Building a recommended product campaign

A how-to guide on creating a campaign using Rebuy's recommended products

A recommended product campaign is a great way to cross-sell to your customers. You can include images, prices, and QR codes that link through to your store for purchase.

Whilst you can add a fixed set of products to your designs, you can power your campaign with recommendations tailored to each customer. This guide covers how to design and build a campaign using a recommended products engine.

Pre-requisites

You need a product recommendation engine integration to power these recommendations in Penny Black. We support Rebuy for Shopify. Please see our guide on setting up this integration.

If using a bespoke ecommerce platform integration, it is also possible to send your recommended products to Penny Black with your order info. The format is described on our order ingest API page.

Designing your artwork

When designing a recommended product campaign, and in particular, deciding how many products to fit on your insert design, you should consider the following:

• readability - the information needs to be legible, the images visible and the QR codes scannable
• media size
• other information that you wish to add to your design
• brand guidelines

It might be possible to fit 8 recommended products on a single side of A6 but it will look cramped and busy.

The Penny Black app features a double-sided A5 template designed for recommended products, where one side is dedicated to 4 recommended products. The second side (the inner pages) is shown below:

You also need to consider the shape of your product images and make sure that they fit your designs - use a real product image when designing the base artwork.

Product attributes

Each recommended product has the following attributes available to be added to the artwork:

• Image
• Title
• URL (for the QR code)
• Prices (see the detailed section below for the different ways to display prices)

Personalising the artwork

A recommended product artwork can be personalised in exactly the same way as any other artwork. However, they do have a lot more fields than most other campaigns, so we recommend designing the base artwork in an external tool (InDesign, Canva, etc.) with all of the static information included.

Naming your artwork fields

We recommend a consistent naming format for your product fields in the artwork and ordering them by product. This will make it easier to manage, especially when creating the campaign.

• Use a consistent prefix such as product followed by the number
• If you’re using copy & paste to create different fields make sure you change the name immediately after copy
• The order in which the fields appear in the artwork list will match the order they appear on the campaign page. When in “List view” mode, the right-hand sidebar shows all of your fields. You can use the 6 dot icons on the left to drag the fields up and down, re-ordering them. Ordering the fields similar to the image below will help minimise mistakes when creating the campaign:

Creating your campaign

For all fields relating to a recommended product, whether it’s a price, title, image or QR code URL, you choose the value of Recommended Product. This adds two additional fields:

• Product number - up to 8 products will be imported from your recommended product provider. You need to match this number here to that of your designs. This is why it’s important to include this number in the name of your fields
• Attribute - this will show valid attributes for that type of field. Because the example below is an image field, the only possible attribute that you can choose is the Image attribute, but it will adapt based on the field type:

If it’s a text field then you will have a different set of options:

URLs and QR code tracking

When assigning a QR code to a product URL you can also specify a tracking parameter. This can show you which positions on your artwork are being scanned most to see if there’s any pattern of user behaviour. We suggest using the number of the product as part of your tracking parameter:

Product prices

You may want to highlight when a product is on sale, but you may not want to draw attention to discounting and prefer to just show the current price. We support both approaches, you just need to design and assign fields in your campaign accordingly.

Current price only

If you want a product to be shown at its current price regardless of whether it’s on sale or not, you just need to add a single price field for each product to your artwork. This field should be required, which you can see by the ***** top-left of the field box.

When creating your campaign you need to map the appropriate price field, which in this case is Price:

Optional sale prices

If you want the artwork to adapt to whether a price is on sale or not, including a strike-through on the original price, then you need to add 3 separate fields for each price variation:

• The original price (with the strike-through below)
• The non-sale price (in black below)
• The sale price (in red below)

We suggest naming these fields accordingly to avoid confusion when mapping them in your campaign.

All of these fields must be optional. Set this by unticking the Required box by the field, which is ticked by default.

An optional field means the PDF will still be rendered even if there’s no value for it. These fields all need to be optional because at least one of these prices will not be shown. This is how you would configure the 3 price elements when creating the campaign:Only sale prices

If you are confident that all product prices are on sale (and you are happy for the campaign not to match if they are missing) then you can ignore the non-sale price and just use original and sale price fields. However, we suggest catering for non-sale prices just in case there’s a data issue with your recommended products.

Previewing your artwork as a test

Once you’ve drafted your campaign, make sure you check some examples using real data. Click the DOWNLOAD PREVIEW button just below the artwork image on the Campaign page to open a preview overlay

Make sure you use orders that you know have recommended products - if they don’t then you’ll get an error when you try to download the preview.