Create Blocks for Interaction: a use case for triggered-based Campaigns

Introduction

SAP Marketing Cloud has delivered some neat features within 2102 release. One that has really caught up my attention (and I am sure it will catch yours, too!) is the new content block interaction types in emails.

This can lead up marketers to a whole other level of flexibility when thinking of and creating new trigger-based marketing campaigns! 😀

You may find this and other enhancements here.

Feature overview

As of now we are able to use the brand new block for interaction in email templates to be utilized in trigger-based campaigns.  This means that any interaction type in your system may be used for personalization in the content studio. The email may containt both header and item level information from the interaction.

What’s really neat about this is that product fields such as ‘item amount’ and ‘item quantity’ have been enabled for usage. Also, other custom fields you might have under Product interaction business context may be used as well. This is also true for Shopping Cart Abandoned interaction block which didn’t use to have item amount or item quantity fields available until now.

Example

Let’s suppose your customer has just placed an order. SAP Marketing Cloud will send an automatic “thank you for your purchase” e-mail to the customer containing relevant information about the purchased product.

In content studio (email) you may now find the new ‘Interaction’ block available. The procedure is the same as for abandoned shopping cart. Drag-and-drop the block to start building the email content.

Interaction block in content studio

Click ‘Interactions’ to view the area where you will select the interaction type and the layout. The Interaction Type matchcode will show all interaction types configured in your system (standard and custom).

For the purpose of this example, interation type Sales Order (SALES_ORDER) has been selected.

Create the block – select interaction type and layout

All of the features available for a text block are also available for this block type. Under personalization you will notice Interaction header fields as well as Interaction Item fields. In the screenshot below you can see the field ‘amount per item’ which corresponds to the actual product price from the interaction (InteractionProductAmount field).

Personalization attributes

The design of the email is not the purpose of this blog but you may work on all features available. A template from SAP was used and adapted for this example. In the screenshot below you can see some of the attributes that were used. Product name and Product ID have been available for a long time. The new ones are:

• Quantity: standard field, InteractionProductQuantity
• Amount per item: standard field, InteractionProductAmount
• Item Status (description): custom field which indicates a specific status for the product

PS: any custom field created under ‘Marketing: Interaction Product Business Context’ would work here as long as it is populated in your integration scenarios within that specific interaction type.

Building your email

Last but not least, a trigger-based Campaign needs to be set up using interaction type Sales Order as a trigger. Once a specific sales order hits SAP Marketing Cloud the email is triggered and sent to the recipient.

Personalized Email sent to the recipient

Conclusion

As of release 2102, SAP has delivered more flexibility when it comes to the design of emails using both standard and custom interaction types. Also, more relevant fields for the ‘interaction product’ have become available such as Item Quantity, Item Amount and custom fields at interaction item level.

What triggers and interaction types would you use for this scenario? I can think of plenty of ideas! 😀