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MailChimp adds new feature for Product Recommendations

Company says it is the only SMB-targeted email platform that offers such a built-in capability.

Barry Levine on June 7, 2016 at 2:11 pm

Email marketing provider MailChimp is out with a new Product Recommendations offering, which it says is the only such native feature available on a platform oriented toward small to medium-sized businesses (SMB).

Product recommendations are common in ecommerce sites, including giants like Amazon or Netflix. They are also increasingly common in email platforms, such as the SMB-oriented Campaign Monitor.

MailChimp points out that Campaign Monitor utilizes an integration with personalization provider Barilliance, for which there is a separate charge.

In MailChimp’s new feature, personalized emails can contain recommendations of products you might be interested in, based on the user’s visits to your website and your site’s sales data. The company claimed that, during its beta test, the Product Recommendations tool was able to correctly predict users’ future purchases more than 98 percent of the time.

Here’s a screen from the Product Recommendations builder:

With Product Recommendations, marketers can automatically include product ideas in an email a few weeks after the last purchase, or they might send suggested products to an inactive customer. So that businesses can utilize an existing product catalog, MailChimp is integrated with ecommerce platforms Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce or BigCommerce.

To utilize the feature, businesses need to have had at least 50 different customers in the past year, over 10 available products and more than 500 orders in the past year. Newer stores that haven’t met these milestones can instead offer top sellers.

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.