Packages: Personalization rules are available on demand for any customers with Advanced or MAX AI/accelerator package who fulfilled the requirements of the prerequisites.
Regarding pricing, Personalization rules are part of the E-Commerce & Retail accelerator SKU.
What are Personalization rules?
Personalization rules are business logics that you can apply on top of your product recommendations. Personalization rules enable you to tailor the recommended product set to your business needs. You can create a personalization rule by using a product recommendation logic. It can be for example, the logic of popular products. Here you can add business-specific filter criteria, such as price range or include or exclude certain brands or categories. To check the existing rules, navigate to Content > Personalization Rules.
Prerequisites
Personalization rules work only for contacts who have received a campaign (any email communication) in the last 180 days. All other contacts are excluded, they are left out from the personalization rules' target audience.
The prerequisites for using Personalization rules are the following:
- Existing, up-to-date Product catalog
- Implemented Web Extend
- Block-based email campaign including at least one repeatable product block with editable fields: Link, Image, Title, CTA to display a product and it is also repeatable.
- Having either of the following email campaign types: recurring and batch email campaigns.
Does my email template include any product blocks?
- If your email template was created by Emarsys, then you do not have to update it.
- If you use your own template, ensure it includes any product blocks. For updating it, follow the instructions described in Updating your own template for Personalization rules or Product catalog updates campaigns.
Personalization rules overview
All the existing Personalization rules that have been created earlier in your account are listed on the Personalization rules page.
Defining a Personalization rule
Recommendations are calculated every 4 hours, so after modifying an existing rule, or setting up a new rule, it might take a maximum of 4 hours until the recommendations are generated. The Contact preview is calculated independently from recommendations and displays nearly real-time results.
Consider the following when using Personalization rules:
- Personalization Rules are to serve either of the following email campaign types: recurring or batch email campaigns.
- Do not use Personalization rule in any on-event, triggered or transactional email campaigns with Automations programs, otherwise the emails will not be sent.
- Personalization rules do not check the recommended product’s availability. To ensure the recommendation only contains available products, add the following Product Filter to your Personalisation rule: Product field - available is true.
- Recommendation can contain unavailable products even after adding this Product Filter to your Personalization rule as the recommendations are calculated every 4 hours. So, it might happen that a product’s availability changes before the next calculation and as a result, the recommendation will contain unavailable products.
- Missing Parent-child level matching: One of the elements of our calculation is item-to-item similarity. This means that we might show the same item multiple times in one recommendation, just in different sizes, or color.
Create a new Personalization rule:
1. Click the Create Personalization Rule button on the main Personalization Rules page.
2. Select a base product recommendation logic from the Base product set pop-up dialog. The recommendation results will be calculated based on the logic selected here.
Base product set
It is a pre-defined product recommendation logic to filter your products. You can select predict recommendation types listed here.
- Global Popularity: It is a general list of the most popular products including the most-viewed and most-purchased items in the past 90 days from the customers’ Product catalog.
PILOT Release: Recommendation logics:
-
Visual similarity: It is an individual filtering, available for piloting clients only.
Visual similarity is part of the MAX AI/accelerator package. - Personal Logic: It enables you to generate unique product recommendations based on the recent browsing activity and the purchase history. For details, see Personal logic.
Visual similarity + Personal Logic: These features are currently on Pilot release for a limited number of clients only. If you are interested in participating in the Pilot phase, please speak to your Client Success Manager.
3. Name the Personalization rule.
4. At the Product filters section set your rules to apply to any of the following:
- All conditions are true
- Any condition is true
5. Click Add Condition to define a filter condition.
Specify a condition filter to narrow down the result set, keeping only those products that are matching the filter criteria. Use AND/OR operators for setting multiple filter criteria.
You can set the following condition types:
-
Product category: Define a condition based on the product category. You can include or exclude multiple categories from the result set. You can select category items, you want to filter on.
Example: To recommend popular women tops you can add a category condition with the full path, which includesWomen>Tops category products only. Include multiple categories separated by semicolons.
In the drop-down list you can select
- any of the following categories, or
- none of the following categories to exclude certain categories.
-
Product field: Define a condition based on the product catalog field value. You can access all your standard or custom Product catalog fields.
Example: To show products that are more expensive than 50 EUR create a product field criteria with the following settings:price - larger than - 50
- You cannot access the Localized Product catalog fields.
- When filtering custom Product fields, you cannot use numeric operators ('equals', 'smaller than', 'larger than' etc), only text-based operators ('contains', 'starts with', 'ends with' etc).
6. When you are done with editing the Personalization rule click Apply.
Advanced settings
7. Check the box to exclude products already purchased the defined days ago.
Sample products: Previewing results of the Personalization rule
8. Click the Save button in the top-right corner and the ten most relevant products are displayed in the right sidebar.
The preview of the personalization rules and also contact preview will only show 10 items no matter the maximum limit set in the repeatable block. The number of shown items can be more than 10 based on the settings and the actual amount of recommendations for given rule and contact only in the sent emails.