Use of action lists: Basket abandon

Apart from Single Shot, Data Driven (scheduled) and Triggered journeys, you can also use an Action list to send 'action' emails, sometimes referred to as "triggered" emails. Each time the contact does something (action), the journey will send an email in response.

With Single Shot and Data Driven journeys, you can send an email only once to your selection.
With a Triggered journey, you can send an email multiple times to all the contacts in the selection.
With an Action list journey, you can send the email multiple times to a specific contact. For instance, each time a contact places an order, you can send them an order confirmation email, or send an up-sell or cross-sell email.

This means that the contact can be targeted multiple times within a single journey. Each record in the Action list represents one email for one contact. The records in an Action list use the fields LISTID and USERID to define the recipient of the email. These need to be filled in, along with the field ACTIONCODE. The journey checks for an action code and only processes records with a certain action code.

Data from the Action list can be used to personalize the email. Although the Action list is linked 1-to-many (1:N) to the Audience list (one contact, many order confirmation mails), the Action lists acts as if it is an extended profile (1:1). Additional Action list fields can be used to personalize the email.

In our example, we'll send the contact an email with the content of their basket whenever they abandon their basket in an online shop. The basket can hold multiple items, so we store a JSON or XML object in a field BASKETCONTENT. An Action Container loops over each item in the JSON object, displaying each basket item in the action email.

We still need a way to fill the Action list with records. Each time the customer abandons their basket, the content for the email is received from an external system (the online shop). For large volumes, this is best done with an automated task every 10 minutes to an hour that will fill the Action list. In this example, we will use a predefined web service call to Selligent Campaign to fill the Action list using the "Individual API". This is for smaller volumes, because you can only do a limited amount of web service calls at once. The data is transferred over the internet, so it depends on connection and transfer speeds.