Working with Commerce marketing automation campaigns

Current version: 10.1

You use Commerce marketing automation campaigns to re-engage with customers who have visited your storefront. This can mean confirming an order placed, inquiring about an abandoned cart, or recommending products.

When you add a Commerce Marketing Automation Campaign to a storefront site during site creation, a new Commerce marketing automation campaign is instantiated from the Commerce marketing automation template. This template includes the Send commerce email activity, which lets you include contact, order, and cart information in an email campaign. The Send commerce email marketing action differs from the standard Send email action in that it includes the shopping cart information needed to personalize the email message with the content from the customer’s cart. Shopping cart information is included as custom values in the marketing automation campaign when the customer is enrolled in the campaign. The following custom values are used:

  • The shop name and Cart ID are used in the Abandoned Cart marketing automation campaign.

  • The shop name and Order ID are used in the New Order Placed campaign.

The Send commerce email action copies all custom values from the marketing automation campaign and uses them as query parameters for the Email Experience Manager.

Important

Do not use the Send email action in place of the Send commerce email action.

Commerce marketing automation campaigns include specific commerce elements. All Commerce campaigns support multiple enrollments and both authenticated and anonymous customers.

Note

For details on the implementation of Commerce marketing automation campaigns, see the Marketing Automation API for the storefront.

Commerce Abandoned Cart MA Campaign

You use this campaign to re-engage with a customer who has visited your storefront but not made a purchase. As shown in the following figure, the Commerce Abandoned Cart marketing automation campaign contains two specific storefront actions:

  • Send commerce email

  • Raise abandoned cart event

The Abandoned Cart MA Campaign

Cart activity on the storefront enrolls customers into a marketing automation campaign with the following characteristics:

  • When a customer enters the campaign, there is a delay before the customer starts moving through the campaign. By default, it is one day.

  • In the course of the campaign, there are three decision points:

    • Did the customer manipulate the shopping cart?

    • Is the shopping cart empty?

    • Is an email address available for the customer?

    If the customer has actively updated the cart, the cart is not considered to be abandoned and the customer is returned to the starting point and further processing is delayed for another day.

  • If the customer has not completed a purchase, still has items in the cart after one day has passed without activity, and their contact email address is available, a commerce email campaign is initiated to persuade the customer to return to the storefront to make a purchase.

  • If the customer still has not made a purchase within the given time frame (delay), which is one day by default, the raise abandoned cart event tags the customer as having abandoned the shopping cart and the customer is removed from the campaign.

If a purchase is made at any point, the customer is removed from the campaign and does not receive an email.

Commerce New Order Placed MA Campaign

You use this campaign to automatically confirm an order when a customer has completed a purchase on the storefront. As shown in the following figure, the New Order Placed marketing automation campaign uses a specific storefront action Send commerce email.

The Send commerce email action

Cart activity on the storefront enrolls customers into the marketing automation campaign with the following characteristics:

  • When a customer enters the campaign, a Commerce email is sent to confirm the order.

  • There is a delay of 14 days.

  • By default, the Product Recommendations email message is delivered two weeks after a purchase is made, but you can configure this to meet your needs.

You can also use the New Order Placed Marketing Automation campaign to recommend products to a customer who has completed a purchase from your web store. Which products are recommended is determined by the relationships defined in the catalog and by using:

  • The Order ID when the Recommended Products email message is part of a New Order Placed MA campaign.

  • The Products query (sitecore/Content/<tenant>/<site>/Storefront Emails/Messages/<email campaign>/Recommended products/Email recommended products) when the Recommended Products email message is part of a Regular email campaign.

  • The order ID from the last order placed when the order ID cannot be retrieved. The order ID is retrieved from the CommerceInteractionsCache.

Note

When the default implementation of the RecommendedProductsProvider does not return recommended products, it might be because the products ordered do not have related products set on the product definition or there is no order ID. If this is the case, by default, the Recommended Products email message is not sent.

The CheckForCommerceFlag processor in the SendEmail pipeline is responsible for intercepting the email sending process, verifying the flag, and aborting the pipeline if the flag exists. To change the default behavior, disable the Sitecore.Commerce.XA.Feature.Emails.SendEmail.config patch file ( \App_Config\Include\Feature\Commerce).

For more information, see Configuring an email rendering to output product content.

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