Fast Simon smart AI cross-sell recommendations integrate with Dotdigital for highly
targeted and personalized marketing and retargeting emails.
The guide below includes set up instructions and best practices for using our
integration.
Background
Personalized recommendations are powerful for retargeting email campaigns.
Fast Simon provides personalized recommendations based on:
➔ Shoppers behavioral activity in search and collection pages.
➔ Smart AI recommendation engines for semantic and visual product data
➔ Smart AI personalization engine
Growth opportunities
➔ Retarget your audience based on their last session
➔ Provide accurate, personalized recommendations on every email sent to your shoppers.
➔ Create groups of shoppers that can be targeted according to their interest (gender, style, season,
specific needs such as maternity or occasion)
➔ Use the shopper’s search query as a retargeting opportunity.
➔ Catchy and accurate email content: “You searched for “{shopper’s query}, here are more items you
might like”
Integration
Enabling the Dotdigital Integration on the Fast Simon Dashboard
Follow these steps in order to connect Dotdigital with Fast Simon:
1. Open the Dotdigital Dashboard to find your account details in the Access page.
2. Create a New API user with the rate limiting set to ‘Tiered’ in Dotdigital (More on API users:
https://support.dotdigital.com/en/articles/8199489-create-an-api-user)
3. Open the Fast Simon Dashboard and head to the Integrations section.
4. In the Marketing section, enable Dotdigital and add User Name, Password
4. In the Fast Simon Dashboard Upsell & Cross-sell section enable Product Recommendations:
Enabling Dotdigital’s web behavior tracking
Install Dotdigital’s web behavior tracking.
For Shopify::
https://support.dotdigital.com/en/articles/8199734-add-web-behavior-tracking-to-your-shopify-store
For rest of the platforms:
https://support.dotdigital.com/en/articles/8199234-install-web-behavior-tracking
You are all set!
In about an hour you will be able to see the new Fast Simon recommendations, that's a great time to
read the sections below that will provide more details on how to use them.
Fast Simon Components
This integration creates a new Insight data “FastSimon”. Every time a logged in shopper searches
and clicks on a product, the metric will log that data and automatically generate unique AI based
Recommendations that you can use in Dotdigital products (email campaigns, triggered emails).
FastSimon Insight Data:
- Recommendations (list of recommended products)
- RecommendationsSource (the source of the Recommendations in the customer profile,
possible values: "Searched with Fast Simon" or "Browsed with Fast Simon")
- LastSearchQuery
- LastProductViewedFromSearch
- LastProductViewedFromCollection
- LastViewedCollection
- LastSearchResultsURL
- LastCollectionURL
Recommended Products and Last Viewed Product available fields:
- ItemPrice
- ProductURL
- ProductID
- ProductName
- ImageURL
The insight data can be accessed in email templates using Liquid markup block.
Basic Liquid markup block example (it will generate a grid with the recommended products images and a
link to product page):
{% for r in contact.insight.FastSimon %}
{% for rec in r.recommendations %}
<h3> {{ rec.productname }} </h3><br>
<a href="{{ rec.producturl }}">
<img src="{{ rec.imageurl }}" alt="">
</a>
{% endfor %}
{% endfor %}
More on Dotdigital Liquid:
https://support.dotdigital.com/en/articles/8198939-personalisation-with-liquid-overview
The recommendations are generated per shopper, per session, and can be seen in your contact insight
data under “FastSimon” insight data “reccomendation_data” record at any time:
Abandoned Search Program
A Shopper visited your store, searched for “query” and then left without placing an order.
The last searched term can now be used for recommending the shopper which items they
might want to check out again.
Create a new program and create a new start condition:
1. Select your preferred Enrolment scheduling.
2. Set you Enrolment rule to Segment and press CREATE NEW:
3. Name the rule “Searched With Fast Simon”
4. Drag insight data block into the block named:
“Include contacts that match any of the rules in this group”
5. Set the filter as the following:
6. Set your desired Enrolment limits
Once the start condition is set, continue and set the rest of the program as you desire.
An example of a program that send an email with the liquid markup block mentioned
in the previous section:
Abandoned Collection Program
A Shopper visited your store, browsed a collection then left without placing an order.
Similarly to the Abandoned Search Flow, you can use the last viewed collection and the Fast
Simon recommendations to retarget the shopper according to their implicit intent.
Similar to the abandoned search program, set up the enrolment rule segment as the
following (replace “Search with Fast Simon” with “Browsed with Fast Simon”):
Other Flows using Fast Simon Recommendations
You can use Fast Simon recommendations on any program\campaign you are already using, or
would like to create in the future.
Campaigns using Fast Simon Recommendations
Similar to programs, you can use Fast Simon Recommendations in campaigns.
Accessing Fast Simon’s recommendations done in the same way using Liquid markup.