Product Recommendations Enrichment

This article applies to all paid subscriptions (Customer Data Studio is not available on Free subscriptions).

Product recommendations play a significant role in increasing online sales revenue. They can help to increase the average order value, improve customer engagement, and enhance customer loyalty.

By suggesting complementary or related products to customers, product recommendations can encourage them to add more items to their shopping cart and increase the overall order value. Additionally, by personalizing recommendations based on customer data such as purchase history and browsing behaviour, retailers can provide a more personalized shopping experience and build stronger relationships with their customers.

Moreover, product recommendations can also help customers to discover new products they might not have otherwise considered, which can lead to increased sales and customer satisfaction. This, in turn, can result in positive reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations, further boosting sales revenue.

In Distil, the Product Recommendations Enrichment creates a personalised set of up to five recommended Products for each Customer. These recommendation sets can then be applied to your newsletters, on-platform personalisation, follow-up purchase messaging and many other actions.

To access the full features of this Enrichment type, ensure that the following Data Categories are being sync'd with Distil: Customer, Product, Tracking and Purchase History. For more information, read our article introducing Data Sources.

To see Product Recommendation options, select Product Recommendation under the Enrichment view, within the Customer Data Studio. Product Recommendation Enrichment is enabled by default.

Mixing Desk

Just as your product set is unique to your business, how Product Recommendations are identified must also be unique. Distil turns your Product Recommendations up to 11 with our unique Mixing Desk, which allows you to fine-tune the algorithm that finds Product Recommendations based on a number of variables.

The Mixing Desk is quick and easy to use, allowing you to tailor Product Recommendations on the fly to meet new challenges and objectives.

The weighting of each of the variables used by the algorithm can be adjusted between a range of 0 – 11, with 11 being the highest (most important), and 0 being switched off (variables set to zero will not be considered by the algorithm). These adjustments will determine the Products that will be recommended to each Customer.

• Viewed Not Purchased: Products that an individual Customer has viewed but not yet purchased.
• Viewed Together: Products that are commonly viewed together by all Customers.
• Purchased Together: Products that are commonly purchased together by all Customers.
• Follow on Purchase: Products that are commonly purchased after another product that the Customer has already purchased.
• Trending over past number of day(s): Products that have the highest number of orders over the last number of day(s), where the number of days is entered in the box below the slider.
• Default Products: Products that are in the list of Default Products (see the section below).

You can easily test which Products your chosen Mixing Desk settings will recommend for a specific Customer in the Customer Recommendation Preview panel, to the right of the Mixing Desk. Search for and select a Customer to see which Products will be recommended.

To see the effect of each variable setting, you can switch on and off individual variables without changing their value by unchecking the box above each of the sliders. 

Default Products

The Default Products tab gives you the ability to curate a custom list of up to ten preferred Products for Product Recommendations. Default Products help drive Customer purchases towards meeting your business goals, whether this is recommending high profit Products, your most popular Products, or a new Product range.

Default Products are recommended to Customers that have no previous order or browsing history. Default Products is also an input variable in the Mixing Desk. If Default Products is the only varable selected in the Mixing Desk, then all Customers will be recommended this list of products.

The list of Products you have added to Distil appears in the grey panel on the right. You can scroll the list of Products or also search for specific Product use the search field.

To add a Product to your list of Default Products, click the + symbol next to the Product name in the panel on the right. The Product will then appear in the Default Products list on the left.

To remove a Product from the Default Products list, click the X to the right of the Product name. To re-order Products, drag the Product up or down using the three-bar icon to the left of the Product name. 

Attributes

Enabling Product Recommendations Enrichment creates a number of Attributes for each recommended Product, for each Customer. These are available wherever you see Attributes in Distil. They can be used to create Segments, appear in the Data Panel view, and can be sync'd to external data sources. 

You can read the full detail of each of these in our article on Attributes. 

Distil can recommend up to five Products per Customer. So, the lists below are repeated for Product 2, Product 3, Product 4 and Product 5. The values for each Product are sourced from the Product Data added to Distil.

Product 1 ID
Product 1 Image Url
Product 1 Name
Product 1 Precis
Product 1 Price (Ex. Tax)
Product 1 Price (Inc Tax)
Product 1 Score
Product 1 Shop Url
Product 1 Thumbnail Url

Additionally, up to ten Default Products can be set, which produce the following Attributes for each Customer. These attributes can be found in the Product recommendations (Default Products) tab in the Data panel of the Customers screen.

Product 1 ID
Product 1 Name
Product 1 Score