Create an Open Time Email Campaign

Generate a block of HTML code for an Open Time Email campaign and use it in your existing email marketing service to add personalized content for each recipient. After creating an Open Time Email campaign, you can clone it and reuse it with the same recipe for additional campaigns. You can also add exclusions and inclusions to your campaigns to tailor them to your overall email strategy.

Required Editions

To create an Open Time Email campaign that uses recipe-driven recommendations, you must design an open time item template that controls how content and product recommendations display in that campaign.

Permissions Needed
To create an Open Time Email campaign: A role with Campaign Create/Edit permissions

The process of creating an Open Time Email campaign determines how many images to render, and which recommendation strategy to apply for each content block in the campaign.

  1. In the Channels & Campaigns section of the main navigation, select Email | Open Time Campaigns.
  2. Click New Campaign.
  3. Enter a Campaign | Name.
  4. Enter a Name for the first content block.
  5. Select an option from the Item Type dropdown, such as Product or Brand. The options depend upon your dataset.
  6. Select Display Block Title if you want to add a title to the content block.
  7. Enter the title to display at the top of the content block.
  8. Make any necessary adjustments in Edit Title CSS to style the title.
  9. Select an Item Template and then configure:
    Item Description
    Block Size Height and width of the block, in pixels
    Number of Items Number of items to include in the block
    Block CSS CSS around all the items
    Item Wrapper CSS CSS for the template wrapper
    Image Alt Text Text that describes the image for users who are unable to see it
    Note
    Note The list of available item templates depends on the Item Type that you select in step 5.
  10. To hide the content block, select the Hide Block for This Experience option.
    Note
    Note Hide a content block when you want to test an experience that doesn’t contain certain content against one that does.
  11. Select Recipe as the Promotion Type and then Select a Recipe from the list of your existing recipes.
    Note
    Note On-page anchor item exclusion recipes and on-page anchor items used to show recommendations are not compatible with Open Time Email.
  12. If you don’t want to add trending items to recommendations blocks that don’t return results, select Disable Trending Fallback.
  13. To add an exclusion, click the Add exclusion dropdown and select an option from the list.
  14. Select Exclude or Include as necessary and make any other applicable selections from the available parameters.
    Note
    Note Adding exclusions and inclusions at the campaign level, rather than within a recipe, lets you reuse the same recipe for multiple campaigns.
  15. Add any additional exclusions or inclusions.
  16. Save your work.
  17. Click Add new block to create another block with a different recommendation strategy. Adding different experiences allows you to target different audiences with the same campaign details.
  18. To test your campaign and confirm that the recommendations render in the email environment as you expect, click Simulate.
  19. Personalization selects a user and populates the corresponding recommendations. You can copy and paste a user ID into the dropdown to test recommendations for other specific users.
    Note
    Note The simulator uses a cache-buster, which means it generates a new call every time you select a user. So it’s possible to see a different image in the simulator than in the actual email.
  20. Click X to close the dialog.
  21. If you’re done creating your campaign and ready to publish it, click Save and Close.

After you create your Open Time Email campaign in Personalization, you generate HTML code to insert into an email campaign in your email marketing system. When recipients open their emails, the Open Time Email HTML code delivers personalized recommendations.