Design a global block to use as a header in your emails, to showcase your clients the most popular products of the week and recommended products. This allows you to speed up the email layout process whenever you want to create a new email that includes these elements.
In this article, you’ll learn how to use an email global block to send your contacts the best-selling products of the week in your store, along with some customer-related recommendations.
Implementation time: 20 min.
Difficulty: Low.
When to use it: When you want to insert a global block to showcase products in your emails.
If you need more information about email global blocks and how they work, you can find it in this article.
STEP 1: Appearance Setup
1. Go to the Email Global Blocks section, click on Create Global Block, select the desired appearance for the block, assign a name, and click on Go to editor.
STEP 2: Building the Block
(In this section, elements that will make up the global block are added and configured. In this example, an Image block to include our logo, a text block for a pre-recommendation message, and two Product blocks for the actual recommendations).
2. Add an Image element to insert the image that will head your email and go to its configuration.
3. Click on Upload image to select the image from your device, or paste a link in Upload image from URL to add it if it's hosted online.
4. Add a Text element and in its configuration, write a message aligned with your strategy to include in the block, such as a call-to-action to check the recommended products.
5. Add a Products (NEW) element. This will be the block that, after configuring it in the workflow (step 3) will display the most popular products of the week.
6. Access the product element configuration and, in the Element Name field, assign a name to later identify it in your workflow, such as "Most popular products".
7. Edit the visual appearance of the Products element so it matches your strategy.
You can edit the visual appearance of the Products element as a template or from the HTML editor.
8. Add another Products (NEW) element. This will be the block that, once configured in the workflow (step 3), displays the recommended products for the contact.
9. Assign a name to this second block to identify it in your workflow, such as "Recommended products". Edit its visual appearance to match your strategy, just like the previous block.
10. Once your block design is complete, save it so you can use it in your email content.
STEP 3: Creating the workflow that sends the email
(In this section, you will configure the workflow that sends an email containing the global block, to display the best-selling and recommended products to each contact).
11. Go to “Workflows” and click on Create new workflow.
12. Click on (Edit node settings) of the “Start” node. In Select a restriction, check "Entire list". In Select the data source, check "All existing and new ones" and click on Update.
13. Add a “Get products” node and access its settings.
14. At the top of the configuration screen, hover your cursor over the node name and edit it. Assign a name like "Best-selling products" so you can easily recognize it later when associating variables.
15. To select the use case, drag "Best-selling products" to the right block. This will retrieve the most sold products from your eCommerce.
16. Click Next .
17. In Select time period for purchases, choose Best-sellers of the last week.
18. Click Apply.
19. Connect a second “Get products” node to the first one.
20. Access the configuration of the second "Get products" node and, just as you did with the first one, rename it for easy recognition during variable association. In this case, for example, "Recommended products".
21. To select the use case, drag “Automatically related to a contact” to the right block and click Next . This will retrieve the products that are automatically related to each contact.
22. Complete the use case settings and click Apply.
23. Connect a “Send Email” node to the second “Get products” node.
24. Once in its configuration, click on Create new content to create the email you will send.
25. In the popup window, at the bottom of the Components panel, you will find the global blocks you have created.
26. Drag the global block you created in step 2 to the email design panel.
27. Add other blocks to your email design to adapt it to your strategy. Once ready, save it and continue configuring the node.
28. Complete the sending details for your email and proceed in the node configuration to the Variables step.
29. On this screen, Variables, drag the data from the list on the left to their corresponding variable.
30. Link the product information retrieved from the first "Get products" node, in this case the best-selling products, to the variables of the first Products element in your email. To do this, match the Connectif fields (left column) with your email variables (right column):
- Drag the Name field to match the {{title}} variable. This way, the variable will include the name of the product from your catalog.
- Drag the Detail URL field to match the {{buttonUrl}} variable. This way, the variable will include the URL of the product’s detail page from your catalog.
- Drag the Image URL field to match the {{imageUrl}} variable. This way, the variable will include the product image.
- Drag the Unit Price field to match the {{unitPrice}} variable. This way, the variable will include the current unit price of the product.
- Drag the Description field to match the {{description}} variable. This way, the variable will include the product description.
31. Link the product information retrieved from the second "Get products" node, in this case, the recommended products for the customer, with the second Products element in your email. To do this, match the Connectif fields (left column) with your email variables (right column):
- Drag the Name field to match the {{title}} variable. This way, the variable will include the name of the product from your catalog.
- Drag the Detail URL field to match the {{buttonUrl}} variable. This way, the variable will include the URL of the product’s detail page from your catalog.
- Drag the Image URL field to match the {{imageUrl}} variable. This way, the variable will include the product image.
- Drag the Unit Price field to match the {{unitPrice}} variable. This way, the variable will include the current unit price of the product.
- Drag the Description field to match the {{description}} variable. This way, the variable will include the product description.
32. Go to the Limitations tab and, within this interface, click Limit per contact to enable it, and select 1 so that only one email is sent to each contact.
33. Save and activate your workflow to send the email with your global block that includes personalized products.
Success!
Your global block is now ready to be included in your emails quickly and easily whenever you want.
Keep learning!
To make the most of your Connectif account, we recommend continuing with the following articles:
- Email Editor, to get a deeper understanding of all email editor functionalities.
- Creating a Workflow Express: sending an email, to quickly create and activate an email send.
- Create personalized product block in an email, to send products of interest to your clients.
- Creating Emails with Copilot, to generate an email in minutes using the Copilot assistant.