Email Send

Clients will send over the change request form(CRF), and ask the specialist to build the edm.

A general process would be, we check out the CRF and see if we have all the resources.

If we are working with a big client, assuming we are working under multiple BU, then we need to be careful because we don’t want to put the wrong email under the wrong BU. We should have the campaign details all typed in the CRF, and also the specified BU.

If you gather all the relevant resources, images or data, you can get to work.

Now, some clients won’t require you get the image from PSD, some clients will need you to modify the text under PSD. Then you might need Adobe XD or Photoshop to grab or modify them if necessary.

Sender Profile

Sender Profile is needed and we need to be sure because wrong sender profile can cause fail test send.

*A common issue with the screenshot above, is that some people might have problem with inserting dynamic personal strings in Subject line.

Problems like when you receive the email, the subject line will look like: FIRST_NAME%%, Hi… Supposedly, it should grab the data from the DE

The reason why is because you should ALWAYS leave a space between : and your subject line    OR  after your Subject Prefix.

If the subject prefix has a space after it, it won’t consume the %% tags. ]

Note that we usually suppress test send from reports. Will cover the tracking for prod send later.

If you want to modify, or customize the sender profiles, build one your own, then go to Email>Admin Tab>Send Management>Sender Profiles.

Be careful with the external key, wrong external key will result in sending to the wrong target…so please be careful with it.

From Name, From Email. You can also modify the Custom Reply Mail Management Settings, so you can get to Reply Name, Reply Email -> Forward reply to.

You can also modify the send classifications, when it comes to email, there’s transactional send and commercial send. In this case, we set up two classifications.

After you finish that, you can go back to Send Preview, select the sender profile you just set up, send it to yourself to see if it works.

Working On EDM

Once you gather all the resources, then let’s checkout the dynamic part. Usually we will have data from the client side, ready for us to import and create DE. If not, we can create DE base on the past templates, or check how many dynamic fields we need, and make one on our own. If the email is complicated enough that we are required to build multiple fields in the DE to check. Then the safest way to do this, is to ask the client to provide a list of fields/specifications detailing what we need to use.

Incorrect AMPScript can cause test email send failure. The recommend solution will be try to put all the required ampscript on the first block, and you won’t need to worry about it in the next few.

Import the data

Assuming we have a large data pool and the DE we just created, we need to import the data from the main DE. We use the Automation Studio activity, target the one we just created. For the SQL:

SELECT Campaign.* FROM ENT.[CampaignName] WC with (nolock)

WHERE …

If your DE is new created, then you can use the data action: “Overwrite”

If you just want to update the DE, then try “Add and Update”

Note that this can impact a lot of things…when you click overwrite you have to make sure your Target Data Extension is completely clear, or something you want to replace with…otherwise it can cause a lot of trouble. When it comes to dealing with large campaigns, patient is needed more than speed.

Check your email, see if your DE has the new imported data, if not, the error message will be sent to your email.

Common troubleshoot for import error

If you import data from the main DE, then usually there’s nothing to worry about other than probably there are some small mistakes in your created DE.

If you import data from the local file, there might be a problem with the field properties or some value errors. For example, if the field property is number, the value is 3.112321321E+14, though in Excel, it’s considered as a number, but not in Marketing Cloud. So you might want to change it in the notepad back to a normal number:311232132100000 and save it as csv, so that you can import it to Marketing Cloud.

Of course, if you find ######## in a supposedly date field, you need to change it as well.

Trigger Via API

First you need the postman agent, which helps you to connect to the client environment. Usually you will get a json file, which is quite easy because you can ask the client to export the json, and you can then import it in your own postman agent.

after you import the environment.

You need to grab the MID of the BU because you might need it for the account id under the Body of the post request. It connects you to the corresponding business unit. The reason we are doing this is because we need to grab the correct email. After we finish all the updates on the SFMC side, we also need to confirm the changes by updating the patches. Once we done that, we need to post it by using the payload, modify the messagekey, make sure it’s unique, because same messagekey won’t allow you to post it, it will expire in 3 days. So after you post the request, use the get request to check the value, and make sure it’s sent. If it’s delivered you can see the success message in the Response corner.

Trigger Via Send Preview

Send it Through Mail

Live Send

Production Send

(Audience Segmentation)