Getting Started
Getting started with Quotient.
What is Quotient?
Welcome to Quotient! Quotient is an email marketing platform with a built-in team of AI assistants called agents. With the help of agents, you can build email marketing campaigns that will help drive traffic to your website, build stronger customer relationships, and ultimately drive conversions.
Quotient is designed to work best for businesses that use Shopify as their commerce platform, but you can still use Quotient if you use a different e-commerce back-end, or even if you aren't an e-commerce business.
Core Concepts
When you open up Quotient, you'll see two main panels:
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Conversation Panel: On the left you'll see a messaging interface. This is where you can communicate with your agents.
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App Panel: On the right is the rest of the Quotient app. This is where you can view and edit your campaigns, look at analytics, create visual assets, and more.
You can interact with Quotient simply by messaging with agents in the conversation panel, or by clicking around the app panel, or both. As you'll see in a moment, agents are able to work alongside you, see the same thing you're seeing the app panel, and even modify things that appear in the app panel.
But first, let's learn a bit more about agents.
Agents
Agents are AI-powered assistants that can help you perform specific tasks. There are a few key differences between an agent in Quotient and a more generic assistant - like ChatGPT or Claude:
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Context about your business. Agents remember information about your business, such as the products you sell, your target customers, and your recent marketing activity. This allows the agents to be much more helpful and create marketing assets that are tailored to your business.
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Tools for getting things done. Agents can actually do things on your behalf, like creating a new email template, generating a new product image, or setting up a discount code in Shopify. Agents have access to the Quotient platform just like you do, and anything you can do in Quotient, they can do too, on your behalf.
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Proactive assistance. Agents don't just speak when spoken to. They will also periodically reach out to you, to give you updates on the performance of your marketing activities, to provide suggestions for new campaigns, and more.
In Quotient, there are a few key agents you will work with:
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Email Agent: The expert in email marketing. Can help you create email campaigns and email templates.
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Design Agent: The expert in creating images to be used in email campaigns (or elsewhere). Uses image generation AI to create engaging images featuring your products.
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Web Agent: The expert in creating landing pages. Can help you generate landing pages for email campaigns, or other types of web content such as email subscription popups.
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Commerce Agent: The expert in Quotient's Shopify integration. Can help you troubleshoot your Shopify integration and also create discount codes in Shopify.
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Help Agent: Your guide to all of Quotient. Instead of reading these docs, you can simply talk to the Help Agent.
Threads
Each conversation you have with agent happens inside of a thread. Threads in Quotient are a lot like threads in other messaging systems like Slack. Each thread is a self-contained conversation, often about a specific topic or objective, like creating a new email template.
Threads in Quotient are similar to conversations with ChatGPT or Claude in that they are strictly sequential - a human talks, then an agent responds, then a human responds again, and so on an so forth. This is a little different from a human conversation in Slack, where humans can send many messages in a row.
Channels
Channels are just a way of organizing different threads. Each channel has a different default responder agent:
| Channel | Default Responder |
|---|---|
| Email Agent | |
| # design | Design Agent |
| # web | Web Agent |
| # commerce | Commerce Agent |
Each channel is designed to focus on a specific aspect of your marketing efforts, with the corresponding agent as the primary assistant for that area.
@ Mentioning
When speaking to agents, you can use @ mentioning to either call a certain agent, or to reference objects that you want the agent to see.
If you @ mention a particular agent, it will guarantee that that agent responds to your ask.
But you can also @ mention objects such as...
- Email Templates
- Email Campaigns
- Assets
- Products
- Web Pages
When you reference objects, all of the relevant context about that object is included for the agent to see. This helps the agent understand your request.
For example, if you are building an email campaign and want it to feature a few specific products from your Shopify store, you can @ mention those products, and this will help the agent understand exactly which products you're referring to.