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Author's profile photo Christoph Pattberg

Improved confirmation Emails per Marketing Area

With our 2005 release of SAP Marketing Cloud we have improved the end-to-end process of branded confirmation Emails allowing now to use dynamic sender addresses per Marketing Area.

In modern Email marketing it is essential that you send out Double-OptIn confirmation mails. This means if a customer registers on your website or subscribes for a newsletter an Email is sent out that includes a confirmation link that the customer needs to click. Only if the link is clicked the Double Opt-in is registered and can be used for permission checks in future campaigns.

Multiple layouts in confirmations

In SAP Marketing Cloud you can activate one confirmation Email per tenant. If you are using several Marketing Areas, you might have the need to send out branded confirmation Emails per Marketing Area. This is possible already today by using conditions in Emails to define different layouts for the confirmation Email. It can be done via a custom field for the Marketing Area in the interaction contact to be selected in the conditions dialogue. The custom field is used to distinguish the different layouts in separate conditions and with that for every Marketing Area a separate Layout can be created.

Dynamic sender name and reply-to information

If not only the layout but also sender name, reply-to name and reply-to address shall be dynamic depending on the Marketing Area this was also possible already. It could also be done via custom fields as mentioned above but a more convenient way to do that is a Custom Business Object (CBO) that is assigned to the contacts via Custom Logic. In addition the CBO needs to be assigned to the segmentation profile of the Email to make it accessible. The CBO would contain all necessary info for sender name, reply-to name and reply-to address. That information can then be added to the respective fields of the “Personalization for Send on Behalf” area in the settings dialogue.

When the email is sent, the system determines the value for the attributes, which is suitable for the respective recipient. This value is displayed to the recipient in the email. If no value is found for an attribute when the email is sent, the system uses the value that were entered in the corresponding field of the default sender profile.

Now enhanced with dynamic sender address

The only missing piece in the end-to-end flow of this process was the sender address, which could not be added dynamically like the other attributes. But with our 2005 release we enhanced the functionality to optimize this process. This means now also the sender address can be defined using personalization attributes using the functionalities mentioned above. The following functionality applies only to the content type CONFIRMATION, not to all Emails.

The major challenge here is that the sender address is an important attribute of the Email that needs to be whitelisted at the Email Service Provider (ESP) for spam reasons. If it is not whitelisted the ESP will refuse it and the sender address of the default sender profile of the Email will be used. That means that some preliminary tasks of an admin need to be done to use this functionality. That is the reason why we have not added the sender address to the default field that is visible to every user but giving an admin the opportunity to add it via the Adapt UI functionality.

 

After adding the Sender Address field to the UI and whitelisting the sender address that you want to use at your ESP you can select the attribute from the personalization source you want to use.

With that enhancement all information in confirmation Emails can be personalized helping to send out customized brand experiences to your customers.

The whole confirmation functionality is currently only available in the classic Content Editor, confirmations are not yet part of Email Lite.

More information on confirmations can also be found in the product help for confirmations.

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      9 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Pieter Rijlaarsdam
      Pieter Rijlaarsdam

      Christoph,

       

      You mention you can use a custom field on the contact to determine the marketing area.

      A few questions:

      1. How would you populate this custom field?
      2. What if the interaction contact is assigned to multiple marketing area's?
      3. A logical requirement would be that the confirmation should be branded in the brand of the subscription that is opted in / out. How would you implement this?

       

      Thanks,

      Pieter

      Author's profile photo Maik Offerle
      Maik Offerle

      Pieter Rijlaarsdam and Christoph Pattberg exactly the same question we also have 🙂 How to handle the requirement if the Contact is assigned to multiple marketing areas? Just load the data several times in the CBO for different marketing areas? And the data is taken correctly based on the template marketing area?

      Author's profile photo Michael Becker
      Michael Becker

      A custom field can be populated by the used segmentation profile which is assigned to the confirmation email.
      Add the custom field to the related segmentation object and mark it as "Export" to get it in the email content editor UI per default in the condition value help for available attributes.

      Multiple marketing areas assigned to the interaction contact are returned as comma separated value in the used marketing area field: --> mkt area 1, mkt area 2,...
      In the email content editor the condition expression has to be defined via the operator "contains":
      e.g. --> "Marketing Area" "contains" "mkt area 1"

      However with the CBO you could also return in the custom field a unique marketing area per contact, via custom logic, may be filtered by the country.

      For the requirement to brand the confirmation in the brand of the subscription, use the marketing area of the related landing page form.
      In the confirmation email, with the assigned segemantion profile "All Interactions" also the landing page attributes are provided in the attribute group "Interactions".

       

      Best regards,

      Michael

      Author's profile photo Maik Offerle
      Maik Offerle

      Michael Becker Thank you very much for the update! ?

      Maybe the question regarding Marketing Area was not clear enough.

      As regarding the Marketing Area we are not asking about adding Marketing Area into the Content Editor in general.

      Pieter Rijlaarsdam and myself are asking how to handle sender address assignment for the contacts which are assigned to several Marketing Areas.

      What if the interaction contact is assigned to multiple marketing area or sender addresses?

       So for some campaigns I want to reach the Interaction Contact via sender address brand1@company.com and for another campaign with brand2@company.com

      If I understood you correct we would need to store both values for this InteractionContact? Am I correct? And then select for the first campaign Attribute Brand 1 (storing for this InteractionContact: brand1@company.com) and for the second campaign Attribute Brand 2 (storing for this InteractionContact: brand2@company.com)

      Because in the sender address field we are only able to add one sender address field at a time. See screen below:

      see%20sender%20address%20field%20in%20editor

      see sender address field in editor

      Author's profile photo Michael Becker
      Michael Becker

      Hi Mark Offerle,

      This is correct the sender address is only a single field. Your described solution, to have multiple fields for multiple sender addresses on the interaction contact, will be work in general.

      However if the branding should be related to the campaign, you can use it based on the assigend marketing area of the related interaction, instead of the interaction contact.

      The mearketing area is passed-trough the process, from the campaign, to the landing page and in the end to the confirmation interaction, which will trigger then the confirmation email.

      This is also valid to differenitiate the content blocks by using of conditions with the marketing area of the interaction.

      In general the marketing area of the interaction is always a single value, to get a suitable sender address.

       

      Best regards,

      Michael

      Author's profile photo Maik Offerle
      Maik Offerle

      Hi Michael Becker

      finally based on your help it worked for us 🙂

      Especially important was to create a field like you said below "name the field for the sender address with SMTP "

      And after this the field was visible and we could also use it in the BAdI

      Thanks and best regards

      Maik

      Author's profile photo GOVINDA PARATE
      GOVINDA PARATE

      Hi Maik,

      Hope you are doing good!!

      Its good to here that you were able to implement the concept of using confirmation mail per marketing area.

      We do have similar requirement for our business process where we want to send out the confirmation email per marketing area.

      So it would be really good if you can provide some more details on the process how you implemented this requirement. A SOP or a details blog from you about this implementation would be really helpful for community member who want to implement requirement.

      Thanks,
      Govinda Parate

      Author's profile photo Markus Grant
      Markus Grant

      Hi Michael Becker & Christoph Pattberg

      How can we achieve the personalisation of the confirmation email for the double opt-in process for a new contact who does not yet exist yet in Marketing Cloud?

      We tried to create a custom field for the contact which is populated by a hidden field in the form and this should then be used as the sender name of the confirmation email.

      However, when a new contact fills out the form with the double opt-in process we only get a lean contact  record created with minimal data like name, email address and language as outlined in the below KBA.

      https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/2897739

      So it seems that for new contacts the only fields that could be used to personalise the sender name are marketing area or language.

      Or is there some way of using our custom field in this scenario?

      Kind Regards,

      Markus

      Author's profile photo Michael Becker
      Michael Becker

      You could use the marketing area of the the confirmation interaction, which is triggered by the form (landing page) submitted by a contact. The created pre-opt-in interaction will get the marketing area from this form or landing page.

      So the sender name and sender address can be derrived from this marketing area.

      A custom field for the sender address and name should be added to Business Context "Marketing Interaction": e.g. ConfirmationSenderSmtp for sender address.
      (btw. it is ipmortant to name the field for the sender address with SMTP to get it in the email editor value help for personalized sender address)

      These custom fields have to be set by a "Custom Logic BADI":
      Custom Field & Logic -> Custom Logic --> New Enhancement Implementation:
      Business Context: Marketing Interctation
      BAdI: Revise Interaction Data Before Import