Live Target allows you to write sophisticated dynamic content rules to personalise what is shown at the moment of open in your email campaigns.
These rules can use any of your API or Datatable data sources and contextual data from the moment of open including date/time, location, weather or device the email is opened on.
You can also include data you hold against customers in fields in your ESP.
Creating a Live Target Campaign
From the Live Target option in the menu click the add button to create a new campaign and give it a name.
A campaign is made up of a series of rulesets. Reignite will run each rule in the order they are displayed until it finds a match for the recipient and show the chosen image, and redirect any click-thru’s to the specified link.
By reordering the rulesets by dragging them up or down you can change the order the Reignite processes the rules.
If there are no rule matches then the ‘Otherwise’ ruleset will apply. This contains no actual targeting rules and cannot be deleted or reordered.
Creating a Ruleset
Firstly, click on the + icon from your new campaign to add a new ruleset.
Next choose the type of image you want to show. The options are:
1) Static Image & Link – load in an image from your desktop you wish to show and type the link for any click-thru’s
2) Live Image – choose from your library of Reignite images, and specify the parameters for this image. For example, if you wish to show a personalised image with the customers name on you would add syntax for their name here, or you could simply hardcode values. We will cover this in more detail later
3) Show Nothing – Reignite will show a 1x1 transparent image in this instance
TOP TIP: Remember to save! Each tab in Live Target requires you to save your changes. You’ll get this handy notification at the bottom of the page if you have made changes and not saved.Using Live Images – Specifying personalisation variables
When choosing a live image you get to choose the variables that get passed into that image. For example in a personalised image type you may wish to specify the persons first name. For a weather forecast you'll need to specify the location. There are 3 ways you can add these personalisation variables:
1) Static values – simply enter text into the various parameter boxes of the live image
2) Data from the image URL – you can specify custom data you add to the URL of the Live Target tags in your email template. To do so add the name of the URL parameter you want to add in around a pair of curly brackets. E.G. {{yourfieldname}}. This parameter then becomes available in both the preview and tags screen.
When adding to your email you can set the value as a fixed piece of content, or add a merge tag from your email marketing campaign.
3) Fields from the results of rulesets data source
When you have a ruleset against various data sources all of the fields from that data set become available to pass into your live image.
For example, let’s say you are querying a custom API that holds the loyalty points of each customer. In the ruleset you are looking for customers with over 5,000 points. When this happens you want to pass the loyalty points, their loyalty status and expiry date from the API results through to personalised image you have created for a special offer to these members.
To add these fields to the personalised image just select the jigsaw piece against any of the parameters and select the field you require. This will add the field with square brackets such as [[fieldname]]. You can add your own text before or after this if required.
Writing rules
Once you have chosen the image and link to use you can write the targeting rules that have to apply for this image to be shown.
Firstly, click into the targeting rule tab inside the ruleset.
In here you will be presented with a few buttons.
Match Type: When writing the main rule if you specify multiple criteria this determines whether all the rules have to apply for a match, or if just one of those rules have to apply.
Add Rule: This will add a line to your ruleset where you can specify the data point and criteria that has to match
Add Groups: Live Target allows very sophisticated rules with nested criteria. This is required when you need to have some criteria to match all rules, and some criteria only needs to match one of the rules withing the group.
For example, you want to find all the customers within 50 miles of your location, but where the weather is Clear/Sunny OR cloudy.
Adding Rules
To add a rule click add rule. This will present you with a dialog to choose the data source, and once you have selected the data source a dropdown for which field in the data source.
Once the rule is added you can choose the criteria such as ‘is equal’ or ‘greater than’ followed by the adding the value to compare against in the end box.
What are the available data sources?
URL
This looks for parameters you add in the end of the URL of the Live Target image. These are often used for merging data from your ESP. Any type of data can be added – text, numbers and dates.
After adding the rule you will be presented with an additional box to specify the name of the URL parameter.
Date/Time
This will compare the date you have specified against the current date/time at the moment of open. Available options are:
Current Date
Current Time
Current Date/Time
Weekday
Location
This data source will lookup the location of the recipient, either with a location you specify (including merge from your ESP).
TOP TIP: Reignite will lookup any location you specify from a number of formats including town name, postcode, ZIP code, latitude/longitude.
The options for location rules are:
Location within:
This allows you to specify how many miles away the customer location should be from a latitude/longitude you have entered.
Country:
Choose from the list of countries the customer must be in for the rule to match
Weather
Another use of location data is to find out the weather in the recipients location. This uses the same location inputs.
Weather Temperature (C) / Weather Temperature (F):
Specify a value here in degrees to match against the current daily max temperature forecast for today in their location
Weather Type:
This provides a list of weather types that are forecast as the summary of the weather for the current date in the recipients location.
Rainfall (mm):
The forecast rainfall in mm for the recipients location on the current date
Device:
At the point of open Reignite can look at the nature of the device the recipient is viewing the email on, ideal for targeting mobile or desktop specific call to actions such as app store promotion.
Device Type:
Options of Mobile, Desktop or Tablet
Device Operating System:
This list includes Windows, iOS, Android or macOS
Device Browser:
A full range of email clients and browsers the email is opened on from the likes of Chrome & Firefox, through to Outlook and Gmail.
TOP TIP: Just like location data some email providers such as Gmail and Yahoo block the true operating system and device type they are reading the email on. In this instance you can target both Gmail and Yahoo to have a rule to cater for these openers.
API’s & Datatables
Any custom API’s or Datatables you have added will be listed here to select, with their output fields available to add to rules. As Reignite cannot be sure of the datatype of these fields all text, numeric and date filters are available.
Hints & Tips Date formats: When using dates in data sources, whether these are results from your custom API’s or when adding as parameters to the URL, they need to be in a standard format of YYYY-MM-DD in order for our rules engine to recognise them as a date.
Managing Rulesets
Copy & Delete
To save time when writing rules you can duplicate them and make the small amends using this icon.
To delete a whole ruleset use this icon (this cannot be undone)
Reorder
Click on the grey bar and drag a rule in order to change the hierarchy of rules. The ‘Otherwise’ rule is always fixed to the bottom.
Previewing your rules
In order to assist with ensuring the rulesets you created are working correctly the preview tab allows you to emulate different scenarios, even changing the current date, location or device.
On the left hand side of the preview screen is each data source used with the fields this data source uses to find results. By changing the values in here you can test the rules are working as expected.
Press save after changing your rules and Reignite will refresh the image shown.
The orange tag next to the image tells you which ruleset has matched.
Exporting tags to your ESP
As a final stage from the tags tab you can copy and paste the image & link tags ready to paste into your email template.
Firstly, if you are planning to add ESP merge tags you can add these here rather than any test values you had from preview.
Next, use the Customise Tag option to specify whether you wish to include a link alongside the image, and enter the merge syntax from your ESP that will uniquely identify the customer such as a customer ID or their email address.
Finally use the copy button in the 'Your tag' section to add these HTML tags to your clipboard, ready for pasting into your HTML.