Sitecore EXM and Flow of Data

Email campaigns are a critical part of businesses today, especially to deliver the right messaging to the right people at the right time. The Email Experience Manager (EXM) application is helpful when it comes to managing email campaigns that are personal and relevant to customers. What’s more, you can also use the List Manager application to manage the contacts that you want to be part of your campaign. It does not involve much effort to deliver bulk email campaigns quickly to a targeted audience at the right time.

There’s also a suppression list in EXM that is maintained and contains all email addresses with messages that either bounced or went to the Junk/Spam folder. EXM ensures that no email message is sent to email addresses in the Suppression list, even if they are present in the Email Campaign Contact List. This will help to keep the bounce rate or spam/junk complaints to a minimum. This can be achieved by either manually adding an email address to the EXM suppression list or by utilizing Sitecore Email Cloud for this. 

The diagram below describes the flow of activities to leverage the benefits of Email Experience Manager: 

Benefits of using Sitecore Email Cloud

Whenever any user marks an email message as Junk or Spam or the email bounces for a reason (such as an invalid email address), the email address gets added to the Suppression list automatically. And whenever an email campaign is triggered, EXM checks with the recipients of the Sitecore Email Cloud suppression list, so that email addresses that are part of the Suppression list do not receive email messages.

The Sitecore Email Cloud Suppression list and Email Experience manager Suppression list synchronizes every hour by default. So, the EXM suppression list may not include the latest updates at every point of time.

Let’s look at the benefits of Sitecore Email Cloud: 

●    Helps create an email campaign

There are two types of email campaigns with default layout and templates - users can choose the email campaign based on their requirements or create their custom templates.

 - Regular email campaigns – These email campaigns are mainly used when we want to trigger email messages to the recipient list on-demand basis. A/B tests can be performed on variants of regular email campaigns.

- Automated email campaigns - These email campaigns are triggered to single users based on the goals achieved or by following a particular journey pattern. 

●  Helps create recipient lists for the target audiences

You can either create a list in EXM or in the List Manager. A list created from EXM ultimately goes to the List Manager, so no matter where you create the list, recipient lists are stored at the same place. There are several options to create a list such as:

- Recipient list from CSV file 

- Segmented list from all recipients present in list source

- Segmented list from the existing contacts list 

●  View detailed reports on sent email campaigns

Users can check four types of campaign reports on the dashboard. Most of the data in these campaign reports is derived using the data in the reporting database, while some comes from xDb index. Reports derived from the xDb index are in the Recipient Activity Report and table at the bottom of the value and engagement report.

Overview -- It displays the summary of the reporting data on how email campaigns respond to recipient activity, landing pages, value and visits, and location. It also provides basic information about visitors like their browser, device details, and operating system.

Source: Sitecore

● Recipient activity – It displays reports of how visitors reacted to the email campaigns. Further, it shows details about the open rate and clicks generated, as well as updates about bounces, spam complaints, and those who have unsubscribed. You can get more information about a particular visitor from the bottom table.

●  Value and engagement: – It displays the value per visit and the engagement value generated from the given email campaign. With the help of this report, we will get an idea about the effectiveness of the email campaign.

The table at the bottom will give information about value generated by each visitor.

Source: Sitecore

●  Landing page performance – It displays the most clicked, most valuable, or most relevant based on the visitor activities on the landing pages that an email campaign leads to.

Source: Sitecore

●  Test to find the best content and design

It is very important to display the right content so that customers like it and engage much more with it. To run a successful email campaign, A/B testing can be utilized. In A/B testing, we run multiple variants of the email message by changing the content or templates, and test which variant turned out to be more engaging and received the best response from the audience.

This is done only on regular email campaigns and the number of the variants to be created depends on the number of recipients or requirements.

In conclusion

In this day and age, nothing is more important than personalised communication, and Sitecore Email Manager comes to the rescue here! The level of personalisation is really high, so that the right message reaches the right set of audience. All in all, it is a great tool for marketers!