E-mail activities and e-mail activity templates

E-mail activities

E-mail activities allow you to deliver news and promotions to customers using e-mail. This allows you to reach customers who may not have visited your site in some time, or to keep regular customers up to date regarding upcoming events or products. Optionally, you may associated an e-mail activity with a campaign, which helps organize the gathered statistics into more meaningful reports.

E-mail activities are created using the e-mail activity dialog in the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator.

E-mail activities can be either pending or delivered. They are considered pending while being created, and while awaiting delivery. Thereafter, they are considered delivered.

E-mail activities send a single dynamic e-mail message to multiple recipients. An activity is not sent as a single e-mail with multiple target addresses, but rather as an e-mail sent multiple times, once each to every selected target e-mail address. This eliminates the ability of a recipient to see the e-mail addresses of the other recipients, and should reduce privacy concerns.

When your Site Administrator configures e-mail activities, one of the settings is a default reply-to e-mail address. That is, an e-mail activity uses this address to populate the Reply-to e-mail address field in the E-mail activity dialog. Some sites use specific reply-to e-mail addresses for their e-mail activities so that the incoming mail is appropriately filtered to the person responsible for supporting the activity, or the parent campaign.

As with any kind of e-mail, delivery of e-mail sent as part of an e-mail activity is subject to failure for a number of reasons. Failure to deliver an e-mail results in what is called a bounce-back. A bounce-back is simply a case where an out-going e-mail fails to arrive at its destination, and ends up in the sender's inbox instead. Bounce-backs fall into two categories, hard and soft. A hard bounce-back typically indicates that the e-mail address to which you sent the message is invalid. E-mails re-sent to an address that has resulted in a hard bounce-back will always result in a hard bounce-back. Conversely, a soft bounce-back is caused by some event or situation that is typically considered temporary. For example, if an e-mail cannot be accepted due to a restriction on the size of a customer's inbox, this is considered a soft bounce-back. Resending this message to this e-mail address at a later time may result in a successful delivery. When you create an e-mail activity, you have the option of specifying how WebSphere Commerce should handle soft bounce-backs. You have the option of having the message re-sent, and if so, how long after the initial send date to wait before re-sending.

Care should be taken in any endeavor to mass e-mail customers. There is growing concern, and in some places, laws forming, around exactly what is allowable depending on the level of consent, whether there is no consent, implied consent, or full consent. Any customer e-mail activities should ensure compliance with the latest developments in this area.

E-mail activity templates

E-mail activity templates are JavaServer Pages, which define the address and subject of the e-mail, in addition to the content. The templates contain data beans, which are capable of accessing the commerce database to generate dynamic content, such as the individual addresses of the target customer segment, the subject, the reply-to e-mail address, and finally the body of the email. Any of these pieces of information can be changed dynamically according to your business needs.

The e-mail activity templates, once created, must be stored in a location accessible by the commerce server. They must also be registered in the commerce database by a database administrator before they will be available to the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator.

E-mail templates must be registered in the commerce database using a command line script which executes SQL statements. These statements insert data into the EMLMSG table of the corresponding instance. The script is in the WC_installdir/bin directory by default. The script requires the following parameters:

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