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4.0 Reusability in Unica 7.5 – Deploying Re-usable Email Document Components

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Sep 15 2009

Is it worth the effort?

Do you think that building re-usability into your eMessage deployment is worth the additional effort? While working at a client site, we debated this same question. The question is whether or not one should implement re-usable eMessage document components in Unica's V75 eMessage application.

Unica's eMessage application enables the design of unique personalized email messages for each recipient in a campaign. The design of eMessage email messages may be done quite rapidly as the application allows for the direct pasting of HTML-rendered creative content into the application. Unica's eMessage application also supports the use of previously created eMessage components in a document. Thus, the concept of re-usability applies to Unica's eMessage application.

Below are definitions for some of Unica's eMessage document components:

  1. Personalization fields- placeholders for recipient-specific data that eMessage inserts into each mail message.
  2. Footer - Usually placed at the end of the message document. Multiple footers can be used in one document. Footer can contain other footers, text blocks, conditional texts and personalization fields.
  3. Conditional Text - Allows modification of the content of an email based on specific criteria.
  4. Text Block- A reusable piece of content that allows adding one or more lines of text to an eMessage document.
  5. Data Tables - Assist in presenting multiple pieces of recipient personalized information in a table format in the document content.

From the list of the five components in an eMessage document above, one can see that Unica's text block component was built specifically for re-usability. And since the footer may contain a text block, then the footer component is reusable as well. So it is evident that Unica's eMessage provides for re-usability should one desire to expend the effort.

Should we therefore build re-usability into our eMessage deployments? Take, for instance, the need to deploy 50 email messages. There are two ways to deploy email messages when the approved HTML-rendered creative already exists. You could readily paste the creative directly into the eMessage application. The developer effort required to create 50 messages would be only a few hours since one is just copying and pasting the approved HTML code into eMessage documents. There is some testing involved but since one was only pasting the approved HTML code the appearance of the email messages should remain consistent with the original (and already approved) HTML-rendered creative.

The excessively longer approach to deploy the same 50 email messages would be to build reusable eMessage components. This approach requires 2 to 3 weeks of developer time in order to design, test, and deploy reusable components for 50 email messages. Each email message needs to be initially analyzed in order to determine if there are consistently reusable blocks of text shared in common by all messages. As you can imagine this approach takes more time since you now have an analysis step, a design step, and additional testing steps. Additional testing is required since you are no longer merely copying and pasting approved HTML code; rather you are testing how the email message renders via the use of multiple reusable eMessage components (like text blocks, footers, etc.).

Now back to our debate. Should we build our email messages for the client in a few hours or across a few week's elapsed time? If you recall, we are debating whether the use of reusable components in Unica's eMessage is worth the extra effort required. In this example, we have determined that the extra effort is two to three weeks worth of time. The two sides of the debate are as follows:

Side 1. Should one attempt to deploy 50 email messages quickly by copying and pasting the previously rendered HTML code directly into 50 document messages?

 

-       Or    -

 

Side 2. Should one take the time to design reusable components which may be combined in order to define the 50 document messages?

 

The time required to build re-usable components in eMessage is prohibitive when considering how easily one might copy and paste existing HTML-rendered code into an eMessage document.  So in a matter of seconds (as long as it takes to copy and paste) one may quickly take HTML-rendered content for an email campaign message and paste it directly into Unica's eMessage document.

But there is another factor that needs to be considered. Once we analyzed the 50 email messages we discerned that the messages all shared the exact same message components (e.g. salutation, label, safety warning, etc.). In fact, when breaking down each email message into the parts that were similar, we arrived at 100% overlap for reusable text blocks. By creating a series of reusable text blocks we were able to re-create 100% of the email messages when combining the various text blocks, footers, and personalized fields.

Consequently my team arrived at a good rule of thumb for when to build re-usability into eMessage components. The rule of thumb is to consider re-usability across Unica eMessage email documents if each and every document uses the same text and graphics, etc.

Best practice tip: Consider deploying reusable Unica eMessage email documents if each and every document uses the same text and graphics, etc.

Sure it took more time to build, test, and deploy reusable eMessage components. But when the client tells you one day prior to the campaign's launch that the labeling message will change on all of the email messages, we were ready to respond. Since we had built re-usability into our solution we only needed to update the labeling message in a single text block. All email messages using that text block were automatically updated. One consequence of our design was that we did not have to test each of the 50 email messages for this change. How about that for time savings!

I would like to offer a special thanks to my friends and associates, Sid Sharma and Seekar Ghodgaonkar, who solved this debate in a most successful fashion for our satisfied client.

This article is the fourth in my series about re-usability in Unica V75. Previous postings in this series discussed contact history, offer metadata management, and a strategy for maintaining a fail-over environment.

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