Showing posts with label email marketing. Show all posts

Sunday, November 10, 2019

Deploy Audience Manager Email Pixel in Adobe Campaign Standard

Email is a very effective channel to reach your customers and it's one of the more cheaper options to consider in your overall marketing strategy. It's estimated that email users will hit 3 Billion by 2020 according to this article which is ~40% of the total world population (7.7 Billion as of October-19). Last year, I wrote about tracking email clicks and impressions in Audience Manager that captures the user id and syncs it with the DMP. I didn't cover how to deploy this pixel in an Email Service Provider (ESP) so in this post, I’ll explain how to deploy AAM email pixels in Campaign Standard and specifically expand on the "Deploy the Pixel in the Email Marketing Software" section from the previous post. I'm also writing this as I got a few questions about how to actually do it in an ESP so given that Campaign is an Adobe product, this made sense to me.

I'm going to refer to some components of the Campaign Standard UI in this post so you can read this Adobe article in case you're not familiar with how to create an email template. Let's go through the various steps:

Use Case

Before we continue, let's take a closer look at the problem we're trying to solve. The main use case here is to perform an Audience Manager ID sync on users who view or click on an email. This can be helpful when you don't have a good way to capture authenticated users on your website for AAM Id sync/natural match purposes. The other advantage here is that you can upload additional data into Audience Manager tied to these IDs and connect these with additional data sources thereby activating on your Email marketing channel users.

It's important to note that there's no concept of a UUID cookie here unless the email is viewed in a browser but given that we add an ID sync, we target users tied to the data source and profile merge rule in Audience Manager. Again, the primary intent is data onboarding in AAM and limited activation which is made possible via the ID sync.

Deploy the AAM Pixels in Campaign Standard

Assuming that we're using the same pixel format (Subdomain).demdex.net/event?d_event=imp&d_cid=(DataSourceID)%01(HashedID)%011&c_emailopen=true&c_campaign=acs542test, we can add the pixel in the email designer where I will cover how to add the pixel both using HTML (imp pixel) and the email designer UI (click pixel) in Campaign Standard.

AAM Impression Pixel (HTML)

In the email designer UI, select the "HTML" option.

At the end of the HTML code, manually add the image tag. Please note that I'm using the same user ID as per my last post as I don't have a hashed ID in Campaign but in order to get the most value, I highly encourage you to add a hashed id tied to email and for that, you'll have to use the Email Designer option to add the user ID as a personalized field (see next section).

AAM Click Pixel (Email Designer)

Follow the steps laid out in this Adobe article to personalize the links. I will show a simple example of how to do that but will not really include it for my example.

Select the "Get Started" CTA and click on the pencil icon to to add a URL.

In the editor, I've added a click pixel where I've included the d_rd (Mandatory redirect URL) parameter which redirects you the landing page URL that needs to be encoded. Also, note that I've added a personalization field as an example so if you have a user ID, you can add it to the pixel as shown below. Finally, I've also added a custom query string parameter called "m_source" which you can track on your landing page in an eVar if you use Adobe Analytics or leverage the utm parameters if you use Google Analytics.

Create Traits in AAM

Before sending the email, make sure that you create the relevant traits tied to impressions and clicks in Audience Manager. I cover this in the next section.

Send the Email

In my example, I just sent to email to myself which is why you just see one email sent.

I can see the email in Microsoft Outlook where an impression pixel will fire as well as the click pixel if a user clicks on the "Get Started" CTA.

Validate the AAM Pixels

We already covered how to validate the email pixels in the last post I wrote but I'm going to do so again as now I'm deploying the pixels in an actual ESP this time around.

Validate in Campaign Standard

We can preview the email in Campaign where it shows you how the email will look on both Desktop and Mobile. After opening up the network tab, I'm able to see the impression pixel fire. Please note that this needs to occur before you send the email so I skipped a step here.

Validate Impression Pixel in Microsoft Outlook

For the purposes of this demo and to simplify QA, I'm manually opening up the email in a browser but note that the pixel will fire in Outlook as well. I'm able to see an impression pixel firing after I open it in a browser.

Validate Click Pixel in Microsoft Outlook

In this case, I clicked on the "Get Started" CTA and preserved logs in Chrome to see that the click pixel took me to the landing page as fired a call to AAM.

Validate Email Pixels in Audience Manager

The next step is to validate the email pixels in AAM. We created two traits tied to impression and click and both show that I qualified for each of the traits.

Validate Email Clicks in Analytics Solution

The final step is to validate how many users actually land on your site which will be users who click on the email. In my case, I have Google Analytics tagged on my blog so I've included a quick example but in hindsight, I should've leveraged the utm parameters as I'm using GA but you can capture this query param in your Campaign ID variable.

So that's the extent of the various steps involved in tracking AAM email pixels in Adobe Campaign Standard.

Additional Things to Consider

I'm going to cover some additional points that are important to consider before doing this.

Emails and JavaScript: Emails don't run JavaScript code so we have to leverage an AAM image tag for capturing impressions and clicks.

Email Client Limitation: Audience Manager or any other image pixels don't fire by default in Gmail or any other web based email service but the pixel will fire when you click the option to view the email in detail (separate browser tab/window) which is typically included at the end of the email. An app based email service such as Outlook will fire the pixel by default so you will have to estimate the potential drop-off because of this limitation.

Email Click Redirect: You will notice that the clicked URL will momentarily redirect to Campaign before taking you to the final landing page. This happens because a click needs to be registered in Campaign which is visible in the native Campaign reporting UI.

Feasibility of the AAM Click Pixel: You may or may not need the click pixel depending on how well the tracking is on your landing page. If you're already tracking the query string parameter on your landing page then you may not need to implement the click pixel as it will incur an additional AAM server call in addition to the impression pixel. So, if the intent is just to ID sync users in AAM then you won't really need to implement it.

So, that's a wrap! Hope you found this post useful as you can use the same framework to deploy any other image pixel aside from AAM in Campaign Standard.

Sunday, October 14, 2018

Adobe Audience Manager Email Pixel ID Sync

I wrote about email marketing back in 2009, and it's still very relevant and effective in 2018. According to this recent (2016) article, "users of email marketing systems are achieving $38 in ROI for every $1 spent". Almost all my clients do some kind of email marketing to send email newsletters to either existing or potential customers. Some of these clients leverage a Data Management Platform to connect data from multiple sources and email is one of the most common choices. I also wrote about email marketing back in 2009 and in 2018, it's still as relevant as back then.

From an Audience Manager perspective, a very useful data point for clients is to capture custom email attributes upon impression or click and user IDs to sync them with AAM for cross device targeting. This post covers the various steps to capture email data in AAM.

Configure the Email Pixel: The general format of the email pixel is very similar to display banner pixels with some minor differences. Below is a screenshot of an email pixel as well as a walkthrough of the various parameters.

(Subdomain).demdex.net/event?d_event=imp&d_cid=(DataSourceID)%01(HashedEmailID)%011&c_emailopen=true&c_campaignname=thanksgiving2018

Subdomain: This is the Audience Manager subdomain. In my example, it's "ags542" as per the screenshot.
d_event: This is the event type which can either be 'imp' (impression) or 'click' depending on where you want to capture this event.
d_cid: This parameter allows us to sync a user ID with AAM.
DataSourceID: This is the data source ID created for this data point. It's '133374' in my case and I've covered this in detail below.
HashedEmailID: It's 'ABC789' as per the example but it can be any numeric or alphanumeric ID for ID syncing purposes.
c_emailopen and c_campaignname: You can pass any customer specific parameters (c_) which in my case are outlined in the screenshot. Note that we will need to create rule based traits to capture these parameters.

Create Data Source and Profile Merge Rule to Capture IDs: Given that we will be syncing user data with AAM, we need to create a cross device data source as shown below.

We will also need to create a profile merge rule mapped to this data source which we will need to leverage for activation.

Create Rule Based Traits: The next step is to create rule based tied to custom attributes that you want to capture for the email pixel. In my case, they are c_emailopen and c_campaignname. Below is what one of these customer specific traits look like.

Deploy the Pixel in the Email Marketing Software: As explained above, once you've completed the prerequisites of setting up the data source and the necessary traits, you can go ahead and setup the pixels in your EMS. Please make sure that there are no extra spaces and the pixel should look very similar to this example where you need to include the additional "%01" and "%011" characters to follow the ID sync conventions. https://ags542.demdex.net/event?d_event=imp&d_cid=133374%01ABC789%011&c_emailopen=yes&c_campaign=ags542_test.

Monitor Audience Traits: This process is often not known to everyone but there is an easy way to test if user IDs synced as part of the email pixel, made it into AAM. This can be done by going to the Audience Traits folder and clicking into the ID sync trait created for email as shown below.

Create Rule Based Traits for the Landing Page: Given that we're only capturing the email open impression and not click, the recommended approach is to create a rule based to capture users who clicked on an email tied to your landing page URL. So, the trait condition will be tied to the following attributes h_referer == AND c_campaign==ags542_test.

Upload CRM Files (if applicable): One interesting use case of syncing user IDs with AAM is to upload demographic or other customer data from the CRM. The process is the same for uploading files in AAM and I've covered it in detail here.

Email marketing is not going anywhere and with a minimum amount of effort, we're able to ID sync users with the DMP. It is a great alternative to ID sync users if you're unable to capture user IDs upon authentication. So, are you capturing email marketing data in AAM and ID syncing your users?

Sunday, March 1, 2009

My take on Email Marketing

Emails have been an integral part of communication since a long time on the Web. It is scary to even think of a world without emails. "Over 50% of Internet users check or send e-mail on a typical day" (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_marketing). In the world of Web Analytics, emails plays a very important role in advertising, bringing in fresh traffic to a website or enhancing customer relationship. This particular branch of direct Online Marketing/Web Analytics is known as Email marketing.

Just like Affiliate marketing, Contextual marketing, Offline marketing etc, there are huge advantages of leveraging email as a powerful medium for advertising purposes.

Advantages of using Email marketing:

1) Low Cost and Reach: Email campaigns are much cheaper to implement in comparison to Banner campaigns or contextual ads. Its accessibility and reach make it a front runner in inciting traffic and creating awareness about your website.
2) Quick and Easy: Email campaign/newsletter is usually very easy to implement and is the fastest medium to send a message across. Email Campaigns can be easily customized with graphics, video etc.
3) Tracking is Simple: There are many tools available which are specifically designed to track email campaigns. You can also track email campaigns yourself. I will be explaining how we can track email campaigns ourselves.
4) Test email for best results: Email campaigns can also be subjected to AB tests incorporating different subject lines, different content of email or different call to actions. You can measure the open rates or Click through rate of each test email campaign and measure efficiency.

Disadvantage of Email marketing:

Prone to Spam and Phishing attacks: Emails are often notorious with spam/junk sent to your inbox which causes frustration among customers. Hopefully the Spam filters of email clients do a good job to an extent but usually good emails might get filtered too. So there is always a trade-off. Similarly spammers/hackers might create Phishing/Fake email campaigns and incite you to go to a different website which might look like a legitimate website.

Email Marketing Metrics:

There are many metrics that we can measure to gauge the success of an Email campaign. Let’s try to understand this from a conversion perspective as shown below.

Emails sent
Emails sent successfully (Non bounce emails)
Bounces
Unsubscribes
Emails opened (Open Rate: emails viewed/emails sent)
Clicks on link in the email (CTR: Total Clicks/Emails Opened)
Visitors redirected to target website from email campaign (Landing page Visitors or Visits/Emails sent)
Conversion rate on target website (Confirmation page Visitors or Visits/Emails Sent)

Email Marketing deep dive and best practices:

1) Open rate is considered to be an important metric while measuring an email campaign but tracking it has some constraints. Mostly all email campaigns are created in HTML and tagging them with a JavaScript snippet of Google Analytics/Omniture will not cause the image pixel to be fired. The reason why it happens is because email clients don’t run JavaScript. A potential workaround that can be to include a .gif image call in the HTML email to get the impressions of the email/opens. Based on the read emails, calculate the Open rate: opens/emails sent.

2) The target outbound link embedded in the email should always contain respective URL parameters to track that the campaign is email specific. Visitors landing on the target website should be attributed to the email campaign based on these tracking parameters. A perfect method for tracking emails yourself can be tried with the Google URL Builder tool found here:

As shown in the image above, when we click on the ‘Generate URL’ button the URL generated is http://rkapoor.blogspot.com/?utm_source=rohanblog&utm_medium=email&utm_content=textlink&utm_campaign=testemails which can be placed as a text link in your email campaign to track a particular campaign. You can then go to Google Analytics and view your Campaigns report.

3) If you do not want to use tracking parameters in your URL, then you can create separate landing pages only specific to your email newsletters. Once you start getting traffic, then you can measure the Visits on the unique email landing page to measure your campaign response to get data for the newsletter clickthroughs.

4) Opt-in is another metric that you can measure to gauge success/response of email opt-in links present on your website. You can measure how many visitors click on a check box to opt-in for an email newsletters. The metric here can be Email Opt-ins/Page Views.

There are various tools available to track email campaigns in the market. Some of those are Madmimi, Aweber, Icontact and Jangomail. Please let me know if I need to add more.

It was really nice writing about a successful, yet underrated topic of Email marketing. I hope you like this post and will highly appreciate if you can share your feedback on this topic.

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