Personalization – while presenting a massive business opportunity – can be daunting to those less versed in eCommerce or low on developer resources. And while oftentimes teams can become fixated on building every element of their websites from scratch, modern-day solutions offer flexible technology and features that will serve the majority of a brand’s digital needs.

One of these solutions is templates. With the ability to serve as an essential part of any optimization plan, they allow marketers to build engaging experiences with relatively low effort. Over the past few years, our team has scaled our templating features and out-of-the-box templates, giving teams the flexibility to build custom templates that best suit their needs or take advantage of our predefined library of 70+ templates, covering a wide range of experiences, including notifications, banners, overlays, and recommendation widgets.

Now, with recommendations often serving as the bread-and-butter of personalized site experiences, finding new and unique ways to tailor them to the end-user has become imperative. And with the way users consume content and purchase merchandise online rapidly changing, we’ve taken some inspiration from some of the biggest digital names to provide Dynamic Yield customers with a fresh set of out-of-the-box recommendation templates we couldn’t be more excited about.

Recommendations as Stories

With over 2.3 billion users active on the platform every month, it’s hard to not be familiar with the Stories format popularized by Snapchat and mastered by Instagram. Designed as fleeting pieces of content, this snackable, full-screen format allows users to get a brief glance at a photo or video. Advertisers have long taken advantage of this format, and now, with our Recommendations as Stories template, brands can mimic this popular social media feature to recommend merchandise. Nestled at the top of mobile screens within circle-shaped icons, each individual story employs a different recommendation algorithm (i.e. “Most Popular”) when showcasing a product. From there, users must simply tap the story icon to access the full-screen recommendation and swipe up to be redirected to the product detail page.

Animated Recommendations

Performance issues should never inhibit a brand’s ability to create memorable customer experiences. And with video formats known to captivate user attention, our Animated Recommendations template relies on eye-catching HTML animations to display various products in a video-like loop. Taking the form of a banner, merchandise is displayed in a carousel-like format within site banners, providing each product an opportunity to shine on its own for a few seconds before moving on to the next. This template is not only lightweight, but also fully responsive and mobile-ready, and it can be used alongside a number of recommendation strategies. Brands can control whether they want to showcase new or trending products, items related to a visitor’s browsing or shopping behavior, or even personalized the experiences according to a user’s affinities. Additionally, it is highly customizable, meaning teams can easily alter the color of the banner, which strategies are used, the layout, and more.

Multi-Strategy Recommendations

Similar to browsing for a new show to watch, users aren’t always dead set on a particular item while shopping. This provides brands with an opportunity to facilitate the browsing experience and nudge users to discover products that they are likely interested in. Taking inspiration from streaming services, this bottom-right notification template allows teams to showcase a number of product recommendations without negatively impacting the user experience. When expanded, this experience houses up to three separate recommendation widgets within a single drawer that users can scroll through to discover more recommended products. When scrolling horizontally, users can see more products within a single widget according to the product category, such as “Shirts,” and when scrolling vertically, users can browse through additional rows of recommended product categories, each of which can be uniquely named and powered by a different recommendation strategy, such as “Popularity” or “User Affinity.” Additionally, the intuitive drawer layout helps brands maximize the available mobile real estate to improve the product discovery process without being intrusive or overwhelming shoppers.

Swipe Right Product Recommendations

With eCommerce sites often serving as a home to hundreds to thousands (or tens of thousands!) of products, finding the perfect item can be a challenging undertaking. For brands looking to alleviate the lift for today’s shoppers – especially as attention spans continue to dwindle – an interactive, familiar digital experience can do wonders. With our Swipe Right Product Recommendation template, marketing teams can help match users to products they’ll love. Employing a banner that triggers a fullscreen recommendation experience upon tap, mobile shoppers can swipe left to see additional products or swipe right on merchandise they are interested in learning more about. A right swipe redirects a user to the recommendation’s product detail page, where users can access additional info and add an item to their cart. This template is fully customizable and can be used alongside any of Dynamic Yield’s recommendation algorithms, providing a fun, engaging, and personalized way to tailor the mobile shopping experience.

With Dynamic Yield’s out-of-the-box templates, designing interactive ,web and mobile-friendly recommendation experiences is a breeze. Browse our full library of 70+ templates for more easy-to-launch recommendation templates, as well as dozens of notification, banner, and popup templates Dynamic Yield users can start using today!