In this era of globalization, businesses leverage the vast and expansive outreach of the internet to engage, retain and expand their customer base. The internet allows organizations to be headquartered in one particular geographical location yet attract customers from across the entire world by means of their official website. That being stated, an organization's official website usually serves as the first point of contact with prospective customers and it can thus be utilized to enhance the brand’s awareness.

It is for this reason, organizations invest a great deal of time in making their websites both convenient to use as well as aesthetic in appearance in order to attract traffic, since more visitors means higher probability of gaining conversions. Nowadays, organizations design their websites in such a manner that potential customers can not only view products but also purchase them online on an ad-hoc basis. In other words, these days visitors can become first-time paying customers by buying products directly from the brand’s official website. 

However, there are times when visitors simply view the products and communicate the intent of purchasing them by adding them to their online buying cart but do not actually materialize the purchase. Businesses understand that when a customer abandons before finalizing a purchase, then that does not necessarily mean that the customer was not interested in purchasing the product in the first place. The reasons for a customer abandoning mid-checkout could be as varied as not having a credit card at the moment of purchase, having an intention to explore elsewhere for similar products or services in order to compare price and quality before making the final decision or it could be that the customer simply wanted to tour the website in order to make a purchase in the near future.

Whenever visitors perform events like abandoning their cart mid-purchase or viewing a specific category of products online, businesses ensure that visitors are reminded about those particular products as a courteous gesture of being considerate about their prospective clients’ needs and product preferences. Organizations employ an ecommerce technique viz. dispatching automated, targeted and adequately timed email notifications to formally reach out to such potential customers, who expressed interest in purchasing products, but for some genuine reason, ultimately didn’t materialize the purchase.

This strategic approach to remind visitors, encourages them to continue their purchase process from the point where they abandoned it and thereby helps organizations to boost conversions. Businesses have multiple visitors from all around the world who visit a myriad of webpages on their brands’ official website and each visitor is unique in the sense that he/she might view a different combination of products. However, businesses aim to dispatch only relevant and appropriate email notifications to each visitor i.e. remind each potential customer exclusively about those specific products that he/she viewed or intended to purchase. This is because irrelevant intimations can be perceived as a dedicated effort by the organization to promote and sell its products.

NotifyVisitors enables you to design journeys/workflows incorporating email campaigns in such a manner that each potential customer gets automatically notified exclusively about those specific products which he/she expressed interest in by viewing them on your brand’s official website or intended to purchase by adding them to his/her online shopping cart. In this guide we articulate the process of dispatching such email campaigns through journeys.

Let’s begin

The primary prerequisite to dispatch the aforementioned type of email campaigns is to first create a journey. To learn more about creating a journey, kindly read our article titled 'How to create a journey'. Proceed as follows in order to create and deploy the foregoing type of email notifications through journeys:

1. While designing your journey, select an appropriate event such as 'Order Place' or 'Add To Cart' that would trigger the journey’s execution and if necessary, apply additional condition(s) to this particular event in order to granularly control its triggering. Once you have configured the main event trigger, click on the 'Save' button present within the 'Edit Main Event' pop-up (process illustration: kindly check the gif provided below).

2. Next, from the 'Actions' tab, drag and drop the 'Email' channel/option on to the journey designing dashboard. Upon doing so, a new pop-up titled 'Email' would appear on-screen wherein you can either choose a pre-existing email campaign or choose to create a new email campaign from scratch and thereby include it within your journey’s flow. Here in this article, for the sake of explaining the process of populating products from events, we will choose the 'Create Email' option.

3. Once you click on the 'Create Email' option present within the pop-up titled 'Email', a new frame would appear on-screen which would allow you to configure and design your email campaign in three consecutive steps viz. Recipients, Content and Review. Enter the campaign details in the 'Recipients' section and click on the button titled 'Continue To Content'.

4. Click on the 'Submit' button within the 'Email' pop-up. Next, link the journey’s Main Event Trigger’s node with that of the Email Campaign’s as illustrated in the gif provided above. This would activate the 'Populate Products From Events' option within the configurational settings available for the email campaign. Once you connect the nodes, a new pop-up titled 'Time To Trigger' will appear on-screen wherein you can set the time delay after which the email campaign will get dispatched once the main event within the journey gets triggered.
5. Next, hover the cursor over the email campaign box and click on the campaign’s title. Upon doing so, the 'Edit Email Settings' pop-up would appear on-screen. Click on the tiny pencil shaped icon within the pop-up in order to re-open the email configuration frame (for step nos. 5, 6 and 7, kindly check the gif provided below).
6. Next, click on the 'Continue To Content' button and fill in the required details in the 'Campaign Content' section and then click on the 'Drag & Drop Editor' option. Upon doing so, you will be offered to either create a template for your email campaign from scratch or choose a pre-designed template from a template list.
7. Once you have prepared your template, click on the 'Rows' tab and from the drop down select the 'Search products' option. Upon doing so a new pop-up titled 'Browse product' would appear on-screen within which you’ll find the 'Populate Products From Events' button. Click on this button (process illustrated in the gif provided below).

8. Upon clicking on the 'Populate Products From Events' button, you will be redirected to the 'Configure Field Event Mapping' screen/frame.

9. Once you have mapped the attributes against the appropriate fields from within the 'Configure Field Event Mapping' frame, click on the button titled 'Add Product'. Upon doing so, you will be provided with the option to choose between two types of product display layouts viz. Vertical and Horizontal. Choose the desired layout and click on the 'Add Product' button once again (for steps nos. 9, 10, 11 and 12, kindly check the gif provided below).

10. Upon doing so, you will automatically exit the 'Configure Field Event Mapping' frame and you will be redirected to the 'Rows' tab which will now contain a drag and drop template of product details (process illustration: kindly check the gif provided below).

Simply drag and drop this template into the email content section and place it wherever you wish to display the list of products. This would populate your email campaign with the various products chosen for purchase by the customer.

11. Configure the remaining settings (if any) for your email campaign and then click on the 'Save' button located at the top-right corner of the frame. Now, exit the frame by clicking on the ‘cross’ button located at the top-left corner of the frame.  Upon doing so, you’ll be redirected to the 'Edit Email Setting' pop-up. Click on the 'Submit' button within this pop-up.

12. Save and publish your journey.

This way NotifyVisitors enables you to dispatch automated email campaigns that timely intimate customers exclusively about those products which they intended to purchase.