Distributed Marketing creates personalization data extensions in Marketing Cloud Engagement to store personalization data Distributed Marketing users enter when personalizing email messages. We automatically create a personalization data extension for you when you first connect a journey to a campaign or enable a journey for quick send. Custom SMS messages aren’t stored here, but are available on the journey’s event data extension.
You can find these data extensions in a folder nested under your root Data Extension folder. The folder is named Distributed Marketing <sfOrgId> Data Extensions, where <sfOrgId> equals your Org ID. For example, Distributed Marketing 00D1I000002xfLyUAI Data Extensions. By default, these data extensions don’t include a retention policy.
Each journey has a unique personalization data extension named PersonalizationDE_<sfOrgId>_<journeyId>. For example, PersonalizationDE_00D560000004xlfEAA_f960e193-c696-4247-8cba-ea6b83cc891c. If this data extension is deleted or renamed, an error message displays stating that we can’t locate the data extension. If a connected campaign is modified to connect to a different journey, the personalization data extension for the newly connected journey is used. If the data extension doesn’t exist, a new one is created.
Each row in the personalization data extension contains one piece of personalization data per recipient, per running user. For example, you select a unique image for two members in a Journey with ID 1234 from Org ID ABC. Two rows are then created in the data extension called PersonalizationDE_ABC_1234 in the folder Distributed Marketing ABC Data Extensions.
Each data extension row contains two columns, id and value:
| id | value | |
|---|---|---|
| Description | Identifies what variable it is, such as hero_image, and is a combination of the CampaignMemberId, emailID, and blockId. For example, 00v1F000000Im0MQAS19059intro. | Contains the personalized content. |
| Primary Key | Yes | No |
| Type | Text | Text |
| Length | 100 | 4000 |
| Nullable | No | No |