Tips & Tricks: Turn an Unidentified User Crisis into Email Personalization Opportunities

Date Sent: February 28th, 2022

Hi there,

The Dynamic Yield Experience Email capabilities empower your team to serve email content that is personalized in real-time, enabling you to render the most relevant content to recipients at open time. To capitalize on email personalization opportunities, users need to be identified in Dynamic Yield. Identified users are those who have a unique DY identifier, or DYID. When the system can associate a user's DYID with their hashed email address, it can connect their web behavior to that hashed email to allow you to serve them with tailored, personalized email content.

Enable the DY platform to make more connections between individual users and their hashed email addresses by applying our use case inspiration ideas for capturing more identified users.

Implement Omnichannel Events for Web

Enable DY to associate a user's DYID with their email address by implementing Omnichannel Events on your website. This allows DY to link user behaviors on the site across different devices with their hashed email address. Basically, whenever a user executes a certain action on your website in which they provide their email address, the event that corresponds with that interaction will fire. Dynamic Yield will then be able to use the info from that event to connect the user's DYID and their hashed email address.

Implement code snippets within your site's script for the following predefined Event schemas to enable to identify users who fire those events: Signup, Newsletter Subscription, and Login. Then, leverage our use case ideas to launch campaigns on your site that will help you capture more identified users.

1. Signup: fires an Event when a user has completed a signup process on the site. Include the Customer Unique Identifier (CUID) as a parameter when sending this event to enable DY to identify users that trigger it. Use Case Idea - Offer an incentive to users when they sign up for an account, such as a discount code for creating a customer profile. Then, serve a Notification campaign on the site to promote that incentive. Use the Expanding Offer out-of-the-box (OOTB) template or something similar to drive users to the sign up page:

2. Newsletter Subscription: fires an Event when a user subscribes to the email newsletter for your site. This event has a parameter to send the user's hashed email when they submit their email information to be added to the newsletter mailing list. Use Case Idea - Capture more email subscriptions by serving an Overlay targeted to users that are not currently identified in DY. Use an OOTB template like the Subscription Creative design template to easily build and publish this use case to your site:

3. Login: fires an Event when a user logs in on your site and you can leverage this event to establish user identification. Passing an email as the user ID is usually preferable, and you have a few options of the kind of info to include when sending this predefined event. Use Case Idea - Encourage more users to trigger the Login event with a Notification targeted to users that are not logged in. Serve the campaign on pages that have a Recommendation widget that uses a more generalized algorithm, like Popularity. Trigger the campaign with a Scroll Event so that it appears when users scroll to a point on the page where the entirety of the widget is visible (for more info on using a Scroll Event, check out our previous Tips & Tricks email). Include messaging that encourages users to log in to be recommended with products that are more personalized to their preferences:

Leverage the Identify API & External Email Campaigns

You can also identify users at any other relevant instance in their journey on your site by calling the Identify API. This adds an identification method to the current user, regardless of the action that they take on the site in which they provide their email address. 

Additionally, you can create a Custom Code campaign for your site that enables DY to identify users who arrive on your site via an external email campaign using their hashed emails. With this approach, any links to your site that a user clicks on from email campaigns that you send from your ESP will include a parameter to capture the user's hashed email.

Use Case Idea: Identify Users via External Email Campaigns

There are 2 different Custom Code OOTB design templates in the DY Admin that you can use to easily apply this approach: one for using the hashed email, and another for using the regular email address. If you have some hashed and some regular email addresses, you can create separate Experiences in the same campaign targeted to URLs that have the second parameter and design the variation using the other OOTB template option. 

In the DY Admin, create a new Custom Code campaign and use the following settings and inputs to identify users from external email campaigns:

1. Select Page Load for the Trigger setting and Once per session for the Frequency
2. Create an Experience that is targeted to the page URL that contains the relevant parameter name. After you specified this targeting condition, uncheck the Ignore URL parameters setting option that will appear below the condition statement(s):
3. Add a Variation to the Experience and select the OOTB template for Hashed Email Identification: Note: to collect both plain text emails and hashed emails, you can create another Experience within the same Custom Code campaign with one Variation that uses the other OOTB template option, Email Identification.
4. On the Design tab of the Variation window, define the variable for URL Parameter Name with the parameter name that contains the email:
5. Save the Variation. On the Status tab of the Experience window, set the status to Active and then save the Experience. 
6. If you want the campaign to identify users for both plain text emails and hashed emails, create that second Experience with a single Variation using the other OOTB template option. Once you've saved that Variation, save this Experience with the status of Active, too.
7. Publish the overall Custom Code campaign. With the campaign live on your site, DY will be able to identify users that click any links to your site from your external email campaigns. You should see a boost to the numbers of identified users, especially when your team sends out major email campaigns from your ESP.

Use the Audience Explorer to check in on the number of identified users for your site. On the Audience Explorer page, click the Select Condition dropdown and select Identified Users. Click the value dropdown that will appear on the page and select true. The Explorer will populate the User Segment Data on the Identified Users that have visited your site:

Check out the Experience Email Academy course to learn how to build DY Experience Email campaigns and serve personalized email content to users.

Until next time,
Ashley

Ashley Berman
Sr. Customer Education Manager