Campaign tutorial: Profile enrichment

Profiles can be enriched with information you gather from your mailings. Information from link clicks and orders can easily be used to identify what matters to your customers and how you can send more relevant emails.

With a clever selection you can use this information to make target groups and send them different, more targeted, emails. You can also choose to personalize the email directly, for example by using different content blocks for different interests.

In this tutorial we show you how to use follow-ups to enrich your profiles in different ways.

With follow-ups it is possible to create a custom subscribe link. All you need to get started is a field in the database. In this case we'll call the field "subscribed".

Now we can create the follow-up:

  • Create or open a template.
  • Open the "Follow-ups" menu under Tools.
  • Create a new follow-up and select "Link click" as the trigger. You can now choose the link you want to make a follow-up for. You can also select "Any link", but this will make all links in the template subscribe links.
  • Add an "Update destination" box and click on "edit".
  • Select "field" and enter the name of the field you want to update. In this case we use "subscribed".
  • Add a new value for the field and save the follow-up. In this case we use the value "yes".

Now the "subscribed" field will be set to "yes" every time a user clicks your URL.

Tip: You can set a target in the follow-up menu to get suggestions for the field names, making editing easier. You can also add follow-ups faster by clicking the "Follow-up" tab when your link is selected.

Gathering interests from orders

With collections you can easily store purchases made by your customers. We recommend using an integration with your webshop for this to fully automate the process. Your purchases will now be registered as subprofiles in the collection. Make sure you create fields for all the information you want to save about an order.

Now we want to create the follow-up for this collection:

  • Go to your database and open the "Manage fields" menu.
  • Add a new interest group named "Purchases".
  • Add all categories used for your webshop items. Watch the spelling!
  • Select the collection with orders under Database & Profiles.
  • Open the follow-up editor.
  • Choose the trigger "Subprofile created", since this means a new order.
  • Enable the advanced mode and grab a Javascript execution box
  • Edit it with the following code:

profile.interests[subprofile.fields.category] = true;

In this code subprofile.fields.category refers to the category field of the subprofile. If you named your field something different you should replace "category" with the name you used. The profile.interests[] refers to the interest we are going to change. You can also turn off interests in your code by replacing "true" with "false".

Now you can create a new subprofile and see if it works. If your follow-up works correctly the category of each new purchase will now be added to the interests of your customer.

More information

Now that you have information about your customers it's important to use it well. The articles below can give you some ideas on how to group your customers in selections and personalize emails just for them.