How Product Recommendations Enhance Themed Emails

Overview

Themed Emails are campaign-specific emails built around curated topics such as seasonal collections, trends, or special occasions. Unlike BAU Emails, which follow a recurring structure, Themed Emails are designed for targeted campaigns where the content and product sets are intentionally curated for a specific theme.

Both Themed Emails and BAU Emails use the same underlying image-based recommendation technology. However, Themed Emails focus on delivering campaign-specific product selections that align with the editorial theme of the send-out.

Enriched product data is used to select relevant items within the curated theme, and recommendations are rendered as ready-to-use images that fit directly into existing email templates. This approach enables you to pair editorial messaging (e.g., trend highlights or seasonal stories) with automatically updated product selections, allowing campaigns to deliver both context and commerce within a single, easy-to-manage workflow.

Benefits

• Higher Engagement: Themed Emails combine campaign storytelling with dynamically updated product selections, helping maintain attention throughout the email.

• Theme-Aligned Recommendations: Recommendations are generated dynamically within curated, theme-based product sets, ensuring that suggested items align with the context of each campaign.

• Seasonal and Trend Relevance: Curated themes paired with enriched product attributes help surface items that reflect current fashion moments, seasonal trends, and planned campaign focuses.

• Simple Workflow: Recommendations are delivered as ready-to-use image slots (<a>/<img> embeds) that fit into any existing email template; no API calls, dynamic templates, or ESP-specific scripting required.

Integration

Themed Emails are configured through a coordinated workflow involving Mapp’s Style Team and Creative Team.

Typical setup steps:

1. Define campaign themes and product sets: The Style Team collaborates with you to define the campaign theme (e.g., Spring Edit, Occasion Dressing, Holiday Edit), determine the number of products to include, select relevant product sets, and confirm the planned send date.

2. Review and approve visual layouts: The Creative Team prepares the image layouts, visual assets, and overall design to align with your brand’s visual identity and editorial direction. You review and approve the proposed layouts.

3. Generate and deliver image-based recommendation slots: Mapp produces the final image-based product blocks, each delivered as simple <a>/<img> embeds. This setup relies entirely on image-based recommendations and requires no additional coding or API integration.

4. Embed and schedule within your ESP workflow: You insert the generated images into your email template in your ESP (e.g.,Mapp Engage) and proceed with your usual preview, testing, and send-out process.

For a complete integration guide, please visit our developer documentation.