You can choose to include a number of recommended products in a "You may also like" type section to your Shopify email notifications, to drive more repeat purchases from customers. This article explains how those recommendations work, how you can include them in your emails as well as how to adjust the recommendations made by the system.
How does it work?
The app will automatically create a hidden Collection in your Shopify account, which is used to control the products recommended to customers. By default this collection will:
Include all products which have an image and are not sold out (if you are tracking inventory)
Sort the products by "Best-selling" so your best selling products are recommended first
Only products not purchased by the customer in that order will be included in the email sent.
Adding recommended products to an email
Login to OrderlyEmails (Shopify admin -> Apps)
Click the "Customize theme" button on your design
In the email editor, click on the "Content" tab
Select the email that you would like to add the recommended products to in the dropdown
Click the "Add section" button at the bottom of the sections list on the left
Select the "Recommended products" section, and click "Add"
You can also drag the section in the list of sections, to move its position in the email.
Viewing and editing the recommendations made by the app
In your Shopify admin
Go to the Products -> Collections section
Click on the Collection named OrderlyEmails - Recommended Products
To change which products are included in the recommendations adjust the Conditions of the collection. For example, you could add a filter to only include products that are above a certain price.
You can also adjust the Sort of the products, to change which products are recommended first. By default, it is set to "Best-selling" but you could change this to "Newest" instead to push your newest products.
Help, I accidentally deleted the recommended products Collection in my Shopify admin!
If you accidentally delete the collection OrderlyEmails - Recommended Products from your Shopify admin, don't worry! The app will automatically re-create the collection during it's next update cycle, which happens every 4 hours.
Best practices
To increase the likelyhood of getting repeat purchases from customers, we suggest including the "Recommended products" section in the following Shopify email notifications:
Shipping confirmation or Shipment Delivered - They've just completed a purchase and may be ready to buy again.
POS and Mobile receipt - Great way to get in-store customers shopping on your online store.
Abandoned checkout - Highly recommended.
Gift card created - A lot of people forward this email on to the recipient of the gift card, and showing some of your best sellers is a great way to get them started.
Customer welcome email - This email is delivered once the customer has finished creating an account with you, and is a great time to promote your best-selling products.
Does the system generate "personalized" recommendations?
No, the recommendations are based on the customizable rules setup above, and will be similar for most customers. This is due to 2 reasons:
This is actually better for newer merchants, and merchants with small to medium sized inventory.
It is Shopify that generate and send the emails, so we are limited on what can be included when these emails are sent by them.
For newer stores, or stores with an inventory under 100 or so products it is actually better to have the recommendations being general. This is because there is statistically not enough data to create useful personalized recommendations in these cases, and showing best-selling/promoted products will generally have a better effect. Small inventories don't need personalized recommendations as shoppers will be able to quickly "discover" all of the products on your site. If you had a store with 1,000 products then personalized recommendations would be useful, as they would not easily be able to view all products themselves.
Having the recommendations be general also means that you can selectively run campaigns through your email recommendations. For example, you can recommend slow selling products for a period of time to help clear out inventory.