Add product recommendations to your email

If you’ve integrated your product catalog through Shopify or our API, you can add product recommendations to your emails.

When you add a product recommendation to your email, the Attentive platform helps select products to suggest to your subscribers based on their shopping history in the past three months, including not just purchase data, but also product views and items they add to their shopping cart.

Product recommendations don’t include gift cards, insurance, or similar products. If there’s no purchase data for the subscriber, the email recommends a best-selling product instead. Recommendations only include products that are in stock.

Follow the steps below to add one or more product recommendations to your email:

1. Create an email campaign or journey.
2. When designing your email, drag and drop the PRODUCT RECS block from the content section.
3. Click Add product recommendations.
   The Add product recommendations editor appears.
   
4. Choose the number of recommended products you want to display, the layout of product images and details, the number of columns, and image height.
   • Attentive automatically adjusts the number of products displayed if that number doesn’t divide evenly between the number of columns you selected. For example, if you select eight products to display but choose the three column option, the number of products to display is automatically increased to nine.
   • If there’s more than one row of product recommendation, the email editor only displays the first row. However, all the recommendations will appear in the email that's actually sent to subscribers. We recommend that you preview and send test emails to see how product recommendations will look to subscribers.
   • You can set an image height for layouts with multiple columns (not available for single-column layouts), which fixes image heights at a given number. This helps align images with different aspect ratios within a product recommendation row by sizing them to the specified height.  The images' original dimensions in your product catalog will remain unchanged. We recommend previewing and testing thoroughly to see how the image height setting looks in various emails with different image ratios. Be careful not to set a height that's too large, as it may cause overflow.
     
     
     Tip: To find the proper image height, preview your email and right click to “inspect” an image in your email (we recommend inspecting the smallest image). Find the image URL and hover over it — the image size appears in the email preview. The second number in the image size is be the image height value (e.g., if the image is 300 x 200, its height is 200).
5. Below Product details, click the checkbox next to each field that you want to appear in the email. Uncheck a field to hide it.
   
   
   Notes:
   

   • If you want to edit information about the product, you can do so in your eCommerce provider (like Shopify) or via the Product Catalog API.
   • You must provide Attentive with product images, product price, and product link from your product catalog in order to add product recommendations to your emails. This data is needed even if you don’t plan to use one or more of those attributes in the email itself.
6. Below Button Content, enter the text that you want to appear on all product buttons. This updates each product button in the email.
7. Click Continue to save your product recommendation settings and return to the email editor.

After you've added one or more product recommendations to the email, you can use the main email editor to change the background, fonts, and colors of the recommendations. For more information, see Design your email.

Edit a product recommendation

If you have one or more product recommendations in your email draft, you can edit the associated product row to make changes.

1. At the top of the email editor, click Edit dynamic products.
   A dropdown menu appears.
2. Select the product row that you want to edit.
   The dynamic product editor appears.
3. In the editor, make the desired changes.
4. Click Continue.

Exclude products from product recommendations

If you use Shopify, you can exclude products from product recommendations. See Exclude products from product recommendations for more information.