Widgets support all modern email service providers without laborious back-end integration, meaning that you can go live merely in minutes! This tutorial walks you through the steps how to create your first email widget and includes links to other associated articles such as FAQs.

Navigate to Emails > Email Widgets and Click create a new widget, which will open up the creation wizard.

In the next menu, choose the campaign type, or in other words: What kind of products would you like to promote in the widget.  You can also change the ruleset later on. Click next to proceed.

Unsure what type to choose or how campaign types work in the widget? Read full glossary under manuals section here.

Choose your email platform/service provider (ESP) from the list. In case your ESP is not listed, don’t worry, choose “Others” and type your platform’s name. Nosto will add out-of-the-box support for most popular platforms, but any platform in general is supported. Click next to proceed.

If you select Best Sellers or Product Based Cross-selling, you can apply any include or exclude filter.

Under the visual settings step, you can amend some key visual aspects of the widget. The widget will feature a product’s image, name and current selling price and also the title as given in Block title input area. By default, Nosto displays four products in the widget.

Preview will open up the recommendation in a safe preview-mode on the Nosto admin and allow you to review applied changes before clicking next to proceed.

The final step is to copy the code snippet from the output area right, save the campaign and include the snippet into your email newsletter. The campaign name also defines the tracking parameter later available in your web-analytics tool, so name this descriptively.

In case your email service provide (ESP) was supported and you chose anything else than “Others” under the choose your platform-menu, you’re good to proceed right away and you can jump over the next chapter “email variable”.

In case you chose Other platform, your Final touches area will appear as below. Pay attention to the highlighted area in red.

Input your ESP’s email variable into the email variable area.

An email variable is a part of the code snippet, which outputs the recipient’s email-address when applied on your platform or in other words in your newsletter template. The example below is Mailchimp’s variable so replace this with your platform’s own, specific variable.

Typically the variable is available in ESP’s technical documentation, but in case this is not documented you might need to consult your platform provider’s support.

After code snippet has been created, it’s time to add the snippet into your newsletter.

It would be great to cover every imaginable email service provider in this tutorial, but since there are hundreds of service providers, the tutorial introduces only the general guidelines how to apply the code snippet.

The function of the snippet is relevantly simple: When a recipient opens up an email, the code snippet makes a request for Nosto to display products based on applied ruleset and visual settings. Therefore, back-end integrations are not required and the only required steps are to:

The best way to proceed and to test, would be simply adding a widget’s code snippet to your test-newsletter or other email you might use. Tweak the design if needed and you are ready to go live!  As as suggestion, don’t forget to send a few test emails before sending the finalised version out to your customers.