Preparing email campaigns and communications to promote your e-commerce products can be a time-consuming task. Manually retrieving product information from the site, such as image, title, price, description, and link to the page, can become repetitive and tedious, especially if you have to do it multiple times for each communication.
The MagNews Product Picker simplifies this process, allowing you to:
- search products in the catalog
- select products to include in the communication
- modify the information accurately if necessary
All this happens in just a few clicks, with product information automatically retrieved, eliminating manual copy/paste steps that often lead to errors.
If your MagNews account is integrated with one of the standard e-commerce connectors (Magento, Shopify, Prestashop), the product catalog information retrieval functionalities are already available.
For more insights:
- Magento - How to use the product catalog
- Shopify - How to use the product catalog
- Prestashop - How to use the product catalog
In these cases, information is not imported into MagNews but is retrieved in real-time during asset creation, such as a newsletter.
In this article, we will explore how to configure the Product Picker in contexts where you do not use one of the standard platform connectors.
Product catalog data table
The fundamental prerequisite to configure your Product Picker is to have a data table on MagNews, updated and synchronized, containing all the relevant information of your product catalog.
Learn how to create and import your catalog through Google Shopping Feed and other methods.
Configure the Product Picker with dynamic feed
Once the Product Catalog is prepared and populated, it's time to configure the Product Picker object.
From Journey Lab, in the Dynamic Feed section, create a new Data Feed, specifying its name and data source. To build the Product Picker, select the table containing your catalog as the data source.
Next, indicate which table attributes you want to use in your custom objects. For the products, information such as title, price, description, category, image, and link to the product page are essential. You can customize the feed by adding other attributes present in the table.
For each selected attribute, MagNews will provide a placeholder to use for displaying the information within the content of your messages.
As the final step, to enable the data feed as a picker, activate the Available for manual selection option, also indicating the attribute that points to the product image link.
Advanced configurations
For most cases, the basic configuration is sufficient to activate a Product Picker. However, there are situations where advanced options may be useful, such as:
- Product Picker for brand: if the catalog contains products from multiple brands, you can create dedicated pickers for each using content filters.
- Product Sorting: if you want the product list in the picker to be sorted in a specific way (e.g., by descending price), you can use the content sorting option.
Create the communication with your products
After configuring the table and the Product Picker feed, you can use your products in communications.
When creating a new communication, choose the Inspire template from the standard library or a custom template derived from Inspire.
Content configured through Dynamic Feed is accessible only using the Inspire template or a custom template derived from it.
Styles
The communication inherits the styles from the brand kit. You will find the logo, fonts, and color palette already preset. To modify them, click the Styles icon; a section will appear on the right allowing you to change various options (learn more by reading the article Create a communication using a template).
Choosing the object and personalizing content
Start creating your communication by adding a new section from the catalog by clicking the Add section button.
In the Dynamic Feed section of the catalog, you will find a series of ready-to-use objects to create different layouts with product lists. Select the object that best suits your communication layout.
Make sure to link the content to be displayed to the parameters set in the feed. You can modify individual elements by setting the correct placeholders.
For example, correctly set the product name with the syntax [temp:item.title{Product Name}], where item.title is the placeholder indicated in the feed and the content in curly brackets represents the default (or placeholder value) to appear in the Designer.
Or set the price to display for your product correctly by entering the placeholder temp:item.price.
All dynamic content must be correctly linked to the respective placeholder.
Once everything is configured, save the object in the catalog as custom to speed up future reuse.
Inserting products
After correctly linking the content, go to edit the entire section. In the Content tab, ensure the content is connected to the Dynamic Feed. In the What to show the contact selection, set the option Content selection and click Add.
In the pop-up that appears, you will be able to choose products from the catalog.
Use the available filters to search for products by brand, category, code, description, etc.
Once the products are selected, confirm with the Add button.
Content modification
Sometimes the content retrieved from the catalog is not suitable or already correct to be included in the communication; for example, the description or name might be too long, the price incorrect, or you simply want to customize some elements.
For this, you can go to Edit on each individual product.
modify one or more attributes that need to be changed.
Content translation
Another possibility for customization, very useful in multilingual contexts, is the ability to translate content; the translated product catalog content is not always available.
In these cases, by activating multi-language management, it is possible to localize all the content of the products selected by the product picker along with the rest of the standard content.
Preview
To verify that everything is set up correctly, click the Preview button.