Connected Recommendations overview & configuration

Connected Recommendations allow you to deliver data-driven product and content suggestions within your Engage experiences.

By linking Engage with Elevate’s recommendation engine, you can use recommendation algorithms directly inside Design Studio modules. This allows you to present tailored recommendations to users based on dynamic data such as SKUs, filters, or customer data, all configured seamlessly within Engage.

How it works

Connected Recommendations use Elevate’s recommendation models directly inside Engage Design Studio.

The recommendation flow works as follows:

1. A module in Design Studio is configured with metadata (for example product rules, SKU input, or user ID)
2. When the email is preprocessed, Engage sends this metadata to Elevate
3. Elevate processes the request using its recommendation algorithms
4. A set of optimized recommendations is returned
5. Engage renders the recommendations directly in the experience

If a discoveryKey is included, purchased products can be excluded, both online and in-store (if applicable). Read more about these concepts within Connected recommendations:

• Top selling products
• Contextual products

Configuration

Marketing groups

Before you can use Connected Recommendations, you must configure the connection between Elevate markets and Engage marketing groups. This is done once in Engage and establishes the persistent connection between the products.

See detailed guide: Configure marketing groups for Connected Recommendations

Email module

Each Connected Recommendation data source includes a ready-to-use module in the starter library, making it easy to get started. You can use these modules as they are, but in most cases you will want to adapt them to match your brand’s design, layout, and visual identity.

See more details about modules: Working with modules

Image requirements and limitations

Image styling in email

Connected Recommendations do not support CSS-based image manipulation inside emails. If you previously used Elevate email recommendations and applied CSS to the product template to adjust image ratio, cropping, or scaling, that approach will not work with Connected Recommendations.

Email clients have limited CSS support. This means:

• Product images must already have the correct and consistent aspect ratio
• Images must be cropped exactly as they should appear in the email
• Image formatting must be handled in the source feed or during asset generation

Image formats (WebP)

Connected Recommendations use the Elevate feed to fetch metadata, including image URLs. If your feed contains WebP images, some legacy email clients may not support rendering them. If this applies to your setup, contact us so we can review compatibility and recommend alternatives.

Email recommendations comparison

Voyado offers three approaches to email product recommendations. Connected Recommendations is the most integrated option, purpose-built for customers running both Engage and Elevate, with native Design Studio authoring, Elevate's recommendation engine, and support for dynamic trigger-based recommendations. The table below outlines how the three approaches compare.