products, Most Viewed, or Revenue Generators. You can also create custom recommendations by working with your customer success manager.
The following recommendations are not personalized for customers but are useful in specific nudges or win-back campaigns.
- Best Selling Products – Uses the products that customers purchase the most to make recommendations.
- Most Viewed – (Email Only) Uses the products that customers view the most to make recommendations.
- Revenue Generators – (Email Only) Uses the products that currently generate the most revenue for the business.
If the default recommendations do not fit your situation, you can also use product behaviors.
Add recommendations to a web campaign
Note
Product recommendations are only available for Web Embed or Web Modal channels.
- Go to Activations > Overview.
- Select the campaign you want to edit or create a campaign.
- Edit the web touchpoint you want to personalize.
- Drag and drop a Product Grid into your web content from Elements > Layout.
- Expand the Source drop-down list and select the desired recommendation model. If you select Best Selling Products, define the desired timeframe. If you select Zaius Recommendations, choose one of the following for Based On:
- Products On Page – Highlights products similar to those on the current page. Use this option to suggest other related products that the customer might enjoy.
- Recent Browse History – Highlights products that the customer viewed in the last 2 weeks. If a customer does not have enough browsing data, ODP will use the best selling products from the last week instead. Use this option to remind customers of other products they have been interested in recently.
- Click Save.
Add recommendations to an email campaign
- Go to Activations > Overview.
- Select the campaign you want to edit or create a campaign.
- Edit the email touchpoint you want to personalize.
- Drag and drop a Dynamic Grid into your email from Elements > Layout.
- Expand the Source drop-down list and select a recommendation or custom behavior.
- Click Save.