📧 How to create and send personalized and individualized e-mails in a scalable way. 📧📧...📧

[Ednei]

Dear reader,

The 1:1 marketing, also known as 'segment of one' aims to customize marketing components for individuals as a tactic to improve loyalty and raise the return of investment. It has been a dream for marketeers worldwide few decades ago and now it is a reality thanks to the cloud computing and its value proposition (high scalability, elasticity and availability).

With the advent of the cloud computing it was possible to deliver Software as a Service and build a solution to improve the Customer Experience, omni-channel, for all type of companies, regardless of their sizes. This is the case of SAS® Customer Intelligence 360, which improves the Customer Experience by delivering personalized digital experiences to customers and prospects.

Within this context, the purpose of this article is to present how to create and send personalized and individualized e-mails in a scalable way with the usage of SAS® Customer Intelligence 360.

Step 1) The starting point here is to obtain a list of E-mail addresses, Creatives URLs and Messages. This list is usually provided by CRM team or another team responsible for defining the NBA (Next Best Action) or NBO (Next Best Offer) for the customers and prospects. Note that the list below will be used in this example and its creatives and messages are unique for each one of the individuals.

Step 2) Now is the time to upload this data into the platform and for that you can follow these instructions (access key: C!ntel#36@).

Step 3) After the data is being successfully uploaded into the platform, it is needed to create the Bulk Email Task and you can do it following the instructions below:

3.1. Select Tasks

3.2. Click in New Task

3.3. Then click Email

3.4. Choose the option Bulk

3.5. And then Design your own layout

This is the screen you will find as a result:

3.6. Select desired Content type (HTML in this example) and hit the button Edit Content.

This is the environment where it is possible to develop the e-mail content layout and for that you can make usage of Layout Gallery objects. You do not need to develop any programming code here but just drag and drop objects from the Layout Gallery to the Layout Manager and change their settings in the General Layout Settings (right side).

3.7. To support this step you can watch this tutorial or simply use the example below as a baseline.

The result of this step would be something like this.

Remember that we want to send a personalized and individualized e-mail content for a certain number of individuals so in this step we will personalize the message and the creative according to the data that has been uploaded.

3.8. In the Layout Manager, select "<FirstName>" and in the General Layout Settings, click in the icon Insert Merge Tag.

3.9. As soon the Select Merge Tag screen appears, search for the term "First" in the query field and observe that a field called FirstName appears as a result. Select it, fulfill the Default value with the term "customer" and click OK.

Observe that a piece of code has been included, replacing the selected term <FirstName>. If FirstName is not available in the platform for some reason, the term "customer" will be included instead as setup in the previous screen.

3.10. Repeat the step above to personalize the term "<Variable Text>" with the field "Message".

3.11. Now click in the image in the left of the e-mail main text and in the Image Setting panel, click in the pen icon to indicate the source of this image.

3.12. When Select Image screen appears, click in the icon Select Merge Tag.

3.13. As soon the Select Merge Tag screen appears, search for the term "Criativo" in the query field and observe that a field called Criativo appears as a result. Select it and click OK.

3.14. Now hit Done button in the Select Image screen.

3.15. And then click Close button in the warning message.

3.16. Your page should be something similar to this. Click OK.

3.17. Click in the Header tab and fulfill the form with the Subject, To, From and Reply-to information. Make usage of the Merge Tag to personalize the Subject and to include a variable in the To field.

3.18. Click in the Targeting tab to include in the Specify criteria field, the list of individuals you have uploaded in the platform. They will be the target for this Bulk Email Task.

3.19. Under the tab Orchestration, option Delivery, make sure the Send Agent (regardless the name) is configured to use SparkPost services and then select the command Mark Ready and Publish. This is will make you save this task with a friendly name and start the e-mail submission.

3.20. Click in the icon highlighted in yellow to follow up the status of this recently created job to guarantee the submission was performed successfully.

For dozens, thousands or millions of individuals, now you know to send personalized and individualized e-mails for your customers and prospects to raise the engagement and improve the relationship as well as the return of marketing investment in a scalable way.

I hope this article has instigated your curiosity or maybe inspired you to innovate your business processes with the experience of SAS in Customer Experience.

Ednei Gomes

Global Customer Success Team

[Josh_Morrison1]

Ednei, love the format and the content!