Messaging Recommendations

Messaging Recommendations include email and SMS recommendations that can be used in your marketing automation provider's templates. This feature is available for the Klaviyo, Dotdigital, and (coming soon) Yotpo platforms. It is designed to drive a more engaging shopper experience, with the ultimate goal of enticing shoppers to return to your website and complete or expand their order.

Part of the Athos Personalization Suite

Athos Commerce Messaging Recommendations are a key component of the Athos Personalization Suite. This product extends the reach of our personalization offering so that we can truly weave personalization throughout the shopper’s journey.

Without personalization, campaigns sent to a shopper after they leave the site often use simple recommendation concepts or manual business rules such as “best selling” or “trending.” Those recommendations are not truly personalized. All shoppers receive similar recommendations regardless of how relevant those products are to the individual shopper. 

Incorporating Athos Messaging Recommendations in an email or SMS message increases the relevance of the recommended products sent in a marketing or post-purchase campaign. Our true personalization uses shopper behavior and shopper preferences based on each shopper’s on-site activity. 

How It Works

Whenever shoppers visit a site, they provide information about their interests in the form of pages they visit and the products they view. Every time a shopper views a product, adds a product to the cart, or completes an order, Athos’s personalization algorithm learns from those actions to better understand the shopper’s intent and predict what that shopper wants to buy next. Those predictions generate recommended categories, brands, and products that are used to personalize their experience and get the right product in front of them at the right time. By engaging Athos Personalization throughout the shopper's journey we are able to provide a consistent experience both on the site and in their inbox.

What Makes Our Email and SMS Recommendations Special

At Athos, we believe in setting new standards when it comes to Personalized Recommendations. Here's why our Messaging Recommendations stand out from the rest:

1. Customizable rules for merchandisers: Use our Athos console to curate and customize personalization rules effortlessly. You can set up Advanced Rules to customize a Personalized Recommendation profile, and those rules will be applied across your store and Messaging Recommendation campaigns. This allows you to maintain consistent merchandising rules and personalized recommendation behaviors. Take control of your recommendations and deliver a seamless experience to your shoppers.
2. Personalization based on email opens: We take personalization a step further by calculating it on email-open and on SMS-open, rather than just on send. By doing so, we ensure that our recommendations are hyper-relevant, aligning with the recipient's most recent activity. Stay in sync with your shoppers and provide recommendations that truly matter to them.
3. Cutting-edge machine learning and AI analysis: With every indexing of your feed, we employ advanced machine learning and AI analysis to deeply understand your site's data. Unlike others, we go the extra mile by performing frequent indexing for all sites, ensuring that our data remains synchronized and up to date with any changes made to your site. The result? Unparalleled accuracy and relevancy in generating recommendations, regardless of when they're needed.
4. Truly one-to-one personalization: We believe in delivering a personalized experience that's unique to each customer. Our Messaging Recommendations are tailor-made for every individual, reflecting their preferences and interests. Say goodbye to generic suggestions and embrace a personalized journey for each shopper.

Experience the difference with Athos's Personalized Messaging Recommendations. Unleash the power of advanced technology, individualized personalization, and easy customization to enhance your shoppers' journey like never before.

Add a profile

To generate a messaging recommendation, you'll need to create a new profile. Click "Personalization" in the main menu of the Athos console to get started.

1. Click Marketing Automation in the Personalization sub-menu. Two tabs will display: Personalized Segments and Messaging Recommendations.
2. Click the "Messaging Recommendations" tab.
3. Click the “+ Add New Profile” button in the top right.
4. A new window will appear, where you will select the marketing automation provider to use, then click "Next".

5. Choose the type of campaign you'd like to use. In this example, we'll use "Abandoned Cart".

6. Choose the type of recommendation you'd like to use. In this example, we'll choose "Cart Cross-Sell".

7. The profile editor form will appear. Here, you will customize the template, precision, and layout for your messaging.

8. Add a profile name. On the Template tab, select a product card from the drop-down menu.
9. On the Precision tab, drag the slider to configure how precise recommendations are. This value dictates how many conditions are used to find recommended products. Broad precision expands the recommendations algorithm to ensure products can be recommended even when shopper data is sparse. Narrow precision restricts recommendations to prevent the algorithm from defaulting to related products or top sellers. This could result in recommendations not being displayed for certain products.
   • All = Include top selling products plus Crowd and Genomic
   • Genomic = Include cross-sell recommendations for other products like this
   • Crowd = Include similar recommendations that match this product
   • No Fill = Cross-sell recommendations that match this product
   • Curated = Only return products from Cross-Sell Product Rules

Note: The Precision tab is available only on Similar, Cross-sell, and Cart Cross-sell profiles. You can learn more about precision here.

10. On the Email Layout tab, you'll set the breakpoint and how many products to show in Desktop and Mobile devices.

Note: You may recommend up to 20 products in an email, but SMS recommendations will contain only one product recommendation.

11. Click the "Save" button in the upper right-hand corner. 

Note: Once you save the profile, a new button will appear at the bottom left of the Profile Editor window, "Show Integration Instructions".

12. Before you integrate this code into your marketing automation provider's site, you can test how the layout looks. Click the "Test Preview" button in the top center of the window. A new window will appear and offer tabs for Desktop and Mobile, so you can compare how each layout looks. The window will open on the Desktop tab.

13. Click the Mobile tab to see the mobile layout you have configured.

14. Click the "Show Integration Instructions" button to see how to integrate these layout settings with your marketing automation platform. A new window will appear, with separate tabs for Email and SMS.

15. Click the "Copy Code" button at the bottom right to copy the HTML code that you will paste into your marketing automation provider's template. Click here to see how to set up that template for each provider: 

    • Klaviyo
    • Dotdigital
    Admin Only:
    
    Yotpo
    Cordial
16. Click the SMS tab to see a similar form; this window will contain separate code sections for the SMS link and the SMS image. As with the HTML code for email, you will click the "Copy Code" button at the bottom right of each section to copy the HTML code that you will paste into your marketing automation provider's template.

Editing a profile

Existing profiles will be listed under Messaging Recommendations. To edit a profile, click the "..." button under the "Options" column on the far right, then choose "Edit".

The profile editor will display, and you can make changes on this form, then click the "Save" button to save your changes.

Boost Rules and Sorts (for Custom Recommendations)

If you've selected the Custom recommendations type, you can select the products to be recommended by applying filters, boosts, and sorts. You can read about the options for custom recommendations profiles here.

Boost Rules

Just like Boosting Rules in Visual Merchandising, boosting allows you to create rules that will dynamically boost products with certain attributes to the top of your recommended products. These rules will continue to stay in effect and re-group your products in real time as their information changes.

Although we show only the first 20 items in a recommendations profile, you can use Product Boosting Rules to elevate specific products to the top of the list. Each Boost rule separates products into an elevated group that meets the rule and a deprecated group that does not. Additional rules create sub-groups within the first set.

The higher the rule is positioned in the list, the greater impact it will have on the results. Boost rules are not required.

Sorts

The sort rule forms the lowest level ordering for the items to be shown. It is applied subordinate to any Boost rules that may have been applied. An example would be to sort by the most sales to elevate popular items, or by the lowest days-since-published to elevate new items.

Filters

Filters can be used to limit which products can possibly show up in a profile. This selection varies for different types of profiles. Note that recently viewed profiles cannot be filtered.

For custom profiles, the filters are applied in advance to help determine the set of products to recommend. A common use would be to only display products that have a certain tag. For example, if you only want to recommend products from a specific season, you could set up a filter requiring products to match a seasonal tag like "ss_season is Winter". Any field that is available in the search index can be used for custom profile filters.

For other types of profiles (including similar, cross-sell, and trending), filters are applied at the time that the recommendations are requested by the website. That means the filters will reduce the number of results returned and may cause the profile to be hidden if no appropriate results are available. It is best to apply these filters only in cases where it is better to show nothing instead of the wrong thing.

Tip: See Personalization Settings for more details on how you can use business rules to influence recommendations instead of using filters.

Previewing Recommendations

For custom profiles, the product recommendations preview (at the right side of the window in the Profile editor) will show you the actual product results matching your boost and filter selections. Similar, Cross-Sell, and Cart Cross-Sell profiles require a product seed for the preview. Category and Brand Trending profiles require a category or brand to be selected; you can search for the appropriate input to see the results for that selection.

Note: These are only previews. When the profile is placed on your site, the seed product, category, or brand will be captured from variables on that page and sent in the request.

Note: Previews are not supported for Personal, Session, and Recently Viewed recommendations, as they are entirely dependent on an individual shopper’s behavior.

When you click on a recommended product, it will show the details of that product and provide context on why that product has been recommended. For example, on a similar or cross-sell profile you will see:

• Total Sales and Total Views for the recommended product
• Common Sales or Common Views between the recommended product and the seed product
  • Common Sales will be shown for Cross-Sell recommendations while Common Views are used for Similar recommendations.
  • Common Views are calculated over 26 weeks. 
  • Common Sales are calculated over 18 months and measure how often a product is repurchased by the same shopper. The repurchase does not necessarily need to be on the same order to qualify as a common sale.
• The Brand and the Categories associated with the recommended product
  • The preview will highlight the categories that the recommended product shares with the seed product.

Note: This preview will not exactly match what shoppers will see once the profile is implemented on your site. Depending on the individual shopper’s behavior, the order of recommended products will change in order to provide a personalized experience.

Ready to Install? 

Check out Installing a Profile to continue.

Create Klaviyo Recommendations

Click here to learn how to create messaging recommendation intelligence in Athos and inject it into Klaviyo.

Create Dotdigital Recommendations

Click here to learn how to create messaging recommendation intelligence in Athos and inject it into Dotdigital.