Hi Andrew

We've worked on a number of campaigns like this for our clients.  We've been responsible for designing and implementing campaigns which are automatically triggered based on past purchase behaviour.

There  are two types of campaign which influence what you can actually do from a design point of view:

1.  One size fits all cross sell/product recommendation

This goes to everyone after an action is completed. The same design goes to everyone featuring the same products and is little more than a scheduled autoresponder. 

In this case you have as much flexibility as you wish in the design.

2.  Personalised email based on past behaviour

These templates merge in related product based on either the person/what they've bought.  The design of these templates are affected by the number of variants you want to use. 

If you only plan to feature a handful of products and you do not plan to update the content very frequently, you can manually update the dynamic content logic.  This means you can be quite creative with your template.

However, if you're looking to output the variants from your web site system you may be limited to what information can be output (asset sizes, number of words etc) which will influcence the design.

Although the original post was a few months ago, I'd be happy to share more about our experiences - just drop me a line

Thanks

Paul

Paul.Crabtree@velomarketing.co.uk

http://www.velomarketing.co.uk