Personalise recommended 'products'

[RvdMgsx]

Hi,

We at gastronomixs.com have a subscription based digital platform where professional chefs get inspired by other top tier chefs. Basically we sell content (recipes - which we call "components"), so our product is digital.

Upcoming year we would like to personalise our emails and show "Recommended components" dynamically in email.

Good to know

- We have 6.300+ components (recipes) on our platform.

- Currently we add components manually to our emails
- In email, a component is basically an image + name + link 

Some ideas:
1. "New components": A feed of newest components shown dynamically into the email, so this email section does no longer have to be added manually.
2. "Last viewed by user": A more behavior driven feed of components shown dynamically in email, since these components differ per user.

3. "Selected for you":  A feed of components based on look a like audience data.

This is common for e-commerce shop. Can this also be done for us?

The question
Can anyone advise us how we can set this up?

Looking forward to hearing from you. Thank you in advance!

Best regards,
Rens

[JeffreyHubspot]

Hey @RvdMgsx! Are you also already using Commerce Hub for your products too?

[RvdMgsx]

Hi Jeffrey, we have Marketing & Service hub professional. Is commerce hub required? 

[KyleJepson]

Hi Rens! 👋🏻 It sounds to me like you want to build a programmable email. I'll be honest, programmable emails are a bit beyond my technical ken, but if you or someone on your team is comfortable coding a custom module, this would unlock a ton of flexibility for you. Your "components" could include name, text, pictures, etc. and be personalized to each recipient.

Written documentation here. 

Helpful video overview here.

I hope this helps!

Kyle Jepson

HubSpot Academy Evangelist

[RvdMgsx]

Hi Kyle, thank you so much for your quick reply. I'll dive into the links you shared and check if we find the solution there. So far the video link leads to "content cannot be found". Can you mention the name of the video or the location where I can find it? 

Thanks again!

Rens

[Victor_Becerra]

Hi Rens,
Thanks for walking us through your use case — dynamic “recommended content” in emails makes perfect sense for a platform like yours.

Since Kyle already pointed you toward programmable email (a great direction!), I’d also love to open this up to others who may have built similar recommendation-style modules or automated content feeds in HubSpot.

Hey @danmoyle @karstenkoehler @BridgetP Happy Thursday! Would you be able to help us out? Any approaches, examples, or best practices would be really helpful here.

Hoping we can gather some guidance to help you move toward a scalable, automated setup.
Victor

[BridgetP · Accepted solution]

Hey @RvdMgsx - I know Kyle already mentioned programmable email but we have a step by step guide with the full code we used in this article which might help! And then we used it in smart modules to get even more specific, a how to is here. 

I personally think this is the smartest way to do it. You could also go down the route of importing the recipes as products and have an email module that pulls in the latest ones. But it wouldn't be very personalised! Categorising the recipes into themes (meat, vegetarian, pastry etc.) and using the programmable/HubDB module is much cleaner and personalised.

Hope these help!! 🙂 

Bridget

[KyleJepson]

Dang. Sorry about that, Rens. It turns out that video content is exclusive to HubSpot partners. I apologize I didn't realize that before -- that's 100% my bad. I'm asking around to see if there is similar content available to customers. Standby.

Kyle