Mailchimp product recommendations.

Do you have a Mailchimp account that you use to send newsletters to your customers – and have you set up E-commerce? Then you can also send product recommendations (Product Recommendations) to your customers.

These recommendations are based on what other customers bought. Purchase data is updated every time one of your subscribers clicks a link in your campaign and makes a purchase.

Mailchimp analyses this data to identify and rank up to 10 unique product recommendations for each of your subscribers, which you can include in a campaign or automation. There is an example of five recommendations in your subscribers’ profiles, on the E-commerce tab in Mailchimp

Criteria for product recommendations

Certain criteria have to be met before product recommendations can be sent to customers.

• There must be at least 10 products in the shop

• There must be at least 50 customers

• At least 500 orders must have been placed during the past year

• Products must have a positive stock quantity

The more data there is to work with, the better the recommendations that can be generated. If these conditions aren’t met, the shop’s best-selling products are shown instead.

Please note that the integration must be at least 7 days old before any product recommendations can be generated at all.

Please note that it can take a while between Mailchimp’s updates.

Why use product recommendations?

You can use product recommendation blocks and merge up to 10 products into your email campaigns. It’s a good idea to tailor the number of recommendations you include, to target your campaigns more effectively.

For example, recommend several products as part of a big sale, or promote a single product to a smaller segment of subscribers who share specific buying preferences.

Recommend relevant products to a segment of loyal customers who have made repeat purchases.

Insert product recommendations in your campaigns

• Create a campaign

  

• Choose the list/segment that is to receive the campaign

• Enter the campaign details; remember to leave E-commerce link tracking ticked

• Drag the Product Rec element into your email template – and adjust it.

These flexible blocks can pull the product’s title, price and image into your campaign and can combine up to 10 products. To encourage your subscribers to make a purchase, it’s a good idea to include a button in your block that links to each product’s page in your online shop.

Note: As recommended products vary from subscriber to subscriber, test your campaigns thoroughly to make sure they look the way you expect.

Product images and titles are pulled directly from your shop and can sometimes be too large or too small for the content block layout you choose. Images in email campaigns look best when they are sized to a maximum width of 600 pixels.

After testing, you’re ready to send product recommendations to your customers.

Things to be aware of

Here are a couple of things we have heard you should be aware of with Mailchimp as your newsletter system:

• Mailchimp requires you to have a link for unsubscribing from the newsletter directly with them (it’s at the bottom by default when you use their design templates)

• Naturally, only send to people who have signed up for your newsletter. If many people complain about your newsletter, your account may be closed.

If you notice anything else people should be aware of, we’d love to hear about it at feedback@goldenplanet.com.

More help with Mailchimp

Mailchimp offers quite a lot of help. In many places, when you’re logged in, you can click help and “video tutorial”.

They also have a wide range of free e-books here (opens in a new tab) and a good support section here (opens in a new tab).