Some of your email campaigns present the recipient with specific products, the most common example is cart abandonment emails, presenting the content of the abandoned cart. Adding product recommendations that are relevant for these specific products can significantly improve the performance of these campaigns. For example, by presenting products that are similar to, frequently bought with or frequently viewed with the list of abandoned products.
These contextual recommendation algorithms require the reference products (referred to as the recommendation context) to be set dynamically for each email, this is possible through most ESPs.
How to Insert Recommendation Context in Email Strategies
The method is somewhat technical and may require developer assistance.
To add recommendation context to email recommendations, an additional URL parameter cartCtx needs to be added to the email recommendation HTML snippet, in every instance of the image source elements, in the following form:
cartCtx=sku1,sku2,sku3
Where "sku1,sku2,sku3" is a comma separated list of the reference products (e.g. in a cart abandonment email, it's the content of the abandoned cart).
Important Note: These SKUs have to match the SKUs in the Dynamic Yield Product Feed.
For example:
<table class="rcom-title" bgcolor="#fff">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: center; width: 598px; font-family:
sans-serif; padding-bottom: 10px; font-size: 23px; font-weight: bold; color:
black;">Recommended Products</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table class="items" align="center" bgcolor="#fff">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td data-dy-rcom-item="">
<a style="text-decoration: none;" href="https://em.dynamicyield.com/emclk/8771232/4074/75741/15126/3/0?dy_ts=1544426026941&dy_cuid=REPLACE_WITH_EMAIL&dy_version=REPLACE_WITH_CAMPAIGN_VERSION&utm_source=Dynamic%20Yield%20recommendations&utm_medium=email"
target="_blank"><img src="https://em.dynamicyield.com/emop/8771232/4074/75741/15126/3/0?dy_ts=1544426026941&dy_cuid=REPLACE_WITH_EMAIL&dy_version=REPLACE_WITH_CAMPAIGN_VERSION&cartCtx=[REPLACE_WITH_PRODUCTS]&utm_source=Dynamic%20Yield%20recommendations&utm_medium=email" alt="" />
</a>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table> Advanced
In more advanced cases, you may need to insert the reference products in a more flexible method. This can be done by adding a different URL parameter to the img source element: ctx, specifying the parameter value as an encoding the web page context.
For example:
ctx=%7B%22type%22%3A%22CART%22%2C%22data%22%3A%5B%22sku1%22%2C%22sku2%22%2C%22sku3%22%5D%7D
Which when decoded is a simple web page context:
{"type":"CART","data":["sku1","sku2","sku3"]}
Note that some ESPs don't deal well with the special characters in the encoded context above, in which case the cartCtx should be used.