OVERVIEW
A Smart Campaign™ is an automated campaign that dynamically displays personalized content, recommendations, and offers for each shopper, even if it's being sent to whole groups or lists. What this means is you're able to create a unique experience for every person within the shell of a single campaign.
A Smart Campaign™ uses machine learning to automate the segmentation process and determine the best personalized email for every subscriber, even those we don’t have data on.
It continuously learns and improves over time to save you time and increase relevance for your customers. With one campaign, you can personalize 100% of your list and generate more revenue in less time.
NOTE: This is an advanced feature, please contact your Customer Success Manager to upgrade.
While options for configuring a Smart Campaign™ in Bluecore are nearly endless, this article will make it easy to get started by helping you:
Understand the core components of a Smart Campaign™
Determine the best use case for your marketing calendar and goals
Get started with the use case you selected
CORE COMPONENTS
Below are the dynamic elements that can be incorporated into a Smart Campaign™.
SMART CONTENT
Personalized content without the need for additional campaigns or segmentation. Content can be displayed based on customer attributes, product attributes, or time/date.
Smart offers are a way to use smart content. These are personalized offers without the need for additional campaigns or segmentation, like if you wanted your loyalty shoppers to have one coupon and new shoppers to have another. Offers can be displayed based on customer attributes, product attributes or time/date.
SMART RECOMMENDATIONS
Product recs utilizing the Next Best Purchase recommendation rule. These recommend and display whatever products a shopper is most likely to buy next, based on how they interact with the site. Smart Recommendations can be set to display products from across your entire catalog or display category-specific products based on each customer’s top category.
TOP USE CASES
Determine the best approach for setting up a Smart Campaign™ that fits into your current email marketing calendar and helps you meet your goals.
WEEKLY PERSONALIZATION CATCH UP
Ensure that every customer gets a personalized email each week with a weekly recurring Smart Campaign™ that targets customers who have not recently received other personalized emails from your brand.
This use case is most used by customers who are not yet using Bluecore as their ESP, but want to maximize opportunities to engage their customers with a 1:1 personalized email. While your triggered campaigns may only be reaching about 20% of your audience, use this use case to optimize for the additional subset of your audience that may not be receiving a personalized email.
AUTOMATE A WEEKLY BATCH SEND
Save time with a highly personalized Smart Campaign™ that automatically recurs each week to display the most relevant content, products, and offers to each customer. The campaign can replace or enhance one or more weekly promotional sends or fill an empty recurring slot on your email marketing calendar.
This use case is typically adopted by customers who are already using Bluecore as their ESP and want to drive higher performance while improving workflows to launching promotional sends each week.
GETTING STARTED
Before getting started, be sure to have a general understanding of how to set up a campaign within Bluecore.
Next, create a new campaign and select the Smart Campaign™ campaign type. Then, follow the below section for our top recommendations for building optimized Smart Campaigns™ for our top use cases.
Deliverability Note: Due to Smart Campaign’s unique ability to personalize across your entire list, even to customers we don’t have data on yet, every new campaign starts as a full-list send and can be filtered down based on deliverability and use case. In order to ensure you meet industry standards for sending best practices and deliverability, please take care to not deliver a campaign that is higher than your typical Bluecore daily send volume. If you have questions or want to learn more about establishing a deliverability plan to safely ramp your Bluecore send volume, please contact your Customer Success Manager (CSM).
Performance Note: Bluecore’s AI learns and improves campaign performance over time. Our recommendation is to give new Smart Campaigns four sends or 30 days before doing an analysis.
WEEKLY PERSONALIZATION CATCH UP
SCHEDULE
One of the key benefits with Smart Campaign™ is the ability to set it up and forget it. After you initially determine a cadence for this send, you do not need to make updates unless you want to.
If you have access, an advanced option is to enable Send Time Optimization (STO) to better personalize and drive engagement by automatically sending this campaign at the best time of day for each customer. STO is an advanced feature, please contact your CSM to upgrade.
Although you could set this campaign to send every day of the week, Bluecore’s best practice for this use case is a weekly campaign schedule on a day that best integrates with your marketing calendar!
AUDIENCE
Bluecore’s best practice for this use case is to filter the new campaign, which starts as a full list send, to send only to customers who haven’t received a triggered campaign in the 7 days.
Add the below criteria under frequency capping to restrict this group of customers.
SUBJECT LINE
Every campaign needs a subject line that’s inclusive of the content being promoted in the email.
Examples of subject lines that customers have used for this use case:
Top picks for you!
We picked this just for you!
So, how’d we do?
An advanced option is to incorporate a dynamic, personalized subject line using Jinja. Include a specific dynamic product or category specific item to align with your Smart Recommendations. Check out some of our favorite examples below:
FYI that (dynamic product) you’ve had your eyes on 👀
We thought you’d like these (dynamic category name)...
It’s all squared away: (dynamic product) has your name on it.
You just scored big - because (dynamic product) is worth checking out! 😉
Unsure about which dynamic elements to include in a subject line? You can always run an A/B test to see which subject lines are performing better!
SMART RECOMMENDATIONS
Add Smart Recommendations to this campaign to display the most relevant product recommendations to your customers that align with the overall merchandising strategy of the email. By adding Smart Recommendations to this campaign, utilizing Bluecore’s most advanced product recommendation strategy.
How does it work? Smart Recommendations, also known as Next Best Purchase Recommendations, leverages a real-time understanding of the product catalog, customer site behavior and the state of the products at the time of interaction, and what content and recommendations were previously shown in ads/emails and whether these marketing messages generated revenue. While Next Best Purchase and Smart Recommendations are the same today, Bluecore has plans to continue optimizing the Smart Recommendations recommendation rule to further improve performance and our ability to deliver the best 1:1 recommendations for every shopper. Bluecore optimizes and explores recommendations for each individual, ensuring recommendations are delivered regardless of a customer’s available preference data. Click here to learn more about Bluecore’s next best purchase product recommendations.
Additionally, deliver product category specific recommendations by checking the category specific checkbox. Use of this option is typically best practice when you want to ensure the content is consistent with the products shown in the email. For example, you configure your Smart Campaign™ to show content when your top three categories are displayed in the email.
When adding product recommendations to an email, be sure to include at least one product block. You can always level-up the recommendations in this campaign by exploring the number of blocks and layouts that are being shown within the campaign.
CONTENT
Once you’ve added a header and footer to your template, you have several options, from simple to advanced, for adding content into your Smart Campaign template. You can always start basic to get this campaign running and later add additional content as time and resources are available.
If you’re looking to get started quickly, a very basic option would be going without a banner image or any additional content. This option makes Smart Recommendations the true star of the template.
Another option, which is used by many customers who have this use case running, is to incorporate a generic banner image into your template that would be sent to every customer each week. Once your campaign is launched, this can be swapped out any time.
To further personalize the content of this campaign, configure one or more dynamic content blocks Smart Content blocks to align with products included in the email or customers receiving the email.
Top examples of Smart Content for this use case are:
Gender specific content: Add relevance to specific customers with gender related content or linking.
Loyalty specific content: Use a loyalty-specific Smart Content block to acquire or retain loyalty subscribers. Information, including number of loyalty points, could be displayed based on a specific loyalty status.
Product specific content: Display content based on product attributes in Bluecore’s living product catalog.
OFFERS
Offers are a form/use case of smart content, and are not required to get started with Smart Campaign™, but if you’re interested in incorporating offers, you have several options.
If you’re looking to get started quickly, a very basic option is to add a dynamic coupon code to your Smart Campaign™. Click here to learn more about adding a dynamic coupon code.
An advanced option is to incorporate Smart Offers into your template using our Smart Content feature. Examples of Smart Offers for this use case are:
Location specific content: Display content to customers who should or shouldn’t receive location based delivery offers based on a location preference.
Product specific content: Display offers based on product attributes in Bluecore’s living product catalog. For example, display offers eligible for specific products or product categories only when they appear in the email.
Date specific content: Schedule offers to display only on specific dates or times to align with on-site promotions and events to drive awareness.
Customer specific content: Display offers based on Bluecore attributes such as birthday or location.
AUTOMATE A WEEKLY BATCH SEND
SCHEDULE
One of the key benefits of Smart Campaign™ is the ability to set it up and let it run week over week, only making tweaks when you have changes you want to make.
If you have access, an advanced option is to enable Send Time Optimization (STO) to better personalize and drive engagement by automatically sending this campaign at the best time of day for each customer. STO is an advanced feature, please contact your CSM to upgrade.
For this use case, you can use Smart Campaign™ to replace, enhance, or add weekly promotional sends. Bluecore recommends starting with a weekly campaign schedule for each campaign you’re replacing, enhancing or adding. For example, if you’re transitioning your existing Monday send to a Smart Campaign™, this campaign would be set to recur every Monday.
AUDIENCE
Smart Campaign™ audiences start as a full-list send.
This Smart Campaign™ use case aims to enhance, replace, or add promotional emails, so there are typically no additional audience restrictions that need to be applied. However, if full list-send means something different to you than your entire list in your Bluecore accounts, you can add and remove customers from this audience with frequency caps, deliverability criteria, and/or customer attributes.
Keep in mind that any frequency caps that are applied at the account-level are still applied here, unless additional frequency caps are applied at this point or overridden to send to the entire audience.
SUBJECT LINE
Subject lines for this use case typically align with any current on-site promotion that’s incorporated into the email template or a more generic message.
Examples of generic subject lines that customers have used for this use case:
Up to 50% off our summer sale! ☀️
50% off NOW EXTENDED!
Picks For You and Free Shipping Inside! ✨
An advanced option is to incorporate a dynamic, personalized subject line using Jinja. Include a specific dynamic product or category specific item. Check out some of our customer use cases below:
FYI that (dynamic product) you’ve had your eyes on 👀
Check out these (dynamic category name)...
It’s all squared away: (dynamic product) has your name on it.
You just scored big - because (dynamic product) is worth checking out! 😉
Unsure about which dynamic elements to include in a subject line? You can always run an A/B test to see which subject lines are performing better!
SMART RECOMMENDATIONS
Add Smart Recommendations to this campaign to display the most relevant product recommendations to your customers that align with the overall merchandising strategy of the email. By adding Smart Recommendations to this campaign, utilizing Bluecore’s most advanced product recommendation strategy.
How is it different? Smart Recommendations, also known as Next Best Purchase Recommendations, leverages a real-time understanding of the product catalog, customer site behavior and the state of the products at the time of interaction, and what content and recommendations were previously shown in ads/emails and whether these marketing messages generated revenue. Bluecore optimizes and explores recommendations for each individual, ensuring recommendations are delivered regardless of a customer’s available preference data. Click here to learn more about Bluecore’s next best purchase product recommendations.
Additionally, deliver product category specific recommendations by checking the category specific checkbox. Use of this option is typically best practice when you want to ensure the content is consistent with the products shown in the email. For example, you configure your Smart Campaign™ to show content when your top three categories are displayed in the email.
When adding product recommendations to an email, be sure to include at least one product block. You can always level-up the recommendations in this campaign by exploring the number of blocks and layouts that are being shown within the campaign.
CONTENT
After you’ve added a header and footer to your email template, level-up the email content by adding Smart Content into your Smart Campaign™ template.
Use Smart Content to incorporate a generic banner image into your template that would be sent to every customer each week. Once your campaign is launched, this can be swapped out any time for a more advanced example.
An advanced option is to incorporate Smart Offers into your template using our Smart Content feature. Examples of Smart Offers for this use case are:
Product specific content: Display offers based on product attributes in Bluecore’s living product catalog. For example, display offers eligible for specific products or product categories only when they appear in the email.
Date specific content: Schedule offers to display only on specific dates or times to align with on-site promotions and events to drive awareness.
Customer specific content: Display offers based on Bluecore attributes such as birthday or location.
OFFERS
Add Smart Offers using smart content blocks showcase offers or events that are currently running onsite that would have been previously included in a promotional email.
A top example of Smart Offers for this use case is:
Date specific content: Display content only on specific dates or times to align with on-site promotions and events to drive awareness. Collapse the content block and show nothing when an on-site promotion isn’t running. For example, a 50% off season-specific sale.
FAQ
Q: Why aren’t my product recommendations matching my Smart Content within my Smart Campaign™?
A: Smart Content is attempting to match content with the types of products that are recommended most frequently to a given customer in order to create a coherent message but occasionally this match may not appear to be as coherent as expected. This is typically due to one of the following reasons:
1. The customer you are viewing a proof/sent email for is interested in products across several different categories and Smart Content is picking the content option that aligns best with the most common product type this customer prefers.
2. The product attribute requirements that are configured within the Smart Content option represent a subset of products within the category that Category Specific Smart Recommendations are recommending products from (e.g. Smart Content shows Red Running Shoes while the product recommendations contain running shoes where some are red alongside a few different colors).
3. You are viewing a proof/sent email for a customer that was shown the Smart Content Fallback option because a product specific match was not available to select from.
Q: When will I be able to see a breakdown of reporting by Smart Content option within a Smart Campaign™?
A: At this time, reporting is not available for Smart Content-level reporting. However, you can achieve this currently by ignoring campaign-level tracking within global widget configuration. This allows web analytics to track clicks from a given Smart Content option as the click source.
Q: Can I use Smart Campaign features in other campaign types?
A: Yes, any combination of the Smart Campaign™ components can be used in other Bluecore campaigns.
Q: How long should I wait for Bluecore's models to learn and enough to perform better than other product recommendation strategies?
A: Bluecore’s AI learns and improves campaign performance over time. Our recommendation is to give the campaign four sends or 30 days before doing an analysis.