Newsletter Dynamic Customization using Blind Form Submits

Vince Lockyer, Demand Generation Specialist at Avid was kind enough to send in this excellent (and very detailed) example of using blind form submits to customize a newsletter to the exact preferences of each recipient.

The Avid Spotlight newsletter has a subscriber base of well over a million contacts – from bedroom DJs and home video editing enthusiasts through to network TV news engineers, Top 10 music producers and Hollywood feature film editors.

To ensure our broad range of subscribers get the most relevant content, ADC (Activity Driven Content) is used to pull in sections of news and promotional content targeted towards six different segments.

In this post I’ll show how we used ADC and Email Blind Form Submits to dynamically customize the newsletter. Using this method our subscribers can personalize their newsletter with additional content preferences, and then immediately view the updated email in a web browser.

In the first month over 4000 individual customizations occurred using this method. Not only does it help to ensure people get the news they want, but it means our subscribers can provide us with explicit segmentation data about themselves.

How it works

Avid Spotlight content preferences are stored as a series of six contact fields containing an ‘on’ (form checkbox) value indicating whether the subscriber should be receiving that content. If an ‘on’ value is present for a particular content preference then that content gets pulled into the final email using ADC criteria rules.




An additional set of ADC rules check to see which content preferences the subscriber doesn’t have – displaying blind form submission buttons (right) that automatically add values to the respective content preferences fields.

After the form submission, a confirmation page is displayed automatically redirecting the subscriber to the Web Preview version of the newsletter containing the updated content (below).



Try it Yourself!

http://forms.avid.com/forms/spotlightdemo

Use this form to subscribe to our newsletter (you can remove yourself at any time). You’ll immediately receive the latest newsletter to try out the customization.

The Form

To keep the blind form submission URLs as short as possible, the HTML name of the form is simply called ‘sl’. The form fields are:

• em (Email Address)
• pref (Preference) – Containing the additional content preference code
• sguid (elqEmailSaveGUID) – Used to display the Web Preview
• elq (RecepientID) – Also used to display the Web Preview

The Blind Form Submission

Here is the format of the blind form anchors, using Eloqua dynamic email fields to pull in the email address and Web Preview fields:




Processing Steps

When a blind form submission is received, Eloqua does the following:

• Updates the Contact Field with the relevant content preference (‘on’ value)
• Updates an additional contact field containing the full name (text string) of the content preference (this is used in the confirmation page).
• Updates two more contact fields – RecepientID and elqSaveEmailGUID (also used by the confirmation page).
• Redirects to the Confirmation Page.

After the processing steps, the contact table will look something like this:




The Confirmation Page

This is where the additional content preference is confirmed to the subscriber in a Web Page, followed by a meta redirect to the saved Web Preview version of the email. In order for this last part to work, Contact Table field values have to be pulled into the confirmation page.



Firstly, the page pulls in the name of the content preference and the email address. In our case CEF100441 equals the content preference name field, and C_EmailAddress is the subscriber's email address:



The final part of the confirmation page is the meta redirect, which is in this format:



Where CEF100440 is the elqEmailSaveGUID, and CEF100442 is the RecipientID.
Note: these field names will be different in your instance of Eloqua, and you’ll need to use the ‘Insert Field’ menu item in the Confirmation Page builder to insert the HTML containing the field name.

Take the Eloqua Challenge

I wrote last week about a fun use of Eloqua by the folks at Accela, who had used the platform for internal employee engagement. It turns out that our own Chad Horenfeldt had put together a similar (although much smaller) quiz called the Eloqua Challenge.

Click here to take the Eloqua Challenge


You may have seen it (or taken it) if you're part of the Eloqua LinkedIn Group, but if not, have a look at it. It's 6 quick questions to see how much you know about Eloqua.

Once you have taken the challenge, you'll be taken to a PURL page that shows you what you got right and wrong, and some additional interesting info about that area.

The Eloqua Challenge is all built using form processing, Hypersites, PURLs, and Activity Driven Content. If you're interested in some of the behind-the-scenes details of how it's built, let me know and perhaps a later post can dig into that.

Something for Everyone - Personalized Content

Content personalization is often like Mark Twain's comment on the weather - everyone talks about it, but nobody does anything about it. Well, not true exactly, but more personalization could certainly be done in most B2B marketing. Let's look at a way to quickly insert a chunk of content into an email that is personalized based on data in the recipient's contact record.

It's easy to do - but, like everything... dependent on the data you have in your database, if that's a mess, you will have a tough time building personalization rules based on it.

In the email editor in Eloqua, click on the "Insert ADC" button at the bottom of the editor when you have your cursor in the spot you want to insert the content chunk. Create a rule to define the chunk of content to be inserted - and create a default for what is inserted if no rules are met.

The way these rules work is simple - it evaluates, top to bottom, a list of "rules" and then puts in the chunk of content defined by the first rule that matches. You just build a sequence of rules/content and drop that in the email.


Click on "Add Criterion" to add each section. For each rule section, you can add text, HTML, images, anything that you would normally add into an email.

The rule looks at the data in the Contact Field, compares it to a value that you set and chooses content based on that (ie, look at the "Industry" field for "Manufacturing" and if that rule is met, show the "Manufacturing offer" content.

Once you have created all the industry content/criteria you need, you can see the full set in the main rule interface. Make sure you test this with the Preview option from the top menu as it will allow you to scroll through the various options and ensure that the content renders correctly with each one.

Once that is complete, you are ready to send your email. Personalized content, done well, has a significantly increased response rate in most situations so don't hesitate to try this out in your next communication with your audience.