Email appends is the practice of adding a shopper identifier to the URLs in all of your other ESPs’ sends and ensuring that Bluecore can translate those identifiers into plaintext email. This allows Bluecore to link a customer's onsite behavior to an email address, and send highly personalized emails.
Email appends are mission-critical and contribute to 80% of customer identifications during the Bluecore implementation period, which allows your triggered email program to ramp up more quickly.
Bluecore accommodates multiple options for email appends. There is native support for some ESPs; otherwise, Bluecore recommends using an encrypted email address as the appended customer identifier.
What are email appends
Email appends are a type of URL parameter added to the URLs in your emails. A common example of a URL parameter (sometimes referred to as a tracking parameter) is campaign ID; once you add this parameter, every email click-through will result in a visit to your website wherein the campaign ID is in the URL.
Example:
http://www.YourUrl.com?utm_campaign=Abc123…Email appends are URL parameters that specifically contain a unique identifier representing the customer to whom that message was sent. By including email appends in your URLs, you provide Bluecore an avenue to identify your customers when they click through a non-Bluecore email.
Example:
http://www.YourUrl.com?customer_identifier=CustomerABCIf Bluecore is your full ESP, we automatically add email appends for us to identify customers. But if you send any emails from another provider (e.g. transactional, promotional batch, etc.), email appends must be added so that Bluecore can identify users who click through those non-Bluecore emails.
How email appends work
The first step is for you to ensure all URLs are appended with the customer identifier of your choice (options below). Then, every click-through of your other ESPs’ emails will result in a visit to your website with that identifier present in the URL. Bluecore’s JavaScript snippet will then detect that this customer has visited your site, and link the identifier with the customer's browsing behavior.
Email append types
When determining how to implement email appends, Bluecore’s recommendation is to choose a method that enables real-time identification – that is, a method wherein the appended identifier can immediately be translated into a plaintext, addressable email address.
Real-time identification can be achieved via 1) using customers’ encrypted email addresses as the appended parameter or 2) using ESP shopper ID with Bluecore’s real-time translation APIs for supported ESPs.
Encrypted email appends
Implementing this approach means that you configure all URLs in your other ESPs’ email sends to include a parameter that equals the recipient’s encrypted email address.
This email append method requires no data dumps, no recurring feeds (which risk breaking), and has a quick implementation process for both clients and Bluecore. All major ESPs support Encrypted Appends, including Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) and Responsys.
When adding the encrypted email address as a parameter, note that Bluecore supports the following symmetric encryption methods:
- AES256 (Recommended)
- 3DES
- DES
Along with setting up this parameter, you will provide Bluecore with the following information about the encryption method:
- Which Cipher will be used
- Cipher Mode
- Encryption Key
- Initialization Vector (IV)
- Character Encoding
- Padding
From there – Bluecore’s JavaScript will ensure that every click in your other ESPs’ emails will result in a real-time identification of that customer, making that customer immediately addressable for highly personalized emails from Bluecore!
Example
http://www.yourdomain.com/product/12345.html?e=pHITX8pEaDvZksDMkJSLtU.Bk_w9waq2pZHJ8ap2WEo=SFMC email appends
If you use SFMC as your ESP, you need to provide your Bluecore Customer Success Manager the following information to set up email appends:
- Client ID
- Your SFMC Client ID
- Account ID
- Your SFMC Account ID
- Nine digits
- Client secret
- Your SFMC API key
- Subdomain
- The marketing cloud API subdomain with your unique ID
- Example:
https://mcz09v6z04nx5vf-2z2nj5c4nqq3.auth.marketingcloudapis.com/
Customer-identified email appends for supported ESPs
If you send emails from Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Klaviyo or Sailthru, you simply need to ensure that URLs in those emails are appended with that ESP’s own shopper identifier (e.g. Salesforce’s “Subscriber ID”, Klaviyo’s “Person ID”; Sailthru’s “Sailthru ID”).
When a customer clicks through emails from these other ESPs, Bluecore’s JavaScript integration will detect the identifier and call the relevant ESP’s API in real-time to translate the identifier into a plaintext email address.
This email append method requires no data dumps, no recurring feeds (which risk breaking), and has a quick implementation process for both clients and Bluecore.
Once you have ensured that all links contain the ESP’s shopper identifier, you will provide Bluecore with credentials to interact with the ESP APIs and the parameter you have used to add that value. For example, the parameter name here is “utm_profid”. This is all the information required for Bluecore to start identifying customers in real-time.
Example:
http://www.yourdomain.com/product/12345.html?utm_profid=ABCDEFGOpaque email appends
If neither of the above approaches are possible to implement, a fallback option is to use opaque identifiers.
This option is not real-time.
Implementing this approach means that you configure all URLs in your other ESPs’ email sends, to include a parameter that is some shopper identifier, other than encrypted email address. This may be an internal unique system shopper ID that you use, or a hashed version of the customer email address.
This method requires not only the identifier to be appended to URLs, but for Bluecore to receive a historical then ongoing mapping file that explicitly links each shopper opaque ID to a plaintext email address. This method also implies a delay in identification; once a customer clicks through your other ESPs’ email, it may be 1-2 hours until Bluecore can link their shopping behavior to their plaintext email.
Once you have ensured that all URLs contain the shopper opaque ID, you will provide Bluecore with the parameter you have used to add that value. You will also provide a one-time file of all opaque IDs mapped to email address. Thereafter, a delta file of new customers will be required on a daily basis; you will work with your Bluecore team to set these up.
- Why is real-time identification important? Take, for example, a net-new customer who has just subscribed (in-store, through a non-Bluecore email capture modal, etc.) and is clicking through from a non-Bluecore Welcome or batch email. When the customer clicks through, if Bluecore cannot identify the email append in real-time (i.e. it is an opaque identifier, which requires mapping), that customer's behavior will be tracked as an anonymous visitor until we can link the identifier to an email address, even though they’re known and subscribed to your list. This means that any behavior the customer took before Bluecore can execute the identifier<->email mapping will not be factored into triggered audience calculation, and the opportunity to quickly action on that behavior will be lost. With an email append method that allows for real-time identification (e.g. Encrypted Appends), Bluecore is able to immediately connect the customer's behavior to an email address, and that customer can qualify for and receive campaigns right away.
B64 and plaintext
Implementing this approach means that you configure all URLs in your other ESPs’ email sends to include the customer's email address, either in plaintext or B64-encoded. While this allows for real-time identification by Bluecore without further setup steps, we do not recommend this approach as it implies PII in your click through URLs, which may be an issue with your tag manager / other vendors (e.g. Google Analytics), or at odds with your own security principles.
When email appends are setup
You’ll want to set up email appends per one of the above options as soon as possible as you begin onboarding with Bluecore; your CSM will help guide you through the process.
Additionally, if at any point you will be changing ESPs (other than Bluecore) Bluecore asks that you please inform your CSM at least 3-4 months prior so that any necessary adjustments to the integration can be made to prevent any potential impact to program performance.