The INDIVIDUALIZE WPO is about offering personalized product recommendations in your outbound communications (newsletter, trigger e-mails, transaction e-mails, push notifications, print marketing, etc.)
If you are not familiar with WPOs, Customer Journey Steps, WPO Levels, Widgets, or Page layouts, please read the introduction: Widget & Page Optimizers (WPO)
Purpose
Relevant recommendations of products in email newsletters for each individual recipient.
Based on the profile, e-shop behavior, your goals, etc.
Integration with all email systems.
How should the widgets appear visually?
The INDIVIDUALIZE widgets typically are displayed with a label (title) on top and a list of product recommendations as documented as “product slider” in the Check-list: empower your Website Layout with Narratives | Layout Blocks (Templates) Check list(but often in the case of the e-mail, there will be no arrows to the slider, only a list of products appearing next or below each other depending on the device). There might be several blocks of product suggestions in one newsletter, one below each other, or in different sections of the newsletter.
Key focus: Customer Journey Personalization (CJP)
Personalization is important here because you are communicating with your existing customers and have some level of information about all of them. Therefore, instead of “simply” sending the same products to all your customers in a newsletter, you can instead select products matching the prior clicks and purchases of each customer individually. And as every visitor is always identified in the newsletter, we recommend putting more focus (at least at first) on the Customer Journey Personalization (CJP).
Related WPOs
The INDIVIDUALIZE WPO belongs to the RELATIONSHIP customer journey step (sixth column of the WPO grid diagram above) and corresponds to LEVEL 1 as it is solely about products and not other types of content: combine it with PROMOTE, READ to also support recommendations of other types of content like banners or blog articles and use it within a smart, personalized and dynamic layout with PRESENT*. You can also quickly extend it with the RE-TARGET WPO for trigger mails (trigger mails often also have personally selected products).
*only available for the API integration option below
What widgets should you consider?
One or several product recommendations blocks, each with a specific label, can be integrated into different types of newsletters. As a result, you might want to define a collection of different newsletters and to define a set of widgets for each of them.
Each block can display the products in one row or in a grid (the number of products per block is not limited but is typically less than 10). The number of blocks is also not limited and will be returned as a sequence by our API.
Combine it with PRESENT* to retrieve a dynamic personalized list of blocks embedded in a complete page layout (including other visual blocks for banners, information messages, emotional pictures, … all of which can be also personalized and A/B tested). As an example of such a case, here is a use case with Marketing Topics: Personalized Marketing Automation on Qualipet Homepage
*only available for the API integration option below
Here is a selection from our Best Practice Strategies in 3 sections (what to configure before your go-live, what could be your first A/B test about and more advanced practices for later stages).
1. What to start with (for the go-live)?
2. What could be a/b tested first?
3. What else could be experimented with?
Expand the list to see all the additional Best Practices of this WPO.
Additional ideas for Widget Strategies
Configure a campaign for each newsletter in Boxalino admin and use it to automatically adapt the selection of products to match your campaign target (you will need to provide a campaign name or id as a parameter in your requests to allow for this option to work as documented below).
Remove products with very low sales for an extended period of time and that the customer hasn’t already bought, it’s unlikely that customers will get interested in such products through e-mails unless it is related to the main topic of the newsletter.
Two Integration options: API vs IMAGE & REDIRECT URLs
There are two ways you can integrate the INDIVIDUALIZE WPO in your newsletter system.
API
This is the recommended option by Boxalino. It has many advantages compared to the IMAGE & REDIRECT URLs option. However, it is not supported by all newsletter systems.
This approach consists of integrating Boxalino Narrative API in the template rendering of your e-mail in a similar way as on your website. One of the many advantages of this approach is that it gives you full consistency with all the templates (Layout Blocks) and layout management you might already use with Boxalino Narrative API in your website.
Your Newsletter (and other e-mails, print marketing, and push notifications) become simply other “pages” of your website you can manage the same way, without switching from one visual editor to another.
Onboarding project plan
Here are our suggestions for the project management steps of the INDIVIDUALIZE widgets.
Task
Description
Comment
Task
Description
Comment
1
Pre-requisites
Make sure the Pre-requisites steps are completed and already deployed in production
Exports for products and transactions are required, as well as all the standard tracking events.
2
Newsletters
Define the newseltters where the INDIVIDUALIZE widgets will be integrated
Example:
Weekly newsletter
3
Widgets
Define the INDIVIDUALIZE widgets to be integrated on each page and where they should appear on the page (if you decide that some widgets should not appear for all visitors, define the logic deciding when they will appear or not)
Example names:
newsletter_recos
newsletter_bestsellers
newsletter_promotions
newsletter_novelties
4
Labels
Define the label of each of the INDIVIDUALIZE widgets in each language (the title that appears on top of the product slider)
Examples:
Your personalized suggestions
For you
Bestsellers you might like
Promotions of products you already bought
Newcomers of brands you purchased
5
Integrate API + Configuration
Integrate Boxalino Narrative API and configure your widgets in the Boxalino Admin.
Widgets with empty strategies in the INDIVIDUALIZE WPO in Boxalino Admin with the exact names defined in step 3
A narrative defining the layout of widgets (with positions if separated zones) referring to the names of the widgets as accessors and with the labels defined in step 4
As a result, you should be able to see the widgets appear in your test e-mails showing valid products but without any relevant logic in the selection of the products. If you display widgets in separated zones of the page, you can use different positions so the widgets are grouped by positions in the Narrative API response
6
Configure Widget Strategies
Define the strategy of each of the INDIVIDUALIZE widgets (first in prose and then by configuring the widget in the Boxalino Admin)
Boxalino can support you for the configuration of the widget strategies
7
Test & Deploy
Testing in your dev/stage environment and go-live
In case you have a separate prod and a stage account, make sure to copy your configuration in production before going live
Boxalino Narrative should be configured in Boxalino’s admin on the first appearing widget on the page (which should be the one called in the API request). The Narrative should define the layout of all the widgets (name of the widget to be indicated in the accessor parameter possibly with a hitCount to define how many products should be returned, for example: “topsellers[hitCount=15]”) as well as the labels.
Boxalino Narrative API will return a list of blocks (for each block of product recommendations) each with a list of sub-blocks (with the list of products) as documented here, (make sure to make only one call to our API to retrieve all widgets and not a call per widget which would cause poorer speed performance on your frontend)
The products returned will always include the product ids (which might be all you need) and other product fields can be returned as well if requested in the API calls (see Return Fields)
Make sure to add to all your links on the newsletter the URL parameter “_bxcid=XXX” with XXX being the account id of the customer in the e-shop system
IMAGE & REDIRECT URLs
This approach consists of defining URLs with parameters that will either be used as image sources (the URL providing an image) or as links for these images (the URL the customer goes to when clicking on the image).
You can find here the documentation of how these URLs have to be defined in your Newsletter editor: Newsletter Image & Redirect URLs
It has the advantage that it works in any newsletter system as you can simply add subscriber attributes as variables in the URL and so that the URLs become unique per customer.
However, it requires some additional preparation that needs to be maintained:
1. Images need to be generated for each product in each language
By image, we don’t mean the product image you already have, but a composite image including the name of the product, its price, and having dimensions that will enable a responsive design in your newsletter HTML. (typically a square or a slightly higher rectangle for each product allowing 2-4 products to be displayed next to each other on a desktop while showing only 1-2 products per row on a mobile).
Boxalino can help you define the generation of these product images by defining the image templates in Boxalino Admin and activating an image generation service (currently CloudConvert is supported in Boxalino) as documented here.
Finally, the images will need to be stored in a public web folder Boxalino can access to proxy the images to the e-mail client.
2. The URLs of the image and of the Product Detail Page (PDP) need to be provided
In order for the image source and link redirection to work, Boxalino needs to receive (or have a way to compute) the complete URLs of both the image URLs and the PDP URLs.
3. The URLs with their dynamic parameters must be configured in your newsletter templates
For each recommendation product position (for each product, not for each group of products), a link (A HREF) and an image (IMG SRC) must be configured with the dynamic URLs as documented here.
Onboarding project plan
Here are our suggestions for the project management steps of the INDIVIDUALIZE widgets.
Task
Description
Comment
Task
Description
Comment
1
Pre-requisites
Make sure the Pre-requisites steps are completed and already deployed in production
Exports for products and transactions are required, as well as all the standard tracking events.
2
Export E-shop Account ids to Newsletter System
Each subscriber of the newsletter who has a registered account in your eshop needs to have as an available subscriber property its e-shop account id.
Make sure to ask Boxalino for Customer e-shop ids for a few example subscribers, so you can be sure that you are exporting the right ids.
3
Newsletters
Describe precisely the newseltters where the INDIVIDUALIZE widgets will be integrated
Example:
Weekly newsletter
4
Widgets
Describe preciselythe INDIVIDUALIZE widgets to be integrated on each page and where they should appear on the page (if you decide that some widgets should not appear for all visitors, define the logic deciding when they will appear or not)
Example names:
newsletter_recos
newsletter_bestsellers
newsletter_promotions
newsletter_novelties
5
Labels
Describe precisely the label of each of the INDIVIDUALIZE widgets in each language (the title that appears on top of the product slider)
an HTML/CSS/JS template must be configured in Boxalino Admin
the generation of the images must be configured and activated (as a result, the images should be stored on a web folder).
If you want Boxalino to perform this task, you need to provide first a visual design of how the images will exactly look like for each device and an access to your web server (FTP/SFTP) so that the generated images can be stored.
7
Integrate + Configuration
Integrate in the position of each product recommendations in your newsletter template the required image and link URL as defined here.
As a result, you should be able to see the widgets appear in your test newsletter showing valid products but without any relevant logic in the selection of the products.
8
Configure Widget Strategies
Define the strategy of each of the INDIVIDUALIZE widgets (first write down a description and then configure the widgets in the Boxalino Admin)
Boxalino can support you for the configuration of the widget strategies
9
Configure your Campaigns
For the first go-live, but afterwise continuously, a campaign must be configured and published in Boxalino Admin withthe same campaign name (or id) as the one defined in your Newsletter system
This means that the current newsletter campaign name or id must be also provided as a URL parameter in your newsletter templates.
The process of configuring Campaigns for your newsletter is described here. General documentation of campaigns: Campaigns
10
Test & Deploy
Testing in your test newsletters and go-live
In case you have a separate prod and a stage account, make sure to copy your configuration in production before going live
Make sure that all the product recommendations image sources and links and have the account id of the customer in the e-shop system set as value of both the “profileId” and “customerId” URL parameters.
Make sure that all the product recommendations image sources and links of each product recommendations groups have the the correct widget parameter (the name of the URL parameter for the widget is “choiceId”)
Make sure that each set of product recommendations link&image have a different offset (within each widget), starting with a value of 0
Provide either the “rc_rcuid” or the “rc_campaign” automatically with the current newsletter campaign name or id (if possible, use the rc_campaign with a name which the marketer will see, as they will need to configure the same name in Boxalino Admin).
Make sure to add to all your links on the newsletter the URL parameter “_bxcid=XXX” with XXX being the account id of the customer in the e-shop system (not on the Boxalino links, on all the links).
