Set up an Optimizely Triggered Messages campaign

7 min

Each Optimizely Triggered Messages campaign must have an associated Email Service Provider (ESP) connection and ESP action (send mail, add to group, remove from group). Set up the ESP connection and the ESP action once, which can act on your Triggered Messages campaigns. Furthermore, each Triggered Messages campaign must have an associated Email Product Recommendations campaign with an appropriate trigger strategy. See Set up a triggered Optimizely Email Product Recommendations campaign.

Create a Triggered Messages campaign

Go to Configuration > Triggered Messages.

Click Create campaign.

Enter a Campaign name, like Test SendMessage.

Select an ESP action so the trigger performs the desired action when it fires.

(Optional) Specify start and end dates for the campaign.

If you have a site in Optimizely with more than one language, like a Swiss site that has French and German languages, you can set the Locale to fire triggered messages based on the locale, which sends emails in the correct language. You can also select a wildcard option to match all regional variants of a locale. Options ending in an asterisk (*), such as de*, match every variant of that locale (for example, de, de-ch, and de-de). Selecting a plain locale value (for example, de) continues to match only that exact locale, so existing trigger configurations are unaffected.

Custom contact frequency displays only if you select the Send message action. Toggle to On if you want the campaign to limit the number of times a trigger can fire for each customer from this Triggered Messages campaign. If you toggle on the Custom contact frequency, specify the maximum number of times that the trigger can be fired for each user by this campaign per day, per week, or per month. In the screenshot below, the trigger campaign specifies that for any visitor, the trigger fires no more than five times per day, no more than 20 times per week, and no more than 50 times per month (whichever limit is reached first).

Under Strategies, select the type of trigger this campaign should use:

Session – Specify how long (in minutes) the visitor needs to be inactive on your site before the trigger can fire. Enter a waiting time between 0 and 240 minutes. You can use In-session triggers and Additional trigger actions alone or in combination with each other. See Trigger action limits. With Additional trigger actions, you can specify whether the customer must have visited a certain page type a specific number of times. You can also specify a URL (or a keyword from a URL) from your site that the customer must have visited. The order of additional trigger actions does not matter. To add a criterion where the user has not visited a certain page type or URL, you can enter the number of viewings as 0 (zero). To enter 0 for an additional trigger, you must have at least one other trigger set (in-session or additional where Viewings is greater than zero).

Daily – Unless stated otherwise, daily triggers monitor the last 30 days of data. When the trigger criteria are satisfied, the trigger fires. For example, the Repurchase trigger sends an email when a visitor has not purchased a recurring product that was expected to be purchased by a given date, such as when paper supplies run out.

(Optional) Add any Expressions you want. Expressions let you further refine the trigger criteria, for example, to fire only for special products, product categories, price thresholds, or brands.

Expressions only apply to the trigger Strategies (session or daily), not to Additional trigger actions.

A trigger fires only with products that match the Expressions filter. The following rules apply:

If none of the products for the trigger (for example, an in-session trigger for abandoned basket products) match the expression, the trigger will not fire.

If only some products for the trigger (for example, an in-session trigger for abandoned basket products) match the expression, the trigger will fire with only matching products.

Tip

You may have products whose prices change frequently. To avoid sending a discount email every time a price reduction occurs for these products, you can use Expressions to limit the trigger requirements to selected products.

Click Save campaign when you are done.

The initial state of a newly created trigger is Off. To activate it, go to the Campaigns overview page and click play next to the campaign name.

Set up an ESP connection

Optimizely must connect to the ESP's API so that when Triggered Messages are fired, Optimizely can alert the ESP to act.

Go to Configuration > Triggered Messages > ESP > Connections.

Edit an existing connection or create one. To create a connection, click Create ESP connection. The Manage your ESP connections page displays.

To create a connection:

Enter a name and select the ESP.

Enter your API credentials for your ESP account (such as username, password, database, realm, and API token).

Click Test ESP connection to test the connection.

Click Save ESP connection.

Set up an ESP action

Go to Configuration > Triggered Messages > ASP > Actions.

You can edit an existing ESP action or create one. Make sure it uses the connection you require, such as the one you created or edited in Set up an ESP connection.

To create an action, click Create ESP action.

Choose your preferred ESP action type from the available options and enter the required details (such as Group ID, List ID, Message ID, Database), the values of which are available from your ESP portal.

Note

These fields are dynamic and differ depending on the chosen ESP connection and action type.

Available action types are as follows:

Note

Depending on the features supported by your ESP platform, some of these actions may not be available for your chosen connection.

Remove user from target group – Remove a user's email address from the group or list.

Add user to target group – A fired trigger tells the ESP to add a user's email address to the email group or list with the specified Group ID or List ID. If there are ESP-level triggers on the list, they are activated by this step. This action adds a user's email address to a list; it does not send those users any emails.

Send message to user – A fired trigger tells the ESP to send the message with the specified Message ID to the user.

Warning

Depending on your ESP, Send message may not check whether the user has opted into the emailing scheme, so use it with caution.

After you create your ESP action, test it and save it.

Link to a specific basket

Optimizely can integrate links from an email recommendation to a particular basket of the recipient. To enable this feature, contact customer service.

For developer information, see Link to a specific basket.