Promotions, Marketing and Content Pages Customer Personalization

In order to maximize the promotion of your products, Magento offers several great ways for your customers to keep track of products and changes in your site. Giving your customers control over which aspects of your site they can monitor gives them a more personalized experience and encourages them to be more involved in your site in general.

Wishlist

The Wishlist is one of the more well known promotion features. It allows your customers to designate products that they wish to purchase (or have someone purchase for them) at a later date. Having your customers able to save products to a Wishlist greatly increases the likelihood that they will remember the products that interested them. To enable Wishlists in your site, navigate to System > Configuration, click on the Wishlist tab in the left column, and select Yes from the Enabled drop-down. This will enable the Add to Wishlist link for every product listed in the category pages, as well as in all

product pages. When a customer clicks this link for a given product, they will be directed to their personal Wishlist page (if they are not logged in, they will be prompted to do so, or register first, and then they will be directed to the Wishlist page).

This page lists all items that your customers have added.

For each product, there is a field for comments where your customers can make personal notes for each product, the date the product was added to the Wishlist, and a link to Add to Cart. At the bottom of the Wishlist is the option to Add All to Cart, and Share Wishlist. The Share Wishlist feature is a good word of mouth tool for customers to promote products they like to their friends, as well as a way to informs their friends about products that they would like to receive as a gift.

Configuration for the Share Wishlist feature is in the same page as above. Select the Email Template which the Share Wishlist email will use. The Email Sender is the address from which the Share Wishlist email will be sent. For more information on how to configure these email templates and addresses, refer to Chapter 6: Customers. There is also a Wishlist quick view located in the right column of category, product, and CMS pages, where your customers can view a summary of the products in the wishlist, and add each product to the cart. The Wishlist can be accessed via this quick view, the My Wishlist link in the header, or via the My Account page. Additionally, the Wishlist has several more features

that are discussed in more detail in other sections. There are RSS feeds available for your customers and the friends with whom they share the Wishlist, which will be described in more detail below. The Wishlist can be accessed in the admin in a customer’s page and during admin Order creation, where products can be moved between it and the Order, which will be covered more in Chapter 8: Managing Orders.

Compare Products

The Compare Products feature is a useful way for customers to quickly compare product attribute information in a side-by-side view, and it similar to the Wishlist in several respects. The Add to Compare link appears in category and product pages, however when the link is clicked, your customers will not be directed to the Compare page. The product will be added to the Compare Products quick view (also in the right column), and the Compare page will only be accessed when the Compare Items button is clicked in the quick view.

This produces a pop-up window, with a table of all products in the list. Each product receives a separate column and each attribute name receives a separate row. You can designate which attributes will display in this page via the Comparable on Front-end drop-down in the Attributes page (refer back to Chapter 3). The products in the Compare page do not necessarily have to belong to the same Attribute Set, or contain values for all the same attributes. If one product does not have a value for an attribute which another product in the Compare page contains, it will simply be left blank. Within this page, your customers will also have the ability to add products to the Wishlist or cart. Additionally, like the Wishlist, you will have the ability to access the Products in Compare List during admin Order creation in order to move products into the Order.

Note: Only Simple Products can be added to the Compare Products list.

Recently Viewed/Compared Products

When a customer removes an item from the Compare Products list, Magento continues to keep track of the item, so that your customers can easily find it if they decide to purchase it later on. Also in the right column, towards the bottom of the

page, is the Recently Compared Products list. It contains a link to the page of each product which has recently been removed from the Compare Products list. There is also a Recently Viewed Products list, which works the same way, and lists all products for which your customers have recently viewed the pages. Both of these can also be accessed in the admin during admin Order creation, just like the features above, where you can move products into the Order. To configure the settings for these two features, navigate to System > Configuration, and click the Catalog tab in the left column. In the Show for Current drop-down, select the level at which these lists will save product information. For example, if you select Website, these lists will show all products compared or viewed within the same Website.

Additionally, Magento by default comes with a pregenerated Home page CMS page, which has a prepopulated Layout Update XML field (more details about this later in the chapter), containing the code that allows both the Recently Viewed Products and Recently Compared Products to display at the bottom of the Home page so that your customers can see lists of these products very prominently each time they visit your site.

New Products

Along with the Recently Viewed and Compared Products, there is also code contained in that Layout Update XML to display new products. Chapter 3 described the process for entering the Set Product as New from/to Date when creating a new product, and this is where that date range is presented. If you have chosen to use this XML code, all products with a date range including the current date will display at the bottom of the home page (or any other page to where you may have copied the XML code), above the Recently Viewed and Compared Products. This is a great promotion tool to let your customers know about newly added products to your site each time they arrive at your home page. Additionally, you can redesign a product page or change some attributes and then set it as new in order to rekindle some interest in that product.

RSS Feeds

In addition to the XML update for newly added products, the new product date range also controls which products will appear in the New Products RSS feed. This is actually just one of several RSS Feeds to which your customers can subscribe, keeping them informed about changes to your site, or even changes to your customers’ personal accounts that they have initiated themselves. In the front-end, there are three different places where customers can sign up for RSS feeds. If you navigate to System >

Configuration, click on the RSS Feeds tab in the left column, and Select Enable in the

RSS Config section, an RSS link with the RSS logo will appear in the footer of your site on the front-end. This is the first of the three locations where customers can sign up for RSS Feeds. This link will contain links to any of the Catalog section RSS Feeds that you have enabled, including the New Products feed. If you do not have any Catalog feeds enabled, this page will be blank. Your customers can click on each enabled feed link and subscribe to it individually. Depending on which feed reader they choose, the feed may include all corresponding items, or only the most recent 20. For example, for the Special Products feed, one reader may display all products that currently have a special price, whereas another reader may display only the 20 most recently created specials.

The second location is in the Wishlist, as referenced in the Wishlist section above. First, however, you must select Enable in the Wishlist section of the Configuration page. This will create an RSS FEED link in the Wishlist page, so your

customers can subscribe to a feed listing the items currently in their Wishlist. However, since your customers already have access to the list of items currently in their Wishlist (that is, by logging in to their account and viewing their Wishlist page), the RSS feature will probably be more useful for sharing the Wishlist with friends. In the Share Wishlist feature, which was described in the Wishlist section above, there is a checkbox with a description reading, “Check this checkbox if you want to add a link to an rss feed to your wishlist.” This checkbox will only appear if the Wishlist RSS is enabled. If it is checked, the Share Wishlist email that is sent will include a link so that your customers’ friends can subscribe to feeds of your customers’ Wishlists, allowing your customers’ friends to stay current with great gift ideas.

The third location is in the Order page of the My Account section. First, however, you must select Enable in the Customer Order Status Notification drop-down in the Configuration page. This will create a Subscribe to Order Status link at the top of the page of every Order that your customer has placed. They must enter the My Account page, and click on an individual Order in order to access this feed link. When a customer signs up for this feed, they will only be receiving order status updates for the Order from which they accessed the link. This way, they have the option to keep track only of the Orders in which they are interested. Whenever you update the status of that Order, your customer will receive an RSS

feed notifying them of the change. There is more information on the My Account page and all of its features in the next chapter, and more information about order statuses in Chapter 8: Managing Orders.