ExactTarget Automation Studio -- sending multiple emails in one automation

Question

We are a large cultural institution that produces hundreds of events every year. I am trying to set up an automation inside of ExactTarget Automation Studio which would send "You are coming" emails to customers who are attending an event on the following day.

We currently have setup the following data extensions:

Event Information - Ticketing Transactions - Customer Information

We have a query setup that works to populate another data extension called "Daily You're Coming Data Extension", that when run, populates a data extension correctly with all customers that are attending an event on the following day.

The problem we run into is telling the automation which email to send to which customer when there are multiple events the following day. Each event has a unique identifier which tells us event information. Is there some way that we can relate the event ID to an email ID so that when the automation runs, it would know to send one email to those who are attending event A and a different email to those attending event B?

One thought would be to create a data extension which relates to event information and has the email ID of the corresponding "You're Coming" email. I know we could also build one email that uses Ampscript to create dynamic content depending on which event the customer is attending.

Please help...we know we are close to a solution, but would love any advice.

Answer 1

There’s a few ways you can do this:

1. You can create some data filters based on event ID’s and use these data filters in your user initiated emails as splits this will split your open rate if you want to see these separately.

OR

2. Write another query to split the data into separate data extension from the daily data extension.

Or

3. Write some AMPscript to generate dynamic HTML’s something like this

%%[set EVENTID = event ID]%%
%%[IF EVENTID == 123 THEN]%% HTML 1 %%[IF EVENTID == 345 THEN]%% HTML 2 %%[ELSE]%% HTML 3 %%[ENDIF]%%

Hope this helps

Answer 2

It would be cool if what you want to accomplish is possible in automation studio. Normally, in this kind of situation, I don't use automation studio. I write an api script and run it on a server automatically.

How about using only one email with dynamic content or AMPScript? I have never used them, but it seems like a good solution for you.

Answer 3

My suggestion would be to build dynamic content using Ampscript and let Automation studio handle your queries and email sends because rejigging multiple email templates can become difficult to maintain if you have lots of different conditions.

Your emails for dynamic content would look something like this:

%%[ IF eventID == "A" THEN ]%% <insert html code here> %%[ ELSEIF eventID == "B" THEN ]%% <insert more html code here> %%[ ELSE ]%% <insert even more html code here> %%[ ENDIF ]%%

Answer 4

I really think that using AMP script as suggested by Minh D, would be a good way of handling this problem without adding a lot of technical complexity.

Personally, what I would do is to set up filtered data extensions based on your "Daily You're Coming Data Extension" which you filter on eventID. In automation studio, you can then run filters as a step prior to email sent. This way you essentially split your audience into several smaller buckets and send a different email to to each of them. So for example, email A to filtered data extension A, email B to filtered data extension B and so on.

If you really want to keep it as simple as possible in automation studio, you can always add a snippet of AMP script which uses a combination of Lookup and RaiseError functions and fails the send if the event ID is not the one you want to send email to. In this case, email A would be failing for contact which has eventID B in your data extension, "Daily You're Coming Data Extension". Personally, this a solution which would make the least sense for me but by using it you only need 2 steps in automation studio, query populating the data and email sends (you still need different email template for each eventID)