Tips to use the SAP Emarsys Connector in CDP

While using SAP Customer Data Platform (CDP) as the contacts source of ongoing data to SAP Emarsys for the first time and not being familiar with Emarsys, it may be helpful to know some important information beforehand so you can create the connector properly and troubleshoot any issue easily.

CDP has the out-of-the-box connector SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement you can find in the Application Library under Marketing group.

SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement connector

Configuring the connector

To be able to create a destination using this CDP connector you need an Emarsys API User with the access to contact, contactlist and externalevent APIs. The Emarsys API User credential will be used on the connector Authentication settings.

You also need to confirm the field Emarsys uses as the unique identifier of a contact to use it in the Configuration settings:

• The default identifier of Emarsys is the email which the Emarsys field ID is 3.
• In case the Emarsys account uses the externalID field as the unique identifier, you need to check the Emarsys field ID for the specific Emarsys account as this field does not have a default field ID and differs from different accounts.

Connector settings

Creating an attribute in the connector

As default the Emarsys connector creates three actions:

• Create or Update a contact in Emarsys.
• Trigger an external event in Emarsys.
• and Create or replace a contact list in Emarsys.

While creating/updating an attribute in the Model step of the actions previously mentioned, you must use the Emarsys field ID as the name of the attribute, otherwise the sync will fail as the Emarsys APIs use the field IDs in payload.

Setting the Emarsys field ID as the name of the attribute

Mapping the CDP and Emarsys fields

While mapping the attributes in the Mapping step, some attributes will require transformation applied depending on the field type used in Emarys or if the Emarsys fields has a list of restricted values, for example:

• Date of Birth attribute need to be converted to the format (yyyy-MM-dd) used by Emarsys.
• Opt-in.
• Gender.
• Emarsys fields of date, single-choice and multi-choice types.

Format transformation of the birthday attribute

Tips on troubleshooting issues

Use the Playground feature you can find on each action to check if the data is being sent to Emarsys.

Sometimes the status code we receive in CDP is successful (status code 200), but the contact is not created in Emarsys, the probably root cause is a wrong value is being sent to fields that has a specific range of values, like the Emarsys fields of single-choice type.

In this case, you can review the values of the Emarsys systems values on Emarsys site or review with the Emarsys analyst the correct values accepted for custom fields created on the Emarsys account.

You can find more information about the SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement connector in the SAP Help portal in  SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement.

If you want to know more about the Emarsys system fields and their IDs, check the link: The Emarsys system fields.

And for the list of values of single-choice fields, that can be helpful while applying the transformation, go to Single-choice fields and their values.

I hope the tips mentioned here can help you on working with SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement connector in CDP, feel free to add any comment if you have feedback or suggestion.