#ExploreHybris – E-mail Recommendations in Marketing Automation

In the #ExploreHybris series, Apollogic experts share their knowledge concerning the possibilities of the most efficient use and extending the SAP Hybris Marketing system. It is a comprehensive Marketing Automation platform used for managing marketing activities and relations with Customers.

From this article you will learn:

• What is the practical use of e-mail recommendations?
• How to create e-mails with product recommendations?
• How can personalized messages affect the increase of Open Rate?

Practical use of e-mail recommendations

One of the primary uses of products recommendations in e-mail messages is allowing the creation of personalized messages with products tailored to customers basing on their past behavior.

The necessary steps to create them include:

• Creating a product recommendation scenario
• E-mail provider configuration (in this case Amazon AWS)
• Creating a target group
• Developing a campaign for the previously created target group
• Planning the created campaign and assigning the “Send e-mail” action
• Preparing e-mail template in HTML format (optional)

Once these steps are fulfilled, one can move on to put them in the message, making it possible to use the recommendations in mailing campaign addressed to the target audience determined during the segmentation process.

Creating e-mail messages with product recommendation

Business Case: We aimed to maintain positive contact with the Customer.

Therefore, we based on interaction data collected by SAP Hybris Commerce and SAP Hybris Marketing systems. This was supposed to enable sending personalized e-mail messages along with the product recommendations tailored to every user.

For this purpose, we have decided to use one of the main applications of recommendation models, i.e. product recommendations in mailing campaigns. We managed to avoid the effect of “overwhelming” customers with irrelevant offers. Product recommendations were selected with the help of a forecast scenario based on the history of the most viewed products in the online store.

Content Studio is the application dedicated to creating and managing e-mail messages. It is a module that allows the creation of personalized e-mail messages, text messages, message templates, confirmation e-mails, and landing pages.

After opening the Content Studio, the desktop with all content created so far appears.

We used SAP Hybris Marketing functionality to create an e-mail message and imported previously prepared HTML template. First, the template needs to be imported into the message template and then an appropriate message can be created basing on it.

This is how the loaded HTML template looks like in Content Studio:

Product recommendations were added when designing a specific e-mail message based on the previously created template. In order to do this, we created a new e-mail message. The previously created template was used as a model for our new message.

The application automatically transfers the user to the e-mail editor. In the ‘Settings’ tab, we assigned a preconfigured e-mail provider (AWS) and a segmentation profile on which the personalized content was supposed to be based.

Then, in the ‘Project’ tab, we added product recommendations. To do this, we used the drag & drop function dropping the block at the desired location.

Ultimately, we wanted to place four product recommendations in the e-mail, including:

• name of the product,
• picture of the product,
• short description.

For this purpose, we used one of the basic functionalities of SAP Hybris Marketing – personalization attributes. We added respectively: product name, link to its picture, and description.

Once the product recommendation block has been designed, the last step was to assign a previously created recommendation scenario and define the maximum number of products in a given recommendation – in this case, four.

This is how we prepared an e-mail message project. In order to send e-mails with product recommendations, we created a new campaign for the specific target group. In its automation, we added an action for sending an e-mail by assigning an e-mail message with product recommendations.

Impact of e-mail recommendations on increasing CTR

The result of such a mailing campaign is that every Customer included in the target group will receive a personalized e-mail with basic Customer data and products tailored based on the recommendation scenario assigned to e-mail. Mailing campaign planned in such a way prevents the issue where Customer receives e-mails with product offers that he is not interested in.

As a result, we are reducing the probability that user will tag the messages received as SPAM. This allows increasing the chance of meeting customer’s preferences. It is possible because they are based on customer interactions and interests that result from his activity on predefined channels.