Advanced content personalization

Overview

Use cases

You should be interested in the “content personalization” feature if your “job to be done” includes at least one of these:

• Access to unlimited custom fields for content personalization, overcoming the current MailUp limit of 39 fields

• Simplify message building when the content is mostly available outside MailUp (i.e. avoiding useless data copy)

• Retrieve content in real time, just before sending, from an external service (e.g. for up-to-date product recommendations)

Getting started

Here is a short list of the steps to be followed:

1. First build the external service

   1. Start building a web service on your platform. This service has to be a public URL that accepts an unique user ID as a parameter (e.g. the email, the customer ID...). When called, it must return a JSON dataset containing user specific information.

2. Then reference your service on MailUp

   1. You can extend MailUp settings with a reference to your service(s). The URL of any of these services is called endpoint. Several endpoints may be added, then you can link them to a specific MailUp message or to a list. This operation can be done through the web interface of your MailUp account or using the API methods described in this page

3. Finally create a message that requires the service and send it

   1. Create an email message and add HTML blocks containing a special markup language called Liquid, whose tags use curly brackets and allow very powerful statements

   2. Just before sending the email, MailUp queries the predefined endpoint for each campaign’s recipient. The returned values will replace the tags built with Liquid markup

   3. Fields are replaced in real time, so this is a perfect solution if you have a product recommendation engine that provides an URL for querying it 

   4. Note: as the provider of the external service, you are supposed to know well the returned JSON object (field names, nested structures...) so that you know the names of the placeholders/tags you have to add to your messages

Technical details

Endpoint specification (request)

The external endpoint shall be called using HTTP GET and optional querystring parameters. Basic Authentication and custom authorization headers are supported.
The endpoints’ signature should support one of the formats shown in the table below. Other formats may be supported, please ask if you need more.

In additional to personal data fields, you may invoke the external endpoint by specifying also one or more of the following querystring parameters:

Endpoint specification (response)

You are free to design the response structure that better suits your needs when it comes to use the returned fields into a MailUp message. The required format is JSON. You can design a flat structure or a more complex one, built with arrays or nested fields.
Your services must return HTTP 200 in case of success and 4xx or 5xx in case of errors. When an error repeatedly occurs while querying services for a recipient, MailUp does not send the email to that recipient.

In some cases it may be useful to let the API decide if a specific recipient has to be excluded from mailing. Here the “DoNotSend” parameter comes in our rescue.

DoNotSend is a boolean parameter to be nested in a “Flow” object. Its default value is false, which means “send the message”. The use of HTTP errors like 4xx or 5xx to skip sending has a bad impact on overall performances, please use DoNotSend instead.

This is the right syntax to be used in the API response

Enable personalization at different levels

By default, the advanced personalization is set at message level. You have to turn it on and configure an endpoint for each message requiring it. In case of more available endpoints, you can decide which one has to be used for a specific message.
In some cases, you may find useful to have personalization enabled by default on all the messages of a MailUp list. By doing so, every message of the list has the personalization automatically enabled, at list level, on a predefined endpoint. You can use MailUp API or ask to MailUp support team if you want to set the personalization at list level.

Performance related best practices

• Avoid enabling the personalization to messages that do not require it. Querying an external endpoint may introduce delays

• Make sure your endpoint is robust, scalable and optimized to respond quickly

• Build your own logging system. MailUp does not inform you when the API calls fail due to errors on the external system

Setup advanced personalization using MailUp REST API

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