About Purchase History Product Recommendations

Use individual contact purchase data to prioritize and promote your store's relevant items. Add product recommendations based on a customer’s purchase history to your emails to increase revenue and encourage repeat purchases.

In this article, you'll learn how purchase history product recommendations work, and how to use them in your emails.

Things to know

Here are some things to know.

• This feature is available with a supported online store or custom API 3.0 integration.
• You may need to wait up to 7 days after a store is connected before recommendations are generated.
• Mailchimp for Magento users must make sure all products added to Mailchimp include a valid image URL and product variant.
• Purchase history recommendations will display in a product rec content block only if your connected store sold at least 10 products to at least 50 customers, with a total of 500 orders in the last year.
• Product recommendations based on a customer’s purchase history can't be customized or filtered. Use Product Recommendation content blocks in the new builder or in the classic builder for more control over which products to display.

How purchase history product recommendations work

After you connect your store and turn on e-commerce tracking, purchase data is sent to your account each time someone clicks a link and makes a purchase. Mailchimp analyzes this data to identify and rank up to 10 unique product recommendations for each subscribed contact. You can then add these recommendations to regular and automated emails.

Purchase history product recommendations pull from your entire catalog and work best with a lot of e-commerce data. To use this feature, your store must meet these minimum requirements.

• 10 products
• 50 customers
• 500 orders in the last year

If your store doesn't meet the minimum requirements, purchase history product recommendations won’t be displayed in a product recommendation block. Choose any of the other available product recommendations. For example, best sellers display the 15 most popular products purchased from your store in the last 30 days and won’t include out-of-stock products or products without an image.

What you can do with purchase history product recommendations

Promote purchase history recommendations in your marketing emails. Choose how many products to include, as well as how they’ll display.

Our data ranks how relevant products are to a particular customer, where 1 is the most relevant. Use these rankings to choose the range of products to promote.

To increase the effectiveness of emails that include purchase history product recommendations, use segments to target subscribed contacts with similar purchase histories.

Example uses

Here are some ways to use purchase history product recommendations in your email.

• Tailor your promotions
  Tailor the number of recommendations you include to effectively target customers. For example, recommend multiple products as part of a large sale or promotion at your store, or promote a single product to a smaller segment of subscribed contacts who share product preferences.
• Encourage repeat buyers
  Recommend relevant products to a segment of loyal customers who have made recent repeat purchases.
• Target seasonal buyers
  Combine products based on a customer's history with purchase date segmenting criteria to alert customers of relevant products at times when they are most likely to purchase items from your store.

View products based on a customer’s history data

In the Product activity section of your report, you'll be able to view the total number of sales produced by purchase history product recommendations and the percentage of total revenue generated by those sales.

Any audience that has a store connected to it will display product recommendations in your contacts' profiles. Contacts who’ve made a purchase will receive products based on their purchase history, and those who haven’t made a purchase will receive top sellers in your store.

If you have a Standard plan or higher, click on any contact in your audience, then scroll to the Predictive analytics section. For contacts who have made at least 1 purchase in your online store, we’ll show their estimated customer lifetime value (CLV) and likelihood to purchase again.

Get started

Ready to add purchase history product recommendations to your emails? Here are some resources to help you get started.

Use Product Recommendation Content Blocks in the New Builder
Use Product Recommendation Content Blocks in the Classic Builder
Segment an Audience by by Purchase Activity