Display Conditions for Email Task Content Blocks in SAS Customer Intelligence 360
New functionality was released recently to support display conditions for content blocks when configuring email tasks. If you are familiar with content blocks already, this is a welcomed new capability that is relatively straightforward. Content blocks are an element type available in the Layout Manager that is used to design the content and layout of an email task.
This new feature is available for both Bulk and Triggered email tasks. However, this mainly addresses triggered email tasks where trigger events need to also be used for display rules using creatives with merge tags. Different content within an email can be displayed within the email body based on display conditions that are set up for separate content blocks.
This process may be further streamlined in the future with Dynamic assets but for now we can use display conditions with multiple content blocks in the email body.
Let’s take a look at how this functionality operates.
Display Rules
The main issue this functionality solves is that a rule-based settings distribution can not use one event to serve as both the trigger event and also for targeting criteria. Let’s use a simple example to illustrate this: a triggered email task will use separate creatives per language with a personalization variable for an individual coupon code. This email will deliver an individual coupon content in either English, Spanish or German language according to the event’s language attribute.
You might be thinking you could set up this scenario to use Rule-Base Settings such as:
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However, it will not allow you to Mark ready the task (and obviously not allow you to publish and execute the task). You would get this error upon attempting to Mark ready the task:
Display Conditions
However, you can use the Display conditions now available for content blocks to configure the language based on the trigger event’s attribute. The Display conditions can be configured in a mutual exclusive arrangement that will send only one version of the coupon according to the primary language indicated by the trigger event’s attribute. The conditions can be configured so that only the target with German language will receive the German content block. Similarly for Spanish language. Then, the display condition will result for all others to receive the English format content block, by specifically excluding the target audiences indicated with German or Spanish.
This results in only 1 version of the content block being delivered within the email body.
As you can see, separate content blocks need to be configured in the email to make this happen:
And under Content Block Settings you can now use:
Then you can use the trigger event’s attribute to set up Display Conditions for each content block such as this example for the German language content block:
The content blocks for both the German and Spanish creatives will use the display condition of “Display the content element for users that match the conditions” – to which I set the merge tag to be the correct corresponding language. Then, for the English language content block, I set the display rule to “Hide the content element for users that match the conditions”, and I specifically selected both German and Spanish to exclude:
Therefore, the entire target population minus the German and Spanish language will receive the English language content block.
Under Personalize creatives you would have the mapping done for replacing the personalization variable with the event’s attribute for the coupon code for each content block such as this for the English content block:
To summarize this use case: attributes from the trigger event are used both in targeting criteria and to replace personalization variables that would drive the need for multiple content blocks, rather than trying to use something like a dynamic asset.
This process may be streamlined in the future with a “dynamic asset” that would allow only 1 content block be set up and a priority type of rule can be applied to deliver the preferred language, but for now this is welcomed functionality.
For more details and information on using email tasks in SAS Customer Intelligence 360, please visit these sites below:
Course:
- Email Development and Delivery with SAS Customer Intelligence 360
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