Personalization Engine in Email Templates

Personalization Engine makes it easy to set up a completely automated newsletter with content customized to each subscriber.

Personalization Engine setup on your website is required. Once Personalization Engine spidered content is in your account, you’re ready for the next steps:

1
Setup a Data Feed

Please see instructions to add a Personalization Engine Content Feed.

In the feed, there are two special fields:

tags contains a comma-separated list of the Personalization Engine interest tags that relate to that piece of content.

weight is optional and contains a weight multiplier to assign to the item. If it is not provided, it defaults to 1.

If you are using a non-Personalization Engine Content Feed (a feed you generate and provide yourself), you can manually add tags to your content by adding a ‘tags’ parameter on each item. For example:

"content":{[
{
 "title" : "Sample Content Item",       
 "url" : "http://www.example.com/products/widget.html",       
 "tags" : ["demo-tag","demo-tag-2","demo-tag3"]   
}
]},

This will allow the items in your feed to work with our recommendation code, just as if you were using a Personalization Engine Content Feed. The only disadvantage to using a non-Personalization Engine Content Feed is that Personalization Engine will not be able to exclude content if a user has already clicked on it, as it would if you were using a Personalization Engine Content Feed.

2
Setup your Template for Behavioral Content

Go to the Advanced tab in the template editor
Set the ‘Data Feed URL’ to the content feed you created in Step 1.
Personalization Engine can select which stories from the feed are going to be of most interest to a subscriber. This data feed will be pulled at send time and passed to the personalize() function for each user. This is required and will automatically pick stories based on user interest. Click here to read more about the personalize() function.

This behavioral selection is set in the Setup section of the Advanced tab. A special block of code is run once per user.
To make the function pick the top five pieces of content for a user, use this line:

 {content = personalize({ "algorithm" : "interest"})}

3
Code your Template to Call Content

Code up the template to call in the data feed as normal.

That’s It! You now have a completely dynamic template.