Overview
Sailthru empowers marketers to build a single view of each user, enabling you to create, automate, and personalize communication across channels to drive retention and acquisition.
Key Capabilities and Example Uses
When your integration is complete, you will be able to take advantage of the following key features:
| Key Capabilities |
Example Uses |
Automating and personalizing email content.
- Send individual or recurring mass emails and triggered messages using custom templates that can display your latest content and user data.
- Let Sailthru tailor your included site content/links to each user based on their known interests and past activity as recorded by Sailthru.
- Create custom flows to handle any user actions or states and respond with messaging and more.
For more information, see the Personalization Engine Overview. |
- Weekly, automated email where you select a featured item and let Sailthru personalize the rest.
- Send a triggered email each time the user signs up for a list, makes a purchase, or abandons their cart.
- Set up a flow to check in 3 weeks whether the new user made a purchase or visited your site multiple times; if not, send a prompt by email or mobile push, depending on whether the user has your app*.
- For a given campaign, choose a time range and Sailthru will send to each user when they’re most likely to open.
- Send a promotion where Sailthru includes one unique discount code per recipient.
- Leverage your preferred combination of editorial control and automation.
|
| Integrating with your site via a simple JavaScript tag to acquire new customers and build their interest profiles, further powering personalization. |
- Based on pages visited and tags on those pages, build interest profiles on each user to power personalization.
- Identify known users and follow up on abandoned carts or browsing sessions.
- If using Site Recommendations*, tailor onsite experiences to the user, offering suggested content items or calls-to-action displayed as targeted Overlays.
|
| Managing users and lists, including robust, dynamic segmentation using Audience Builder that allows you to target customers based on their User Profile attributes |
- Maintain a profile for each user with interest data populated by Sailthru and contact information or other custom data points supplied directly by the user (e.g. in signup forms) or via your other CRM systems.
- Maintain “natural lists” to which users are individually added and removed.
- Maintain “smart lists” with Audience Builder or our API, setting criteria for users to include/exclude dynamically. For example, users who:
- opened or clicked a link in your email this month
- have a birthday today
- have custom field ‘loyalty_program_member’ set to ‘true’
- any combination of attributes using nested AND/OR/NOT logic
|
| Analytics – Sailthru tracks user interactions with your site and your communications, allowing you to gauge the success of your strategies through in-depth reporting. |
- Monitor interaction with your campaigns, templates, site, and more.
- Monitor the performance of A/B/split testing and select the best-performing strategy for a given email campaign or triggered template.
|
| Mobile* – Integrate your mobile app with Sailthru Mobile to power personalized push notifications and in-app messaging. |
- Send a single promotional push notification to a certain segment of users based on their known attributes.
- Automatically send a behavior-based push notification to customers the moment that they reach a certain location or threshold of loyalty with your site or brand.
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*This product is only available with certain subscription packages.
User Profiles and the Content Library
Sailthru helps you connect each user with optimal content across channels. This requires our system to maintain an in-depth understanding of each user as well as your site’s content items, such as articles or products. This data in Sailthru will resemble the following:
Example User Profile
| Data |
Primary Uses |
| Email (Address) |
A unique identifier and for sending email |
| Name |
Included in communications |
| Location |
Segmentation/targeting |
| Source (Acquisition) |
Segmentation/targeting, analytics |
Interests
(Based on click/browse activity. Includes degree of Interest vs. other users) |
Sailthru’s personalization algorithms |
Custom fields
(Ex. age, loyalty_status) |
Segmentation/targeting, including in communications |
And much more. For more information, see the User Profiles page.
|
Example Content Item
| Data |
Primary Uses |
| Title |
Included in communications |
| URL |
Unique identifier and included in communications |
| Interest tags |
User interest profiles and interest-based personalization algorithms |
| Date |
Display recent content, Include in communications |
Custom fields
(Ex. department, category, vertical, long_description) |
Filter for or filter out content based stored category name in a given view/context, or display custom content in templates with the content item (e.g. long description, original price, etc.)
|
And much more. For more information, see the Content in Sailthru page. |
In short, having the right data in your User Profiles and Content Library is essential to powering content automation and personalization.
Read on to learn about how you can get this important data into Sailthru and put it to use.
Interacting with Sailthru
My Sailthru and the Sailthru API, JavaScript, and Zephyr
- My Sailthru (https://my.sailthru.com)
- A web interface where marketers manage users and lists, create and schedule emails, view analytics, and much more.
- JavaScript and API
- The Sailthru JavaScript will be embedded on your site, allowing you to collect data on users’ interests–even those who are browsing anonymously and who later identify themselves through a signup, purchase, or email link click.
- Some clients also use the JavaScript to automatically build their Sailthru Content Library–a replication of your site’s content URLs, titles, and other metadata. However, this data may be more optimally synced using the Content API.
- Using additional JavaScript and/or API functions, your developers may set up your site or server to send and receive additional data and initiate actions. For example, when a user signs up for an email list or makes a purchase, you can send that data to Sailthru in order to act on it later or in real time via your preconfigured Lifecycle Optimizer flows.
- For some data, you will have the choice of whether to send it directly from your server (using the API) or directly from the user’s browser (using JavaScript). For other data, the API is required.
- Zephyr
- Within your templates, in addition to HTML, you can include Sailthru’s scripting language, Zephyr, to insert user-specific data, logic, and more. As a basic example, Hi, {first_name}! In your template might become Hi, Steve! for one of your users, depending on what is stored in the user’s profile.