Email campaigns are an excellent way to keep in touch with your customers and get them to come back to your store, but have you ever wanted to target a specific group based on what they ordered?  Maybe you’re carrying new products that would be of special interest to people who purchased something similar in the past, or you just want to send a coupon out to people who ordered a certain product.

In this post we’ll review how you can target emails with our Mailing List System by using a free Order API that we have available for our ShopSite Pro customers.

Configure Your List

Before implementing this process your contact list may need a slight change to its settings.  Since customers will order from your site many times we need to store the data from all their orders.  Therefore your list needs to allow duplicate contacts so the API can add the customer each time they place an order.

Allow duplicate emails to subscribe

On our Mailing List System, edit the list you want to use and click on the “Additional & Advanced Settings” link below the “Name of List” field.  Turn on the “Allow duplicate emails to subscribe” option which allow the API to add duplicates.  Just be sure that the “Allow duplicate emails to be sent” setting is turned off, because you do not want to send duplicate emails to the same person.

Storing The Data

Adding the "order_product_sku" Subscriber Field

On the Lists screen of the Mailing List System there is an option for “Subscriber Fields”.  With that feature you can add extra fields to a contact list to store additional data about each person.

For this example we’ll be adding a field named “order_product_skus” to store all the SKUs a customer had on their order.

TIP: Be sure to select the correct contact list in the “For use in” select box.

Adding the API

When you’re ready to have this process enabled on your ShopSite Pro store please contact us and let us know the name of the extra field you’re using as well as the name of the contact list you want the customers added to.  We’ll add the API script to your store and configure it for you.

The "order_product_skus" Field

Customer details and the SKUs they ordered will then begin populating your contact list.  For example, in this screenshot you can see our test customer ordered SKUs “dvd2″ and “4oz”.

Sending Your Campaign

When you’re creating a new campaign, one of the first steps is to select the contact list that you want to send to.

On the bottom of that screen, right above the Back & Next buttons, is a link for “Segment my selected list(s)”.  Click on that link and an area will appear where you can configure search segments.

Segment My Selected Lists

This is where you will select your extra field and enter the criteria that you want to search for in order to determine if the customer should be included on the newsletter.  In our sample we have configured our segment to include just the customers who have a SKU of “dvd2″ in the their “order_product_skus” field.  This will cause our test user shown above to be included when this mailing goes out.  Any contact who does not have “dvd2″ on its list of SKUs will be ignored.

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This method of using an extra field and list segments is not limited to just the product SKU.  Instead of the SKU you could store the product names, a value from an extra product field such as the brand name, or just about any other field available in ShopSite.  If you’re interested in setting this up with a different field just let us know.