Note: Before you can create a triggered email campaign, make sure you enabled triggered emails for your site.
Creating a Triggered Email Campaign
- Go to Email › Triggered Email › Add New and select the type of triggered email. The settings in the following steps differ depending on the type you select.
- Set the Triggered Email’s object settings.
- Name: Triggered email object name. Optionally add notes and labels.
- Trigger: Event that triggers the email send.
- Delay Send: Time between the trigger event and the sending of the email. In case more than one trigger event is detected (e.g. multiple ‘add to cart’ events are fired in the same session) the delay starts from the last event.
- Cancel Send: If these conditions occur within the delay time interval, the email will not be sent.
- Frequency Capping: Maximum number of emails of this type that should be sent within the provided time interval.
The default settings for Trigger and Cancel Send are determined by the type of the triggered email selected. The following are settings for the Triggered Email types:
- Cart Abandonment:
- Trigger: For cart abandonment this is always the ‘Add to Cart’ event. You can choose whether any product added to the cart will be used as the trigger or set specific products.
- Cancel Send: For cart abandonment the default cancel events are ‘purchase’ or ‘new session started’, ensuring that if a transaction is completed or if the visitor returned to the site within the delay time interval – the cart abandonment email is suppressed. These default settings can be overridden.
- Product View Abandonment:
- Trigger: For product view abandonment this is always the ‘Product Viewed’ event. You can choose whether any product viewed will be used as the trigger or set specific products.
- Cancel Send: For product view abandonment the default cancel events are ‘add to cart’, ‘purchase’ or ‘new session started’, ensuring that if a visitor proceeds in the purchase funnel for a viewed product or returns to the site within the delay time interval – the product view abandonment email is suppressed. These default settings can be overridden.
- Category View Abandonment:
- Trigger: For category view abandonment this is always the ‘Category Page Visit’ event. You can choose whether any category viewed will be used as the trigger or set specific categories.
- Cancel Send: For category view abandonment the default cancel events are ‘product viewed’, ‘add to cart’, ‘purchase’ or ‘new session started’, ensuring that if a visitor proceeds in the purchase funnel or returns to the site within the delay time interval – the category view abandonment email is suppressed. These default settings can be overridden.
- Custom Trigger
- Trigger: Any custom events can be selected.
- Cancel Send: Any custom events can be selected.
- Click Next to continue to the Targeting Settings.
- Configure the Targeting settings by selecting the Audiences or Shared Audiences to which this experience will be targeted.
- Variations: Create one or more variations that include the email header and body content. For details, see below.
- Set the allocation, primary metric.
- Configure the end of the attribution window in the advanced experience settings. The beginning of the attribution window for triggered emails is defined as the time of the user's last click on the email.
- Configure how much traffic to allocate to each variation, and control group.
- Click Save Experience and create additional targeted experiences as needed clicking the plus icon
. - To send a preview email, click the preview icon
and specify your email addresses.
- To verify the trigger functionality, click Simulation. For more details, see below.
- Save & Publish if you are ready to fully publish the experience, or Save as Draft if you want to verify the functionality before publishing.
Creating Triggered Email Variations
If you are using a custom ESP, use the procedure about creating JSON triggered email variations below instead of this procedure.
- Variations are created as part of the triggered email campaign creation process, or on their own from Assets › Variations. There are a number of Dynamic Yield templates for triggered emails that are already configured for common use cases.
- Configure the email variation header attributes: Subject, Sender Name & Sender Email.
- Code the email body HTML. Triggered email HTML is similar to any other Dynamic Yield template with the difference that it includes special logic to dynamically add products in the visitor’s cart, products recently viewed and recommended products.
- Adding Products in Cart
- Within the HTML create a special variable that includes an opening and a closing tag as follows:
Opening tag:${#}
Closing tag:
${/}Example:
${#}...${/} - Click on the variable to open the Variable Settings panel; change the Variable type to “Product List” and the List Type to “Items In Cart”.
- In the Variables tab – configure the Maximum Items in Cart to set the number of cart items to be displayed in the email.
- Between the cart variable opening and closing tags, code the HTML markup for each cart item. Use Variable type Feed Property to insert the product property from the product feed. At send time, this markup will be multiplied times the Maximum Items in Cart, every Feed Property variable will be taken from the product feed for the products in the visitor’s cart.
- Within the HTML create a special variable that includes an opening and a closing tag as follows:
- Adding Recently Viewed Products
- Similarly to Items in cart, create a special variable that includes an opening and a closing tag.
Example:${#}...${/} - Click on the variable to open the Variable Settings panel; change the Variable type to “Product List” and the List Type to “Recently Viewed”
- In the Variables tab – configure the Maximum Recently Viewed Items to set the number of recently viewed items to be displayed in the email
- Between the recently viewed variable opening and closing tags, code the HTML markup for each recently viewed item. Use Variable type Feed Property to insert the product property from the product feed. At send time, this markup will be multiplied times the Maximum Recently Viewed Items, every Feed Property variable will be taken from the product feed for the products in the visitor’s cart.
- Similarly to Items in cart, create a special variable that includes an opening and a closing tag.
- Adding Recommendations
- Product recommendations can be inserted into the triggered email. The design is set within the triggered email HTML body, but the strategy (algorithm, filters and rules) need to be defined in advance within an Email Recommendations Campaign.
- Similarly to Items in cart and recently viewed items, recommendations also require special variable that includes an opening and a closing tag.
Example:${#}...${/} - Click on the variable to open the Variable Settings panel; change the Variable type to “Recommendations Items”.
- Note: The configuration for Number of items is taken from the recommendation widget configuration.
- In the Variables tab – select the desired email recommendations widget to be used.
- In case the recommendation widget strategy is contextual, meaning recommendations are related to one or more contextual products (e.g. Similarity and Bought Together strategies both relate to contextual products to which recommended items are similar to or bought together with correspondingly), the input contextual products need to be configured. To do this, open the Variables tab – configure the Productvariable attribute to either Items in Cart or Recently Viewed Items.
- Between the recommendation variable opening and closing tags, code the HTML markup for each recommended item. Use Variable type Feed Property to insert the product property from the product feed.At send time, this markup will be multiplied times the Number of Items (maintained in the recommendations widget), every Feed Property variable will be taken from the product feed for the products in the visitor’s cart.
Creating JSON Triggered Email Variations
If you are using Responsys or a custom ESP, use the JSON template to create triggered email variations as follows:
- Configure what information will be sent to your ESP from Dynamic Yield using JSON code. Make sure the following variables exist in the payload and then incorporate them into your ESP templates to compose the full email:
- dyTrackingPixel - allows Dynamic Yield to track the email, for example whether the email was opened or not.
- dyRedirectStringLink - Should be included in EVERY item that is clickable in your ESP email template (for example a product image) to allow Dynamic Yield to collect information. For Responsys, you can use Responsys RPL to concatenate the redirect link with every additional URL.
- Adding email variable - add the standard special character as any variable for example - ${email} or ${external}. Click on the variable to the open the variable settings panel, and change the variable type to either Hashed email, Plain Text email, or External ID depending on the type of your identifier.
- Adding Products in Cart / Recommendations:
- Add the special character ${#} for example - ${#cart}, click on the variable settings panel and choose Products in cart , Recently viewed products or Email recommendation widget.
- Configure the minimum and maximum value of items you would like to allow. You can choose to show the number of items in the variable tab settings as well.
- Use Variable type Feed Property to insert the product property from the product feed. At send time, this markup will be multiplied times the Maximum amount placed in the settings. Every Feed Property variable will be taken from the product feed - either items in cart, recently viewed or any recommended items.
- The variable ${#Cart Products(sku)} provides a comma separated list of products within the string. This should be used in Responsys and any other ESP that required this structure. If you would like a different feed property, it should be stated within the variable as follows ${#Cart Products(url)}. Examples are documented below.
- Get a preview of the JSON variation payload structure
Examples
Variation example 1
{
"content": {
"templateId": "1",
"region": "US"
},
"recipients": [
{
"hashedemail": "${Email}",
"profile": {
"userAttrs": [
{
"content": {
"itemsInCart": {
"${#cart}": "${skuInCart}"
},
"recommendations": {
"${#recommendation}": "${sku}"
},
"hiddenPixel": [
"${dyTrackingPixel}"
],
"urlForWrapping": [
"${dyRedirectStringLink}"
]
}
}
]
}
}
]
}
JSON payload of example 1
{
"content": {
"templateId": "1",
"region": "US"
},
"recipients": [
{
"hashedemail": "fcc1c1ecbc0b14e7d83d3dca4ece1fcbec85d0a413b3f518eb916c21bd38d25a",
"profile": {
"userAttrs": [
{
"content": {
"itemsInCart": [
"1002300-410",
"1004800-469",
"1002600-001"
],
"recommendations": [
"1005111-290",
"1005900-001",
"1005666-210"
],
"hiddenPixel": [
"<img src=\"http://trem.dynamicyield.com/tremop/?cuid=0&cuidType=ihe&sec=8772173&expId=0&expVer=0&expVisitId=&mech=0&smech=&va=\" alt width=\"1\" border=\"0\" height=\"1\" style=\"height:1px!important;width:1px!important;border-width:0!important;margin-top:0!important;margin-bottom:0!important;margin-right:0!important;margin-left:0!important;padding-top:0!important;padding-bottom:0!important;padding-right:0!important;padding-left:0!important\">"
],
"urlForWrapping": [
"http://trem.dynamicyield.com/tremclk/?cuid=0&cuidType=ihe&sec=8771748&expId=0&expVer=0&expVisitId=&mech=0&smech=&va=&targetUrl="
]
}
}
]
}
}
]
}
Variation example 2
{
"recipientData": [
{
"recipient": {
"plainemail": "${Email}"
},
"optionalData": [
{
"name": "PRODUCTS_TO_SHOW",
"value": "${#Cart Products(sku)}"
},
{
"name": "Rcom_TO_SHOW",
"value": "${#recommendations(sku)}"
},
{
"name": "hiddenPixel",
"value": "${dyTrackingPixel}"
},
{
"name": "urlForWrapping",
"value": "${dyRedirectStringLink}"
}
]
}
]
}
JSON payload of example 2
{
"recipientData": [
{
"recipient": {
"plainemail": "test@dynamicyield.com"
},
"optionalData": [
{
"name": "PRODUCTS_TO_SHOW",
"value": "sku1,sku2,sku3"
},
{
"name": "Rcom_TO_SHOW",
"value": "sku1,sku2,sku3"
},
{
"name": "hiddenPixel",
"value": "<img src=\"http://trem.dynamicyield.com/tremop/?cuid=0&cuidType=ihe&sec=8772173&expId=0&expVer=0&expVisitId=&mech=0&smech=&va=\" alt width=\"1\" border=\"0\" height=\"1\" style=\"height:1px!important;width:1px!important;border-width:0!important;margin-top:0!important;margin-bottom:0!important;margin-right:0!important;margin-left:0!important;padding-top:0!important;padding-bottom:0!important;padding-right:0!important;padding-left:0!important\">"
},
{
"name": "urlForWrapping",
"Value": "http://trem.dynamicyield.com/tremclk/?cuid=0&cuidType=ihe&sec=8771748&expId=0&expVer=0&expVisitId=&mech=0&smech=&va=&targetUrl="
}
]
}
]
}
Variation example 3
{
"content": {
"templateId": "1",
"region": "US"
},
"recipients": [
{
"hashedemail": "${Email}",
"profile": {
"userAttrs": [
{
"content": {
"itemsInCart": {
"${#cart}": {"sku":"${skuInCart}",
"image":"${cart_image}",
"name":"${cart_name}",
"price":"${cart_price}"
}
},
"recommendations": {
"${#recommendation}":{ "sku":"${sku}",
"image":"${recs_image}",
"name":"${recs_name}",
"price":"${recs_price}"
}
},
"hiddenPixel": [
"${dyTrackingPixel}"
],
"urlForWrapping": [
"${dyRedirectLink}"
]
}
}
]
}
}
]
}
JSON payload of example 3
{
"content": {
"templateId": "1",
"region": "US"
},
"recipients": [
{
"hashedemail": "test",
"profile": {
"userAttrs": [
{
"content": {
"itemsInCart": [
{
"sku": "skuInCart1",
"image": "cart_image1",
"name": "cart_name1",
"price": "cart_price1"
},
{
"sku": "skuInCart2",
"image": "cart_image2",
"name": "cart_name2",
"price": "cart_price2"
},
{
"sku": "skuInCart3",
"image": "cart_image3",
"name": "cart_name3",
"price": "cart_price3"
}
],
"recommendations": [
{
"sku": "sku1",
"image": "recs_image1",
"name": "recs_name1",
"price": "recs_price1"
},
{
"sku": "sku2",
"image": "recs_image2",
"name": "recs_name2",
"price": "recs_price2"
},
{
"sku": "sku3",
"image": "recs_image3",
"name": "recs_name3",
"price": "recs_price3"
}
],
"hiddenPixel": [
""
],
"urlForWrapping": [
""
]
}
}
]
}
}
]
}
Test a Triggered Email
To send a test email of the triggered email:
- Go to Email › Triggered Emails, and click the Preview icon
. - Enter an email address or external identified, and specify the desired settings.
- Click Send and verify that you received an email.
Simulating a Triggered Email on Your Site
You can run a simulation of a triggered email to verify the trigger functionality on any triggered email experience. The simulation works on experiences in any state: fully published, saved as a draft, or paused.
- Close any open tabs to the URL you plan to test.
- Make sure you are not testing from a filtered IP
- Go to Emails › Triggered Emails.
- Select any triggered email experience and click Simulation.
- Enter the target email address or external identified and the URL you want to test.
- Perform the expected user actions. As you navigate the site, you can see details about your session such as whether or not an email was triggered.
- If you perform an action that meets the trigger conditions, the corresponding campaign will appear under Pending Triggered Emails and an email will be sent. The email will be sent immediately, disregarding the Delay Send parameter, however it may take a few minutes to process.
Creating Triggered Emails in Multiple Languages
To create a single triggered email campaign that delivers content in multiple languages, follow this procedure:
- Before you begin, verify that your product feed has multiple entries for multiple languages.
- Create audiences for each of the languages that are going to use that are defined by the user's location. For example, for french you might create an audience that includes users from France and any other french speaking countries you are targeting.
- Create a new triggered email campaign.
- Create one experience for each language you want to include.
- Each experience should have the same variations, with content that is translated to one of the languages.
- The variations should reference the translated entries in the product feed (e.g. “lang:FR_fr:name”).
- Use the targeting settings of each experience to target one of the audiences you created above.
- Create one experience for each language you want to include.
When a triggered email is served, users will receive an experience based on their location that is fully localized.
Viewing Triggered Email Reports
You can view detailed reports with information about the performance of each triggered email campaign.
Go to Email › Triggered Emails and click the View Report 
icon next to any campaign.
Total Performance
This graph displays the overall statistics of your experience based on its Primary Metric.
Variation Performance
This table breaks down the performance of each variation according to the following metrics. The metrics displayed in the report differ depending on the campaign's primary metric.
- Send Requests. The number of times Dynamic Yield requested an email send from the ESP.
- Opens. The number of times the email was opened. One user may open the email more than one time.
- User. The number of unique users who opened the email.
- Revenue. The revenue attributed to users who clicked on the email. Revenue is attributed if a purchase occurs after the user clicked on the email, but before the end of the attribution window.
- Revenue Per User. The attributed revenue divided by unique users who opened the email.
- CTR. The total clicks on the email divided by the total opens.
- Purchases. The total purchases attributed to users who clicked on the email. Purchases are attributed if they occur after the user clicked on the email, but before the end of the attribution window.
- Purchases Per User. The total purchases divided by the number of unique users who opened the email.