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E-mail activities

Overview

Use e-mail activities to deliver news and promotions to customers. E-mail marketing allows you to...

You can associate an e-mail activity with a campaign, which helps organize the gathered statistics into more meaningful reports.


How E-mail activities work

E-mail activities send a single dynamic e-mail message to multiple recipients. An activity is not sent as a single e-mail with multiple target addresses, but rather as an e-mail sent multiple times, once each to every selected target e-mail address. The individual e-mail generation allows the system to target the e-mail content for each user. This includes simple elements like the customer's name, but also e-mail body text, and promotional content. The individual generation also eliminates the ability of a recipient to see the e-mail addresses of the other recipients, and should reduce privacy concerns.

E-mail activities are created using the e-mail activity editor. When creating an e-mail activity, select the e-mail template upon which it is based. This e-mail template can be defined either prior to creating the e-mail activity, or as part of the e-mail activity creation.

Prior to e-mail activity creation, the site administrator must configure the e-mail accounts used by the e-mail activity system. E-mail configuration defines...

If the store has enabled workspaces, e-mail activities may be managed using workspaces and inherit the benefits from that feature.

E-mail activities can exist in three states:

By default, the scheduled job that creates and sends e-mail, SendMarketingTriggers, runs every 30 minutes. The e-mail activity is either scheduled to be sent in the next daily delivery, or sent immediately, if the send time has passed during the last 30 minutes. The frequency of this job can be configured using the Administration Console.

Care should be taken in any endeavor to mass e-mail customers. There is growing concern, and in some places, laws forming, around exactly what is allowable depending on the level of consent, whether there is no consent, implied consent, or full consent. Any customer e-mail activities should ensure compliance with the latest developments in this area.


Reply-to addresses

When the Site Administrator configures e-mail activities, one of the settings is a default reply-to e-mail address. That is, an e-mail activity uses this address to populate the Reply-to e-mail address field in the E-mail activity dialog. Some sites use specific reply-to e-mail addresses for their e-mail activities so that the incoming mail is appropriately filtered to the person responsible for supporting the activity, or the parent campaign.


Management of e-mail delivery failure

As with any kind of e-mail, delivery of e-mail sent as part of an e-mail activity is subject to failure for a number of reasons. Failure to deliver an e-mail results in what is called a bounce-back. A bounce-back is simply a case where an out-going e-mail fails to arrive at its destination, and ends up in the sender's inbox instead. Bounce-backs fall into two categories, hard and soft. A hard bounce-back typically indicates that the e-mail address to which you sent the message is invalid. E-mails re-sent to an address that has resulted in a hard bounce-back will always result in a hard bounce-back. Conversely, a soft bounce-back is caused by some event or situation that is typically considered temporary. For example, if an e-mail cannot be accepted due to a restriction on the size of a customer's inbox, this is considered a soft bounce-back. Resending this message to this e-mail address at a later time may result in a successful delivery. When you create an e-mail activity, you have the option of specifying how WebSphere Commerce should handle soft bounce-backs. You have the option of having the message re-sent, and if so, how often, and how long after the initial send date to wait before re-sending.


E-mail activities in extended sites

Whenever the information defined in the e-mail configuration is needed, the following rules apply:

  1. E-mail can be configured in both an asset store and a child store.

  2. When an e-mail activity is created in a store, the following logic determines which store's e-mail configuration is used:

    1. If there is an e-mail configuration for the store in which the e-mail activity is created, that store's e-mail configuration is used.

    2. If there is no e-mail configuration for the store in which the e-mail activity is created, the system uses the e-mail configuration defined in the store's asset stores according to the following precedence

      1. If there is only one asset store which has e-mail configured, the configuration of that asset store is used.

      2. If multiple asset stores have e-mail configured, the closest asset store, according to the relationship defined in the database is used. Specifically, the store that has the smallest value in the SEQUENCE column of the STOREREL table. For example, consider an e-mail activity being created in an extended store that has an inherited relationship with asset store A and a direct relationship with asset store B. If both A and B have e-mail configured, the e-mail activity created in the extended store will use the e-mail configuration from store B.

      3. If there is no e-mail configuration defined in any related asset stores, the user is not allowed to create an e-mail activity.

In an extended site model, an extended store's e-mail activity list displays the e-mail activities created in the extended store and its asset stores. However, the e-mail activities created in the asset stores are read-only. For example, if an e-mail activity named EA1 is created in the asset store, it is listed in the extended store's e-mail activity list. However, when a user selects the EA1 and clicks Change or Delete, the user receives an alert message that the action is not allowed.


Related concepts

Web activities
Dialog activities
Campaigns
E-mail templates


Related tasks

Create an e-mail activity
Create e-mail templates using the Marketing tool in the Management Center
Changing an e-mail activity
Configure e-mail activity accounts


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