Personalised Offer Emails

[Anonymous]

Hi,

We're looking to include personalised offers for customers either as a whole email or as a section in an email that displays 4 offers that are personal to a customer. This would link through to an area of our site which showed their personal offers.

What I want to know is would we be able to change the 4 images displayed via a url in an email depending upon a customers 'customer id' which is a field in Marketo of {{Lead.CustomerID}}".

So if the url for each image was as follows would Marketo be able to display the 4 different images within an email template depending on a Customer's CustomerID:

https://emailcontent.gemporia.com/offer/1/customerid={{Lead.CustomerID}}".jpg

https://emailcontent.gemporia.com/offer/2/customerid={{Lead.CustomerID}}".jpg

https://emailcontent.gemporia.com/offer/3/customerid={{Lead.CustomerID}}".jpg

https://emailcontent.gemporia.com/offer/4/customerid={{Lead.CustomerID}}".jpg

I understand that a dynamic image which is not possible to implement out of the box in Marketo.However it's been suggested to me that using a custom coding feature like Email Script tokens would work for us.

Can someone help?

Thanks,

Chloe

[SanfordWhiteman]

You're asking 2 related, but different questions:

1. Can I change the src of an <img> tag based on the value of a lead field?

2. Can I dynamically generate image content (as in personalized JPG/PNG/GIF bytes) based on the URL of an <img> src.

The answers are

1. Yes, of course, exactly as you have illustrated by including tokens.

2. Not using Marketo. While many such dynamic image generation/compositing services exist, Marketo doesn't offer this directly.

So you can successfully call such a service from a Mkto email, but you can't use Mkto only.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Sanford, we're looking to find a way of dynamically generating image content ourselves.

So if we create an email script as described below then this should be possible for us?

http://developers.marketo.com/email-scripting/

Thanks,

Chloe

[SanfordWhiteman]

Nope, I would've mentioned if Velocity (email scripting) could do it. Like I said, Marketo doesn't have an image content generator. Velocity creates email content (i.e. text/html) but (a) runs when the email is sent and (b) is not a web service (and also (c) has no image generating ability).

[Anonymous]

Sorry, definitely still confused by this. We'll do the generation our side which would produce the offers via a url as i explained above. Would this url when added to an email display a different image depending on a customer id or would we need to change or add additional tokens into the url?

https://emailcontent.gemporia.com/offer/1/customerid={{Lead.CustomerID}}".jpg

[SanfordWhiteman]

If http://example.com/generator is an image generator (or perhaps a primitive image switcher among pre-generated images), then <img src="http://example.com/generator/?customerid={{Lead.Customer ID}}" /> will switch images. This is kind of a tautology, no?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Maybe you were confused by what "it" was in "Velocity can't do it."

What I meant there was "Velocity cannot itself generate images." Velo can create dynamic links to anything you want -- but there's no need for Velo here, when there's just an existing lead field -- thus an existing {{lead.token}} -- to append. Your syntax works fine right in an email, it doesn't need to be output from a Velocity script token.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Oh, and I didn't see at first that you posted to the wrong place... please move the thread to Products. "Community" refers to the Marketo Nation website itself, and yes, this is confusing!