Bring Your Own ESP and trigger behavioral emails through our activation API

While personalization relies heavily on tailoring experiences for those who are proactively interacting with your brand, a key part of any strategy must also include reacting to important signals users leave behind. Whether navigating away from their browsing session, viewing a particular item but not purchasing it, abandoning their cart, or completing an order, it is critical to take quick and appropriate action if brands want to drive visitors further down the funnel and continue nurturing relationships.

Through triggered emails, marketers have been able to do just that – automatically delivering content that is both timely and relevant to the recipient based on key events. Because of this, behavioral-triggered emails have become a powerful tool, producing click rates three times higher than batched marketing emails (Yesmail) and contributing to more than 75% of all email marketing revenue (DMA).

In a world where 246 billion emails sent a day is the norm, the same old methods and best practices simply aren’t enough to stand out in the inbox anymore. Which is why we’re making it easier than ever to incorporate trigger marketing into your current email efforts. 

A new way to integrate

At Dynamic Yield, we recognize the interconnected nature of marketing technology and the importance of our platform working well with your existing stack. Our open and flexible architecture allows for seamless integration with the ESPs teams love and trust so they can continue working without any unnecessary distractions. 

But as the industry grows more reliant on APIs (Application Programming Interface), it becomes increasingly important to provide product managers and developers with more control in how these integrations are implemented, deployed, and scaled.

Designed for the builders and supporters of the customer experience, we’ve introduced a new activation API. With it, preferred ESPs can be independently qualified and integrated for the delivery of triggered emails through the Dynamic Yield platform.

We call it, Bring Your Own ESP, and here’s a little bit about how it works. 

Bring your own ESP

Using Dynamic Yield’s triggering engine, brands can automatically send emails (as well as on-site messages and push notifications) based on a variety of user actions or signals that happen while the user is on the website or in the app. With this capability, information captured will be sent to a team’s ESP of choice for the triggering of a personalized email. 

To maintain the look and feel of the email, the HTML body is created and controlled through existing templates in the ESP. The data, which is in JSON format, is then sent from Dynamic Yield and ingested by the ESP in real time, where the full email is sent to the desired recipients.

What the whole process looks like from the back-end:

This framework uses a RESTful API (Representational State Transfer), which is an API that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE data. In our case, we use HTTP POST requests to send over the data in JSON format. 

When sending a request, you often have to include parameters to ensure the request has permission to access and return the data you want. Dynamic Yield provides the capability to send these requests including header parameters in the form of a key-value. One can set any string value as the header name to define, for example, the content type and authorization key. 

We’ve also introduced two common authorization types to increase security and unlock additional ESPs – OAuth 2.0 and Basic Authentication.

• Basic Authentication (Basic Auth) allows users to provide the username and password associated with the ESPs HTTP endpoint. When data is sent, the Basic Auth fields are included in the header of the HTTP request.

• OAuth 2.0 is an authorization protocol that gives an API client limited access to user data on a web server. We use Client Credentials Grant type to connect with supported ESPs.

Eventually, each event triggered request includes the ESPs endpoint URL, the header parameters that cover the content type and authorization, and lastly, the body with the personalized data from Dynamic Yield.

A few ways in which the API can be used to trigger emails: 

Abandoned cart views – a user added items to the shopping cart without completing a purchase will receive an email including the items in the cart.

Abandoned product views – a user has viewed a product in the last session without completing a purchase will receive an email with the recently viewed items and, optionally, a recommendation widget showing relevant items.

Abandoned category views – a user has viewed a category page in the last session without completing a purchase will receive an email with a recommendation widget showing relevant items from that category.

Custom events – any custom event can be set to trigger the delivery of a corresponding email update or reminder at the most convenient time for the user.

All of these emails can be delivered automatically, when customers are most likely to engage, using Dynamic Yield’s triggers engine and your ESP.

Putting our integrations to the test

We believe the integration process should be as easy as possible, which is why we offer out-of-the-box integrations with the most popular email service providers, including Responsys, SendGrid, Bronto, Listrak, and more. 

And now, our Bring Your Own ESP approach unlocks additional vendors in the market, providing teams with the freedom to integrate how they want and with the technology partners of their choosing.

The future of email 

By better leveraging a user’s digital signals, brands can begin to reverse some of the effects of inbox blindness, increasing trust among recipients through relevance while also opening new opportunities for engagement previously lost. 

With our activation API, we’re determined to expand the benefits of triggered emails, asking teams to “Bring Your Own ESP.” And in the future, will allow you to activate more than your ESP – any API activated service can be triggered by Dynamic Yield’s trigger engine, such as SMS, Customer Service ticket creation, direct mail, instant messaging, and more.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas, join the discussion about Bring Your Own ESP in our Community.