Build an Open Time Email

Learning Objectives

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

Explain how to build an open time email campaign.
Explore an overview of promotions, exclusions, and templates.
Create content blocks and rules, simulate messages, and create HTML code.

Open Time Email Components

There are several components you need to set up for each open time email campaign you build, but you can reuse these components in other open time email campaigns.

The recipe: In Marketing Cloud Personalization, create the recommendations recipe algorithm, which determines the content that should populate the email message for each recipient.
The template: Use Marketing Cloud Personalization to create the OTE template that holds content generated by the recipe.
The email: Once the recipe and template are ready, you can create your open time email. You simulate the email experience for recipients and generate the HTML code. Then you copy this code into your email marketing system to send the message.

Create Recipe Recommendations and Promotions

Before you begin building an open time email campaign, you need to create the recipe that drives recommendations and promotions you send to your recipients. For this example, use two ingredients: co-buy and co-browse. These ingredient recommendations are items that are generally bought and looked at with items the recipient specifically bought and looked at in the past month. The goal is to inspire shoppers with items related to things they look at or have purchased. It’s best to omit any exclusions at the recipe level, and then add them when you create the content block that uses a recipe. This makes it possible to reuse the same recipe for multiple content blocks, experiences, and campaigns.

Create Marketing Cloud Personalization Template

Before you can create an open time email campaign, you need to have at least one open time item template. This template controls how each content or product recommendation displays in your email campaigns.

Build the Email

After you create the content components for your open time email, you need to create the message that contains these items before you can send it through your email system.

In the Channels & Campaign section of the left navigation, click Email.

Email highlighted in the Channels & Campaigns section.

Select Open Time Campaigns.
Select Open Time Email from the new campaign dropdown.
Enter the campaign name.

An item or content block is a container for content and adds a preformatted layout to a promotion or group of recommended items. Enter a name for the first content block, which can contain items or promotions.

Types of Promotions

There are several types of promotions you can choose from as you build your email: static, dynamic, or decision.

Static Promotion: Always displays the same media within that campaign experience. It’s possible to vary what media is shown to a customer by creating multiple experiences in the OTE campaign.
Dynamic Promotion: Allows you to vary the media content displayed within an experience based on a schedule that you define when you create the promotions and content zones. For example, you can create a promotion that displays a special hero announcing a sale taking place during a set time period. If a customer views the email during the specified date range, they see the special sale hero. But if they view the email outside of that date range when the sale isn’t happening, they see a default hero instead.
Decision Promotion: This type of promotion is driven by the contextual bandit algorithm, which means that the algorithm displays the promotion likely to resonate with the recipient.

An Example One Time Email Promotion

Here’s an example of how to put an OTE promotion together step by step.

In the Catalog section of the left navigation, click Promotions and Actions.

Promotions and Actions highlighted in the Catalog section.

Select Add Promotion.
For Name, enter Jane dress free shipping promo.
Since this is a promotion, you select Promotion as the item type, but what you select here depends on the type of content you want to populate in a content block. For this example, choose Static.
Select Jane dress free shipping promo.
There are two image sizes for this promotion. Since it’s going at the top of the message, select the 660x 311 size because that fits better at the top of the message.
Add alternate text for the image in the event that the recipient’s email application removes the image.
Click Save before adding a second block for item recommendations.
Click Add new block.
For Name, enter Rex row one.
For Item Type, select Product since you want to recommend products in this item block.
Select Display block title if you want to add a title to the top of the content block. Note: This is optional. And you can also add CSS styling for the block title.
Choose the item template from the list of options.
Adjust the Block Size and the Number of Items as needed. On the side panel, you see the changes happen as you make them.
You can add additional CSS styling for the block and the item wrapper. You can also add alternate text that displays for all images as needed. For this content block, use a recipe as the promotion type. Note: For more information about using advanced dynamic message content (ADMC) for promotions, contact your customer success representative.
For Recipe, select Collaborative filtering with a gender boost. Note: Recommended items are based on the recipient’s browsing and purchasing behavior with extra weighting placed on the gender category the recipient shows the most interest in. However, sometimes a recipe may not return any results.

Marketing Cloud Personalization fills in the empty spaces with trending items unless you select disable trending fallback. If you disable trending fallback, Marketing Cloud Personalization returns transparent, one-by-one pixel images for any remaining empty slots. For an OTE campaign, it’s more efficient and more flexible to omit exclusions or inclusions at the recipe level and instead control any exclusions or inclusions at the campaign level so you can reuse the same recipe for multiple campaigns. Select the exclusion type, and then select exclude or include as needed.

Repeat the same process to add an additional row of recommendations based on a different recipe and even a different item template.

Since this is a Marketing Cloud Personalization campaign, you can add multiple experiences so you can target different audiences with the same campaign details. For example, you can adjust the recipes to target different genders or promote different categories of products based on geolocation or weather. Click plus to add a second experience. Marketing Cloud Personalization automatically clones the initial experience, so it’s easy to make minor modifications to the recipes and exclusions. Once you have a second experience, you can adjust the test mode and the settings or rules that control it.

Rules Simulation and Publishing

Select Setup Experiences to choose the type of test you want to perform.
- AB test: Set the percentage of recipients who will see each experience. Click Redistribute to evenly split the percentage across the experiences. Use the slider to make adjustments.
- Rule-based test: Select each experience to add the target users rule or rules that control which recipient gets which experience. Note: if you want to target members of your high-value segment, select Segment includes high-value customer.
Close setup and click Save.

Even if you thoroughly test the recipes when you build them, it’s still critical to simulate them in the open time email environment.

Click Simulate to open a modal with a recipient already selected and the recommendations for that recipient already populated.
Copy and paste a user ID into the dropdown to test recommendations for other specific users.
Click Show HTML to view the HTML code for this simulation. You can use this HTML code to test prior to publishing.
Close the simulation and make any changes needed. When your open time email is final and ready for your email service provider (ESP), you need to generate the HTML code.

Once you generate the HTML code for your open time email, copy it into an email campaign you create in your email marketing system. But before you do this, make sure you’re finished making changes to the open time email campaign. Once you generate the HTML code, you cannot make format changes to the open time email, but you can still adjust the recipes driving each content area.

Click Publish and generate HTML.
Click Confirm. Review the generated HTML code to confirm that your ESP can inject the Marketing Cloud Personalization customer ID into the HTML request.
Make any necessary changes.
Copy the HTML code and paste it into the email template in your ESP. You can either copy each content block by clicking copy HTML next to each block, or click combine all HTML blocks and copy HTML to copy the entire message.
Click View separate HTML blocks to switch back to separate HTML blocks for each content area.

Once your email template is complete, test it in your email service provider. Make sure that your test contains representative profiles similar to your opt-in list so you can realistically simulate the results. Once you publish your campaign in your ESP, you can view analytics in Marketing Cloud Personalization around the effectiveness of the content areas.

Next Steps

Similar to other Marketing Cloud Personalization campaigns, you can view detailed campaign statistics along with promoted item statistics on Marketing Cloud Personalization email campaigns. Select the email campaign from the open time campaigns list screen. Below, select statistics to see campaign statistics on the recipe or ADMC-generated content areas, or select promoted item stats to see analytics on the effectiveness of the promotions you included in the same email.

Wrap Up

Building an open time email campaign begins with a recipe, a promotion, and an open time item template. You use the open time campaign to put them together into a message that resonates with each recipient. Once you have the building blocks, you can create the framework for your email marketing system. And after you publish, you can use Marketing Cloud Personalization to see the effectiveness of the content areas you created.

Marketing Cloud Personalization OTE combines the power of Marketing Cloud Personalization one-to-one recommendations and promotions with the email marketing system you already use to deliver email messages that account for each recipient’s latest actions.

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