Get to Know Campaigns and Templates

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Control who sees the personalization content in your campaign.
Identify the areas on your site that are eligible for personalization.
Create different personalization results within the same campaign.

An Introduction to Campaigns and Templates

Campaigns are at the heart of personalization on your web channel, giving you a launching point to create experiences that resonate with your visitors and help you reach your business goals.

In Marketing Cloud Personalization (MCP):

Web campaigns are created by a business user with campaign author or higher permissions using a web campaign template created by a developer.
Templates offer infinite flexibility to developers so they can create a framework for a business user to achieve specific business goals.

Parts of a Web Campaign

A web campaign is a container for a content area on your site personalized based on a visitor’s behavior, affinities, preferences, location, or other qualifying criteria. During the campaign development process, a business user can modify configurable inputs in MCP to create and deploy these one-to-one personalized interactions. When you, as the business user, create a new campaign and select a template, you complete the inputs available for that template, add qualification criteria rules, and then publish the campaign. The published campaign is visible to visitors that qualify based on the testing and targeting logic you set when you create the campaign. For example, suppose you want to create an infobar promoting free shipping and returns. You create a campaign, add the infobar template, complete the input specific to that template, add any qualification rules, and publish the campaign.

Content zones, web templates, and experiences are key components of a web campaign.

Content zones: A content zone is an area on your site that a developer configures to make it eligible for personalization. An example of a content zone is a website’s homepage hero banner, which can be personalized with various offers, promotions, or lifestyle images. Another example is a section of a product detail page (PDP) that you reserve for a product recommendations carousel. Content zones are defined by a developer for your site during the implementation process, but can be added later as well.
Web templates: A web template offers a developer-built, fully QAed, and repeatable framework that you can use to create web personalization campaigns. Templates define what a campaign can render, such as promotional assets, product recommendations, message copy, and images. It also defines what campaign creators can configure, such as the algorithms powering the recommendations, message copy, call-to-action copy, or even the presence of a call-to-action button.
Experiences: This is just what it sounds like—the experience a visitor has with a particular web personalization or activation campaign. You can use experiences to create different personalization results within the same campaign. For example, suppose you want to create an infobar campaign welcoming first-time visitors to your site, and show different copies to visitors from different geographical regions. Using one campaign, you can create separate experiences, each targeting a different subset of your website visitors. Then you can use geographic rules to control the visibility of each experience.

Web campaign and experience rules control the visibility of a campaign to individuals and audiences. There are many combinations of rules, and they can be used regardless of the testing type you use for your campaign.

Common Template Examples

Here are a few examples of web templates you can use to put together a campaign in Marketing Cloud Personalization.

Web infobars: These appear at the top or bottom of the page and are typically used to call attention to an announcement like a discount code, system outage, or other important item that you don’t want visitors to miss.
Popup campaigns: These are used for many applications from browser abandonment to email capture and typically have a copy, an image, and a call to action such as a button or an entry field. For example, you can use a popup to entice returning visitors to provide their email address in exchange for access to exclusive discounts.
Homepages: Often built with a static one-size-fits-all approach, a homepage can put the task of finding relevancy on the visitor by asking them to seek out the content or products that inspire them. A better approach is a homepage entirely personalized for every visitor on your site. For example, based on the visitor’s location, the hero banner can change to reflect the type of footwear popular in that region for the season or weather conditions.

When you think about recommendations, you typically think of product recommendations. But they can also be used for blog content, which can go a long way to promote brand awareness and build customer loyalty. For example, the recommendation zone can promote articles and videos driven by two separate campaigns. The first includes curated articles personalized for the visitor, and the second includes a video specifically selected for the visitor.

Each visitor sees the content that most resonates with them based on their behaviors and preferences. Another option is including two recommendation carousels powered by separate campaigns—one that shows trending items boosted by the visitors category affinity and the other that uses collaborative filtering boosted by brand affinity.

The Northern Trail Outfitters Web Campaign

Consider the product recommendations on the homepage of the Northern Trail Outfitters (NTO) site. NTO is an outdoor lifestyle brand that sells women’s and men’s apparel along with camping, hiking, and biking equipment. They know that on its site, much of NTO’s traffic comes through the homepage. So NTO wants to offer product recommendations to inspire shoppers from the moment they arrive on its site. Here’s what Dan, the marketing manager, needs to do to create this type of campaign.

First, Dan needs a developer-configured content zone to make it eligible for personalization.

Next, he needs a template. Since there’s a global template for homepage recommendations available on his site, he doesn’t need to engage a developer to create one. But if the template isn’t quite what he needs, he can work with a developer to update a global template or create a new one. Also, depending on the template, he can control certain aspects of the campaign design. The design includes text or copy, font style, color, the algorithm powering the recommendations, a call to action, message, and behavior.

For this campaign, Dan changes the header text to Trending This Season and selects the Trending Now recipe (for more on recipes, see Einstein Recipes and Decisions: Quick Look) as the algorithm and logic driving the selected recommendations. Note that recipes can limit recommendations to a specific category of products like men’s or women’s.

Finally, Dan adds multiple experiences to target and test other options in the same campaign using an A/B test or a rules-based test. Experience One targets visitors with an affinity for women’s products. Experience Two targets visitors with an affinity for men’s products. Experience Three targets all other users without a clear affinity for certain products. Dan updates the recipe in each experience to appropriately limit the product selection to his desired audience using separate gender filters. He also adds a rule for the entire campaign to target visitors who are in the recent visitor segment. The resulting campaign shows trending product recommendations to qualified visitors. That means their product gender affinities, based on the selected algorithm, and the trending-now recipe selected for the campaign, target those in the recent visitors segment.

Wrap Up

Content zones, templates, and campaigns are the central components of web personalization. Once you define the content zones and templates for your site, it’s easy to create a personalization campaign that resonates with your audiences. Next up, dive into campaign statistics.

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