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.

Personalizing Flash with Eloqua Data

(Guest post by Pancheliyan Pancras)

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After my last post on creating a web form in Flash© and integrating it with Eloqua, there has been a lot of interest in how to pass personalization data into a Flash file. There are several different methods of doing this. Today I will be covering a fairly basic method that utilizes the ‘FlashVars’ property. This method allows you to import variables directly into your Flash movie. Using this in combination with Eloqua PURL pages you can really create dynamic and unique Flash content for your web site visitors. There are two parts in implementing this using Eloqua.

First, we will need to create our Flash file. I will be using Action Script© 3.0 for this example. Before we even dive into the coding we must plan ahead to determine which fields we will be using. In this example we will be working with First Name, Last Name and Email address. Please see the sample Action Script code below for what to call the parameters and how to insert them into the dynamic text fields within the animation.

(click on the image for a larger version)


• Line 1: Declare an object using the LoaderInfo class to enumerate all the parameters we are passing from the PURL page

• Line 3: Declare a string called ‘first_name’ to the first parameter called firstname (variable within the FlashVars found on the PURL page)

• Line 4: Declare a string called ‘last_name’ to the first parameter called lastname (variable within the FlashVars found on the PURL page)

• Line 6: We are simply concatenating first name and last name with an exclamation. Just so it looks better when we present it using the Flash animation

• Line 8: Another way of directly passing the parameter to a dynamic text field

Now that the Flash file is ready to accept parameters, we will need to create a new PURL page to host our dynamic content. As mentioned previously we will be using the property called ‘FlashVars’ which almost looks like a regular query string in a URL. Each parameter will be separated by an ‘&’ symbol. Note that URL escape codes will work as well (if you want to add any spaces, symbols etc...).

To insert Flash into a web page we use the object element to embed the animation. This is also where we are going to use the power of Eloqua Field Merges to pass the parameters. Please refer to Eloqua’s Customer Central (which is now open for everyone) for helpful user guides on creating PURL pages and inserting Field Merges.

Within the object we will need to add a line using PARAM to set the value. This is where we call 3 Eloqua field merges (highlighted in yellow) to provide us the information from the contact record. These fields are populated dynamically based on your PURL record. If you are hosting this page on your own website you will need to use Data lookups to pre-populate these fields.

(click on the image for a larger version)


Then we will need to call the 3 field merges again within the embed tag.

(click on the image for a larger version)


So for our example above, our final code and result would look like this.

(click on the image for a larger version)





The above example is a simple illustration of what can be done with Eloqua PURL pages and Flash, but using these tools marketers can get really creative to deliver exciting content to their clients.

Looking at Interest - Activity-Based Filters

In many areas, interest is equally or more important than explicit data such as title, role, or industry. Whether you are targeting an outbound campaign or scoring leads, an ability to build rules on interest is critical.

That is easy to do in Eloqua with Activity-Based Filters. If you haven't tried them, they are worth getting familiar with as they are useful in so many scenarios. Activity-Based Filters work like the Contact Filters you are familiar with, but look at data on email, web, and form activity.

Again, similar to regular Contact Filters, you can use Activity-Based Filters in many areas, Distribution Lists, Program Decision Rules, Group manipulation, and reporting.

To create one, select "Activity-Based Filter" when you are presented with options in the first screen you see in creating a new Contact Filter. Select the type of filtering you want to do - Clicked through an Email, Opened an Email, Was Sent an Email, Submitted a Form, Visited Hypersite, or Visited Website. Each selection presents you with a further set of options where you can refine the amount of activity and the time over which you want to look.

In combination with tools such as Content Tags, which identify specific areas of a website, this becomes a very powerful tool. By tagging the pages on the Eloqua Artisan blog with a Content Tag, I can now define a Filter to identify people who have seen at least 3 pages on the Eloqua Artisan blog in the last 4 weeks in order to identify people showing interest in the blog.

The ways in which this can be used are numerous, so it is worth exploring to gain familiarity with it. Comments on how you've used it are greatly appreciated.

Reading and Responding to Web Interest

On the topic of personalization, one of the most effective ways to understand what type of message a prospect is most interested in is to use their web activity to identify the topic of interest, and then use that to trigger a communication.

I'm going to again borrow from our own Chad Horenfeldt, who blogs at Anything Goes Marketing http://anythinggoesmarketing.blogspot.com/, and share one of his videos that walks through creating this process here: http://www.eloquasm.com/eloqua/wallboard/real_time_custom/real_time_custom.htm .


The idea is simple, and has three main areas. First, identify an area of your website that you want to "watch", perhaps it's product specifications, or customer case studies. Some of our real estate clients have even used this for monitoring specific floor plans in individual building projects.


Second, identify the visitors to those pages, with a specific level of interest you're looking for. Maybe you want to identify people who looked at more than 3 case studies, for example.


Third, define what you want to communicate to them when they show interest in the way you've identified. Perhaps this is a special offer, or a push to attend a very topical webinar. You can easily feed the invididuals who meet your defined criteria into a program that communicates the right message to them, at the right time.


Chad goes through the process for building this in Eloqua in detail in this video: http://www.eloquasm.com/eloqua/wallboard/real_time_custom/real_time_custom.htm


Enjoy, and I look forward to your feedback and comments.

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.