Extending personalisation strategy

One of the first things many people think of when they think of marketing automation is personalisation. This was also the case with Cassis/Paprika, where personalisation was always a focus. Our mission: to further expand personalisation by showing popular, recommended, or related products to customers. For that, we used the Cortex module in Marigold Engage. By using relevant parameters, we could offer smart content, both in emails and on web pages.

Expand newsletters

The expansion of the personalisation strategy took place in several steps.

Step 1: the Cassis/Paprika newsletters. We built two different types of smart content into the template:

• On the one hand, there is the smart content that appears in every newsletter. It contains recommendations based on the recipient's tastes and interests. We also made sure that products that the recipient has already purchased aren’t featured in the newsletter. This means the emails are always interesting, fresh, and relevant and we can avoid causing frustration and making unnecessary repeat recommendations.

• On the other hand, we also provide smart content that is different for each newsletter by making a variable part (block) in the template. These blocks can be used several times, and each block can contain different, relevant content. This helps Cassis/Paprika to provide focused content for every part of the newsletter.

Expansion of "out of stock" emails

Step 2: Refine the "out of stock" emails. Not exactly the place for smart content, we hear you cry, but nothing could be further from the truth: these emails are primarily intended to inform customers that the product they are interested in is not available. However, it's also the ideal time to trigger those customers with recommendations for other popular or suggested products. By placing smart content here, we stimulate the needs of the customer­ — so that they might proceed to purchase.

Abandoned items left in shopping carts are very common in e-commerce and the Paprika website is no different. With the Marigold Engage Site module, we can drive sales by linking cart management with the shopping cart on the website — we can remind customers about the products that they have recently shown interest in. Products that the customer adds or removes from the shopping cart are passed on to the cart manager. After that, parameters are set for the desired follow-up actions.

The most important parameter to set is the time from which the shopping cart is abandoned. It is crucial that the merchant does not approach the customer too quickly, so that they still have time to browse the products on the website. On the other hand, it should not take too long — otherwise the customer may switch to other webshops to make their purchases. After the chosen interval has elapsed, an automatic flow is activated. This contains the products in the abandoned shopping cart and offers the option to proceed straight to purchase.