E-mail activities
E-mail activities allow Merchants to deliver news and promotions to customers using e-mail. This enables Merchants, using the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator, to reach customers who may not have visited your site in some time, or to keep regular customers up to date regarding up coming events or products.
E-mail activities can be either pending or delivered. They are considered pending while being created, and while awaiting delivery. Thereafter, they are considered delivered.
E-mail activities are based on templates, coded as Java Server Pages, which define the subject and content of the e-mail. The templates contain data beans, which are capable of accessing the commerce database to generate dynamic content, such as the individual recipients' first and last names.
The e-mail activity templates, once created, must be stored in a location accessible by the commerce server. They must also be registered in the commerce database by a database administrator before they will be available to the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator.
As a site developer, when you are creating e-mail activity templates, you must be aware of your site's policy regarding customers opting in and opting out of receiving e-mail. In order to receive e-mail activities, the customer must have a corresponding entry in the EMLUSRRECV table. If the user does not have an entry in this table, or if the RECEIVEEML column in that table is set to '0' for the given store, the user will not receive e-mail. This is equivalent to saying that the user only receives e-mail if there is a corresponding '1' in the RECEIVEEML column for the customer in question. It should also be noted that the current product architecture does not scope a customer segment to a particular store, therefore, an entry of '0' in the STORE_ID column represents a customer being opted-out of all e-mail activities in all stores.
IBM recommends that you, as the e-mail template author, utilize the EmailActivityUrlHelperDataBean class to allow the recipient a one click opt-out method from receiving future e-mail activities.
Related concepts
CampaignsRelated tasks
Create e-mail activity templates using JSP filesRelated reference
E-mail activity delivery algorithm