Get Started With Newsletter Content

In this guide, you can read and learn about how to get started with newsletter content, setting up the campaigns and customization. If needed, you can head directly to one of our partner providers below from the list.

By using Hello Retail's Newsletter Content, you can integrate product recommendations with ease – into your newsletters and marketing emails.

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Prerequisite

It is important to note here that before being able to create and set up a campaign, you must have created a design for the newsletter content first. To learn about how to do so, click here. When you have your design ready, then feel free to proceed with this guide.

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If you want to head to a specific setup for one of our partner newsletter providers, then feel free to navigate to them here:

• Rule
• MarketingPlatform
• Omnisend
• Drip
• HeyLoyalty
• Klaviyo
• ActiveCampaign
• MailChimp
• MailCamp
• Bullsender
• Apsis

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How to set it up

In the following steps, you can learn to create your first email campaign using product recommendations:

1. Start by logging into your Hello Retail account. On the dashboard view, navigate to the left-hand side menu. Under the Email section, click on Newsletter Content to unfold the drop-down menu.
2. Next, from the drop-down menu, click on Overview. From here, you can choose between three different campaign creations: 
3. When creating a new campaign, simply choose the following options to set up your campaign:

    4. Once you are done, simply click on the button Create to continue.

• Name: Choose a name for your campaign, e.g. "Christmas campaign" or "Weekly newsletter, week 50"
• Number of products: Choose the number of product recommendation views you would like to include in your newsletter. E.g. if choosing 2, you can have two product recommendations side-by-side.
• Design: Choose a design for your campaign.

Design the product recommendation view

    5. Next, you can configure the design of the product recommendation view. You can control attributes like width, height, the font, font-sizes and highlight colours.

In the right side of the screen, you'll be able to see a preview of the generate product recommendation view (based on a random product from your inventory):

    6. Once you are done, click on the Save button and move on to the Products configuration.

Recommendation strategy

In this section you configure what products should be shown in your newsletter. You can choose from our standard recommendation strategies and you can customize them by changing the steps of the strategy and by applying filters.

The system will automatically avoid showing products that has been viewed by the same recipient in another campaign sent in the past month. If more than 10 campaigns have been sent in the past month it will only consider the 10 most recent campaigns.

Code section

1. In the Code section, you'll find the actual code snippet you have to copy and paste into your newsletter template. If you are using a newsletter provider like: MailChimp, Ubivox, Carmamail, Apsis, Loyaltymanager or Responsys - simply select it from the list and the code will be ready for you.

This is the key for Hello Retail to be able to show each recipient a personalised recommendation:

    2. The code setup is completed once you've placed the code-snippet from the step above in your newsletter template. Moreover, make sure the EMAIL_ADDRESS part have been replaced with your newsletter providers replacement parameter. 

If you insert the code once, it will show one recommendation. You can insert it as many times as you want.

However, make sure that you have enough products in step 2 but you will need to change PRODUCT_NUMBER to make sure we don’t show the same recommendation more than once. Each PRODUCT_NUMBER will result in a different product. You can just type it with ascending numbers (such as 1,2,3) to make sure that your product recommendations are different.

EMAIL_ADDRESS and PRODUCT_NUMBER must be changed two times per product, both for product link and image URL.

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Code snippet: Multiple campaigns in the same email

The newsletter content system ensures that the products is not included and shown more than once in the same campaign.
However, if needed, it is also possible to have multiple campaigns inside the same email. This requires some more setup to work:

1. Start by logging into your Hello Retail account. On the dashboard view, navigate to the left-hand side menu. Under the Emails section, click on Newsletter Content to unfold the drop-down menu.
2. Next, from the drop-down menu, click into the relevant campaign that you have (auto, rolling or manual).
3. Inside the campaign, then click on the Edit config button to access the overview of the code snippet. You can also access it by clicking on the Code snippet button.
    
4. Scroll down to the Code snippet section and unfold it to be able to access it.
5. Double click in the code snippet editor and the whole code will be selected.
    
6. Copy and paste this code snippet into any kind of applicable editor or directly into your partner newsletter provider to be able to edit and save it.
    
7. In this code snippet, you will need to input excludeFromCampaigns to both the image URLs and the links.
   
   The parameter excludeFromCampaigns must be given and accepts a comma-separated list of complete campaign IDs that indicates which other campaigns that should be looked at when deciding what products to include.
   
   If this is a auto campaign, the complete campaign ID is  {template key}-{campaign id}.
   
   It is important to remember to do the same configuration for all products in each of the campaigns.
   
   Example of three campaigns that each exclude from the two others:

<h2>Campaign 1</h2>
<a href="https://core.helloretail.com/serve/tile/click?template=aaa6534270e6100619f8708f&campaign=c1&index=0&email=email1&excludeFromCampaigns=bba6534270e6100619f8708f-c2,cca6534270e6100619f8708f-c3">
  <img src="https://core.helloretail.com/serve/tile/image?template=aaa6534270e6100619f8708f&campaign=c1&index=0&email=email1&excludeFromCampaigns=bba6534270e6100619f8708f-c2,cca6534270e6100619f8708f-c3">
</a>
<h2>Campaign 2</h2>
<a href="https://core.helloretail.com/serve/tile/click?template=bba6534270e6100619f8708f&campaign=c2&index=0&email=email1&excludeFromCampaigns=aaa6534270e6100619f8708f-c1,cca6534270e6100619f8708f-c3">
  <img src="https://core.helloretail.com/serve/tile/image?template=bba6534270e6100619f8708f&campaign=c2&index=0&email=email1&excludeFromCampaigns=aaa6534270e6100619f8708f-c1,cca6534270e6100619f8708f-c3">
</a>
<h2>Campaign 3</h2>
<a href="https://core.helloretail.com/serve/tile/click?template=cca6534270e6100619f8708f&campaign=c3&index=0&email=email1&excludeFromCampaigns=bba6534270e6100619f8708f-c2,aaa6534270e6100619f8708f-c1">
  <img src="https://core.helloretail.com/serve/tile/image?template=cca6534270e6100619f8708f&campaign=c3&index=0&email=email1&excludeFromCampaigns=bba6534270e6100619f8708f-c2,aaa6534270e6100619f8708f-c1">
</a>

In the above example, you can see that:

• campaign1 excludes campaign2 and campaign3
• campaign2 excludes campaign1 and campaign3
• campaign3 excludes campaign1 and campaign2

Once you're done updating the code snippet with the excludeFromCampaigns to both the image URLs and the links, then input it directly into your newsletter content provider HTML and save it.

Code snippet: Exclude specific product(s) directly

If there are specific products that you wish to exclude from the newsletter then this is done by adding the excludeProductNumbers parameter to each link and image URL.

The parameter excludeProductNumbers must be given and accepts a comma-separated list of product numbers. Products that respectively match these product number IDs will then be excluded from the campaign and, therefore, not shown. 

It is important to remember to do the same configuration and add this parameter to all products in the campaign.

 

Using custom customer id

If you don't want to use emails as the identifier for the users, you can use your own internal customer id.

To do this, you first have to set your customer id using our JavaScript SDK. You can find an example of how to do this here. By doing this, we identify the cookies using your customer id instead of the default being emails.

When copying the Newsletter Content code snippet, you have to do some modifications. The original snippet will look at bit similar to:

<a href="https://core.helloretail.com/serve/tile/click?template={your template id};campaign={your campaign id}&amp;index=0&amp;email={the email of the receiver}">
   <img src="https://core.helloretail.com/serve/tile/image?template={your template id}&amp;campaign={your campaign id}&amp;index=0&amp;email={the email of the receiver}" width="298" height="350">
</a>

You will have to replace the userEmail attribute with customerId, so it becomes:

<a href="core.helloretail.com/serve/tile/click?template={your template id};campaign={your campaign id}&amp;index=0&amp;customerId={your own customer id}">
    <img src="core.helloretail.com/serve/tile/image?template={your template id}&amp;campaign={your campaign id}&amp;index=0&amp;customerId={your own customer id}" width="298" height="350">
</a>

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If you have any questions or need any help in the process, please feel free to reach out to our support team here

Need a custom template?

If you need an even more customized template for your product recommendation views, then please feel free to reach out to our support team here. We can discuss the potential options to get a customized template for your product recommendation view.