When you send a mass email campaign, it is important to customize the content for each recipient so that the message is personalized. For example, a targeted email that begins with “Dear Ms. Johnson:” obviously has more impact than a generic form letter that refers to your contact as “Dear Customer.” Similarly, you can make emails even more effective by personalizing them to include specific pieces of information about the email recipient such as interests, hobbies, or product preferences.

SAP CRM not only allows you to personalize emails with standard fields such as the contact’s name, title, address, and company name, but it also makes it easy for you to include data from marketing attributes in the mail form template. With this capability, you can customize the email content to include virtually any type of information linked to the contact.

In a previous article we explained the basics of how to create and personalize mail forms using attributes – including out-of-the-box attributes provided by SAP, as well as your own custom attributes located in a Z table. See “Provide Better Customer Support with Personalized Email and Chat Responses,” located in the SAPexperts knowledgebase for details. Now we would like to present an additional option for personalizing mail forms by leveraging content stored in marketing attributes. Let's review the basic functionality of email personalization and then go through an example in which a marketing attribute is embedded into a mail form to support customized content.

Overview of Email Personalization

When you launch an email campaign, one of the first steps in the process is creating the mail form. The mail form contains the content, typically in HTML format, that is ultimately sent to your target group. You can access the mail form creation tool from the CRM WebClient using the Marketing Professional business role via menu path Marketing > Create > Mail Form. To create a personalized mail form, start by creating the form as you normally would. You need to specify an ID for the form, specify the language, enter a description, specify usage, and enter the subject line. In addition, you need to select the attribute context, which controls the personalization fields that are available.

SAP delivers the attribute context named Email Response Management. In older versions of CRM (from CRM 4.0 Add-On for Service Industries to CRM 2007) the attribute was simply called ERMS (which stands for Email Response Management System). This ERMS attribute context provides many commonly used contact attributes such as last name, first name, title, and physical address fields.

If you need to insert these common fields into your mail form you need to assign the attribute context ERMS to your form (Figure 1). The ERMS attribute context provides many commonly used contact attributes such as last name, first name, title, physical address, and so on.  Note that the ERMS solution was actually designed to help automate the handling and processing of mass inbound emails. It was not specifically designed to support the creation of personalized outbound marketing emails as described in this article. Thus, not all ERMS attribute categories and attributes are available for inclusion in outbound marketing emails.

Figure 1

Select the attribute context for the mail form

For example, certain attribute categories (such as Business Data Context [BDC] Attributes and ERMS Fact Base Attributes) can only be used when processing inbound ERMS emails in conjunction with the SAP CRM Interaction Center. When creating mail forms to be used with outbound marketing emails we are restricting ourselves to the use of attributes belonging to the Business Partner (ERMS Automated Process) attribute category.

To insert a personalized field into your form, first click the Attribute button. A dialog box listing all the available fields appears. Next, select the field you want to add to the form. In this example, we'll choose Person: First Name so that the salutation in the final email contains the contact's name. When you click Insert (Figure 2), a placeholder for the field is added to the form (Figure 3).

Figure 2

Add a personalization field to the form

Figure 3

The placeholder for First Name appears on the form

When you personalize the mail form, it is important that you carefully review the data for the contacts who will receive the campaign. Before sending the campaign in this example, you should verify that each contact in the target group has a valid first name and that it is properly entered in mixed case. Otherwise, recipients may receive an email that begins with "Dear Contact:" or "Dear THOMAS:," which would be undesirable. To get the benefits of personalization, you must invest some time and effort in data cleansing.

Expanding Personalization with Marketing Attributes

SAP CRM Marketing allows you to personalize your mail forms using data stored in marketing attributes for a contact. To do this, you first create new marketing attributes and group them under an attribute set that is assigned to a group of contacts. You then create an attribute context that includes the attribute set. When the attribute context is assigned to a mail form, all the marketing attributes will be available as personalization fields. Let's take a closer look at each of these steps.

1. Start by accessing transaction CRMD_PROF_CHAR to define one or more marketing attributes that you want to associate with a group of your contacts. A marketing attribute is simply a field that is tied to a contact and is usually used for segmentation. For instance, an online sporting goods retailer might use marketing attributes to track which contacts have an interest in various activities. One email campaign might be sent to everyone who has an X in the attribute named Running, while another campaign might be targeted at those who have Swimming checked. A marketing attribute can be defined with a type of character, numeric, date, time, or currency, so it can store a wide range of data for both segmentation and personalization.

In our example, we want to send a targeted email to contacts thanking them for their latest purchase. The email will include a coupon that is valid for one year after their last purchase, so we want to include the date of that transaction in the message.

In transaction CRMD_PROF_CHAR select Attribute > Create from the menu to define the first marketing attribute. Name the attribute PRODUCT and specify it as a character field with a length of 30, which is the maximum allowed (Figure 4). This attribute stores the name of the item last purchased by the contact.

Figure 4

Create a marketing attribute to store character data

Figure 5

Create a marketing attribute with date format

2. Your next step is to use transaction CRMD_PROF_TEMPL to create an attribute set, which comprises a related group of marketing attributes. Choose Attribute Set > Create from the menu to build a set named PURCHASE_HISTORY. Next, include the two attributes we created in the previous step, PRODUCT and PURCHASE_DATE (Figure 6).

Figure 6

Define the attribute set

3. Now that the attribute set has been defined, you can assign it to a contact and populate the attributes. To do this, access a contact record in the UI and go into the marketing attributes section of the screen. Choose Edit List to select the PURCHASE_HISTORY attribute set, then enter values for the two attributes (Figure 7).

Figure 7

Populate the marketing attributes on a contact record

4. To display the marketing attributes in a campaign email, you need to create an attribute context that references them. Start by entering the configuration transaction SPRO and follow menu path Customer Relationship Management > Marketing > Marketing Planning and Campaign Management > Personalized Mail > Maintain Attribute Contexts for Mail Forms. Next, click the New Entries button to create an attribute context. Give your attribute context a name in the customer namespace. The name must begin with the letter Z, so we use Z_PRODUCT in this example. You should also enter a description for the new context. Next, you configure the attribute context so that it includes marketing attributes. We chose option 3, which is Selective marketing attribute sets (Figure 8). Finally, you link your attribute set to the attribute context. Double-click Marketing attribute sets and then select PURCHASE_HISTORY to complete this step (Figure 9).

Figure 8

Configure the attribute context

Figure 9

Associate the attribute set with the attribute context

Adding the Marketing Attributes to the Mail Form

Now that the new attribute context has been configured, you can add your custom fields to the mail form. Start by creating a new mail form and assigning the attribute context named Z_PRODUCT to it. When you click the Attribute button to add a personalization field to the form, you see an entry labeled Marketing Attributes under Attribute Category. Selecting that option from the pull-down list makes the list of marketing attributes appear for selection. In this example, those fields are Date Purchased and Last Item Purchased (Figure 10).

Figure 10

The marketing attributes appear in the Insert Attributes dialog box

When the email campaign is executed, the personalized data found in the marketing attributes is merged into the mail message that each contact receives. In the example used here, the contact can be thanked for his purchase of Men’s Super-Star Running Shoes on 03/12/2012, making the content relevant to his purchasing history.

John Burton

John Burton is a director of product management at SAP and is responsible for the SAP CRM Interaction Center (including ERMS) and social CRM topic areas. John has 13 years of experience at SAP and has been involved with SAP CRM and the Interaction Center since 1999. He is also the author of Maximizing Your SAP CRM Interaction Center, available at the SAPinsider Store. John is an alumnus of the University of Michigan and Central Michigan University. John can be found on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/sapjohnburton.

You may contact the author at john.burton@sap.com.

If you have comments about this article or publication, or would like to submit an article idea, please contact the editor.

William R. Pritchett

William (Bill) Pritchett has more than 25 years of IT industry experience and has worked at Dow Corning Corporation for the past 16 years. Over the past eight years he has focused on the company’s CRM systems and processes. His current responsibilities include expanding the capabilities of Dow Corning’s SAP CRM 7.0 system.

You may contact the author at bill.pritchett@dowcorning.com.

If you have comments about this article or publication, or would like to submit an article idea, please contact the editor.