The Recipe Builder allows you to identify the products you would like to appear in an email or on a site page. Products can be recommended based on the number of items purchased, product information, such as brand, and price range, or overall trends, such as top sellers.
Before you begin building a recipe learn more about the recipe builder interface or jump in and start creating.
Recipe Builder Interface
When building a recipe you will use this interface to customize what products are displayed. Learn more about the elements of the interface below.
Title: The title of the recipe in use. The title often indicates the email or page the recipe is featured in, or indicates the types of products displayed.
Recipe Tab: The recipe tab is where you can create a specific customized strategy for your desired use case.
Global Ingredients Tab: The Global Ingredients influence your recipe and are often used to improve customer experience, for example by making sure only in stock products are recommended. Learn more about Global Ingredients. You can use the global ingredients tab to view the existing setup or to edit global ingredients for all recipes.
Add: Add additional ingredients to a base ingredient. These can be used to further customize your strategy by filtering results. These are broken down into three categories: general, pricing, and personalized.
Base ingredient: Use the gear icon to select or change the base strategy for the products in your email.
Activity to use for reference SKUs: Use a customer's activity (products browsed, abandoned in cart, or purchased) to customize the products that appear and the number of products (up to 25) to consider. Products that are referenced are based on most recent activity from any kind being requested.
Backup Ingredient: A backup recipe is used if there are not enough products to display for a contact based on the strategy constructed. It's recommended to use a recipe as a backup ingredient because the general backups do not use global ingredients, and need to be used cautiously.
Product Reference Tab: In the preview window, view the results that would appear in an email or website page based on the product a contact browsed, abandoned, or purchased from the product tab.
Customer Reference Tab: In the preview window, view the results that would appear based on your recipe for an individual contact from your Listrak account.
Customer Activity: View the specific activity (selected in element #6) influencing the results for a customer by clicking into their information.
Preview window: Based on the recipe strategy you have created, this will show up to 25 products that could be recommended. If included, a contact's activity will be used to customize results. Products are ranked based on how well they fit the recipe you have created based on a color system. Green: fits well, yellow: does not fit as well, and red: does not fit well, but still applicable. For example, using a top sellers recipe green products have sold more units than yellow or red products.
Search: This bar lets you look for a product via SKU or Title, or a customer via email.
Building a Recipe
When building a recipe there are three major components. Use the questions below to help determine what properties you will set for each component.
What is the overall strategy for the types of products I would like to display? This question will help determine the base ingredient to use in the recipe. For example, you may want to display top selling products from a customer's preferred brand. The base ingredient of top sellers helps achieve your overall strategy.
What other criteria should these products meet?
This question helps determine the additional ingredients that can be added to your recipe. Using the example above, an additional ingredient from the preferred category of preferred brand can narrow down the types of products that will display.
If Listrak cannot display products based on your strategy, what products should display?
Some recipe strategies rely on a customer's previous activity, such as purchased products, to display results. In the example above preference is determined based on previous activity. Not all contacts receiving an email may have this specific activity. Determining what products they should be show in this instance can help determine a backup ingredient. In the example above, displaying overall top sellers not based on a customer's preferred brand would be the backup.
Follow the steps below build a recipe. The example below will use the strategy of top selling products in the preferred brand.
Access the recipe builder page by navigating to Solutions > Recommender Recipes.
On the recipe builder page:
1. Click Create A Recipe
2. Enter a descriptive name for the recipe
Now you will be taken to the main recipe builder. Here you will build out the specifics of your recipe based on your goals.
3. Select your base ingredient by clicking the gear icon
🔎 Learn more about the available base ingredients
4. Select the number and type of customer activity to reference in your recipe, if desired.
💡 Words like same, preferred, purchased, and viewed indicate that customer activity is being used. This is not required if all contacts should be displayed the same products in their email.
5. Click the Add button to configure your additional ingredients. Repeat this step to configure multiple ingredients.
💡 Adjust your importance slider to filter your additional ingredients. Importance Sliders set to 100% must follow the criteria you set when displaying products. The information passed in your product file (such as brand) or on your site (such as browse activity) to determine if products meet these criteria.
Once your main recipe is configured you will need to set your backup ingredient. A backup ingredient should be more general For best results create a new recipe to use as your backup ingredient by following steps 1-5 or use a recipe you previously created. Once you have created the new recipe follow the steps below to tie the two together.
In the example above, the same base ingredient would be use, but no additional ingredients will be added to the new recipe that will be used as a backup.
6. Click the gear next to Backup Ingredient
7. Select Recipe from the list of options
8. Select the new recipe or existing recipe you configured
9. Click Save Ingredient
Your recipe and backup are now configured. Save your recipe and now you can add it to a Merchandise Block.
Example Recipe Build
A recommendations recipe can be re-used multiple times across different email campaigns. You may want to create recipes that are tailored to some of your common campaign types. For example, a recipe that provides personalized results based on a contact's behavior that is used when there is not a specific category or product featured, such as during major holiday sales.
Using the questions outlined at the beginning of the article, you can use this example to see how selecting base and additional filter ingredients can achieve a goal.
What is the overall strategy for the types of products I would like to display? In this recipe the goal is to provide personalized results based on any activity a contact may have. I want to display what other people who were interacting with those same products were also interested in buying.
What other criteria should these products meet? I want to recommend products that are above a certain price point because I sell both single packs and multi-packs of products.
If Listrak cannot display products based on your strategy, what products should display? If a contact does not have any or enough activity I would like to show trending products that are popular now with people on my site. I would still like to recommend products above our lowest price point.
Tier 1 Recipe:
In this tier 1 recipe, the base ingredient of Purchased This Purchased That (PTPT) will display products that other contacts have purchased if they have also purchased one of a contact's reference products. The recipe uses all three behaviors: purchase, browed products, and abandoned products, and looks at a contact's three most recent activities. The results are then filtered to those over $25. The slider is set to 100% which will result in only products over $25 being displayed.
Tier 2 Recipe:
In the tier 2 recipe, the base ingredient of trending does not use any reference products so that all contacts would have products display. There is still a filter to promote products at a higher price point. Setting the slider at 90% promotes more expensive product, but will show less expensive products, if necessary.