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Documentation Wiki > Content Syndication

Content Syndication

1. About this Guide
2. Introduction to Content Syndication
1. 2.1. Path Specification with a URL
2. 2.2. System Performance Preservation
3. 2.3. Use with Internationalized Web Pages
3. Content Syndication in the ExactTarget Online Application
4. Content Syndication in the ExactTarget API
1. 4.1. HTTPGet command
  1. 4.1.1. Purpose
  2. 4.1.2. Syntax
  3. 4.1.3. Arguments
  4. 4.1.4. Example: Calling a Script with HTTPGet
2. 4.2. HTTPGetWrap command
  1. 4.2.1. Purpose
  2. 4.2.2. Syntax
  3. 4.2.3. Arguments
3. 4.3. Before;HTTPGet command
  1. 4.3.1. Purpose
  2. 4.3.2. Syntax
  3. 4.3.3. Arguments
  4. 4.3.4. Example: Including the Same Ad in Each Email
  5. 4.3.5. Example: Requesting Notification that an Email Send has Begun
5. After;HTTPGet command
1. 5.1. Purpose
  1. 5.1.1. Syntax
  2. 5.1.2. Arguments
  3. 5.1.3. Example: Requesting Notification that an Email Send has Completed
2. 5.2. Empty Return Handling Options
  1. 5.2.1. Syntax
  2. 5.2.2. Valid Values
  3. 5.2.3. Example

About this Guide

This document provides conceptual and procedural information about the ExactTarget content syndication feature.

Introduction to Content Syndication

When you think of creating an email, you probably think of entering content by typing or using cut-and-paste. Content syndication allows you to bypass typing in the email and include content in your emails directly from an outside source. You specify a path to the content in place of the content itself, and the program gets the content at that path and includes it in your email automatically.

For example, you can include the latest entry in your company blog in your email by specifying the path to the latest entry. The program uses the path you entered to get the latest entry at the time of the email send and include it in your email.

Content syndication is designed to help you integrate your CMS or CRM system with emails built and sent with the ExactTarget application. You can use content syndication to get content from any web site or your CMS into the body of your emails. Additionally, you can use the content syndication features to notify your system that an activity has completed in ExactTarget. You can use content syndication through the ExactTarget online application or by using the calls in the ExactTarget API. ExactTarget AMP Web Services currently does not support content
syndication.

Path Specification with a URL

You specify the path with a URL. The URL can be virtually anything you can access with a web browser, such as a text file, HTML code, or CGI script. As a result, you can call a function in the middle of your message and insert whatever the function returns into the message at the point from which it was called.

You can make the URL specific to the subscriber by inserting a substition string in the URL to act as a placeholder for the subscriber's attribute value. You insert the attribute substition string into the URL in square brackets, for example: [First Name], to indicate to the program to replace the substition string with the subscriber attribute value. You can use this functionality to present different content based on the subscriber attribute. Refer to the online help within the ExactTarget application for a list of other substition strings that you can insert.

System Performance Preservation

The process of pulling content from another system into an ExactTarget email involves HTTP calls from the ExactTarget application to your content management system or web site. The send speed, response time, and overall reliability of the process depend on the state of several pieces of equipment involved in the Internet connection between ExactTarget and the content source. Consider the following guidelines to preserve your system performance:

Make no more than three content syndication requests in an email.
Use this process for small lists or subsets of lists only. For large lists, contact your

ExactTarget sales representative to identify a custom process that will meet your needs. If the syndicated content is the same for all of the subscribers in the campaign, you can save processing time by requesting that the system get the content just once at the beginning of the send instead of separately for each subscriber. If the syndicated content is not the same for all of the subscribers in the campaign, the system caches the syndicated content that it gets from the URL so it can be used again without accessing the URL.

Use with Internationalized Web Pages

Content syndication can get content from web pages that use any of a broad range of character encoding, including double-byte characters. For best results, web sites from which you syndicate content should use the same character encoding as the email that contains the content.

Content Syndication in the ExactTarget Online Application

The ExactTarget online application allows users to use a web-based user interface to create content for email campaigns, manage subscriber lists, test and send messages, and perform tracking analysis on each campaign.

You use content syndication in the online application as part of the process of creating an email. See the ExactTarget online help available through the application for more information about creating emails.

Use these steps to use content syndication within an email:

Create or open the email in which to add the syndicated content.
Click Create or Modify in the content area in which to add the syndicated content.
If you're creating new content, select the orientation of the content area.

You can choose any orientation when syndicating content, but the syndicated content is considered to be text only. If you choose an orientation that includes an image, the image should come from the image library. So, for example, you can include a logo from the image library at the top of the content area and have syndicated content appear below it.

If you've selected an orientation that includes an image, select the image.
Select External Content. from the Insert menu on the text editing screen.

The Insert External Content window appears.

File:Content_Syndication/Insert-External-Content.JPG

Enter the complete URL (including http://) of the external content that you want the program to populate in the content area.

You can link to anything that you could normally access via HTTP. You can click the personalization button to use personalization as part of the URL.

File:Content_Syndication/personalization.png

Click the radio button to indicate when to retrieve the content:

Retrieve content immediately gets the content from the path you provided when you click OK. Use this feature to get the content as it appears at the path right now. You cannot include personalization in the URL if you select this option. You can edit and preview the syndicated content in the regular HTML and text preview.
Retrieve content when email is sent retrieves the content at the time the program processes the email for sending. Use this feature to get the latest content at the path at the time the email is sent. You can include personalization in the URL if you choose this option. You cannot edit the content, but you can preview the content for a test subscriber.

If you select Retrieve content when email is sent, you must choose a Retrieval Option:

Subscriber level evaluates the content to include for each subscriber. If the content is cached, the system uses the cached content; otherwise the system accesses the URL. Use this option if the path in the URL field contains a personalization string or if it triggers a function that changes the content for different subscribers
Email level accesses the URL once at the beginning of the email send and includes the content for each email. Use this option to save processing time if the path in the URL field will return the same content for every email sent.
After (post-send) level accesses the URL after the email has been sent. This option does not include content in your email. Use this option if the accessing the URL raises an event to perform a one-time programmatic action, such as logging the
completion of the send.

If you select Subscriber Level or Email Level, you must indicate what to do if the call returns no content:

Continue allows the system to proceed as normal.
Stop the email send prevents the system from processing any more emails in the send and puts the send in an error status.
Skip the subscriber and continue email send is available only if you select
Subscriber Level Retrieval. This will skip the subscriber and proceed to process the
rest of the send as normal.

Click OK.

If you selected the option to Retrieve content immediately, the email preview displays the content from the URL you specified. You can edit this content within the email.

If you selected the option to Retrieve content when email is sent, the email preview displays the command that will get the content from the URL you specified. For example, if you specified the URL http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/getmailad.pl, you would see the following content area in your email preview:

File:Content_Syndication/content-area.JPG

Content Syndication in the ExactTarget API

The ExactTarget API is a multi-tier architecture that delineates user interface, business logic, and data access. You can use the API to call business logic objects from processes other than the online application. This allows the same program code to be run regardless of whether it is executed by a user navigating the site or a client application triggering a remote process.

The notification requests described in this help topic can help you keep your systems up-to-date in such common situations as wanting notification when a specific subscriber receives an email from a particular campaign and wanting notification when a campaign has been delivered.

HTTPGet command

Purpose

Include in the body of the email to pull content located at the specified URL into the email at the time the email is sent. If the content is cached, the system includes the cached copy; otherwise, the system accesses the URL. Use this command to include subscriber-specific content in each email in the campaign.

If the syndicated content is not specific to the subscriber, use the Before;HTTPGet command.

Syntax

%%httpget "URL"%%

Arguments

URL

Example: Calling a Script with HTTPGet

You have multiple ads on your web server, and you have a script that will pick one randomly (so that each subscriber gets a randomly selected ad).

The web site address is http://www.example.com, and the filename of the script you've written to generate custom web pages is getdata.pl, which uses the ExactTarget attribute labeled Email Address to determine which page to display. You enter the following code in the email body at the point where the web page content should appear:

%%httpget "http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/getdata.pl?id=[Email Address]"%%

When the email is generated, the ExactTarget application substitutes the subscriber's email address into the URL (for example: http://www.example.com/cgibin/getdat...heirDomain.com). The content that appears in that location of the email body is the web page specific to that subscriber's email address.

Note: Although the HTTPGet merge tag does not require any specific output from the URL, we recommended that you include a standard HTTP/1.0 200 OK status line, a Content-Type: text/plain or Content-Type: text/html line followed by an empty line, and then the content of the text to be inserted. For example, a Perl script would include code similar to the following:

print "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\n";
print "Content-Type: text/plain\r\n";
print "\r\n";
print "Welcome to the Northern Trail newsletter!";

HTTPGetWrap command

Purpose

Include in the tags of links in the syndicated content to track the links that appear in the content you've pulled into your emails with HTTPGet.

Syntax

Arguments

URL

Before;HTTPGet command

Purpose

Include in the body of the email to pull content from the specified URL one time at the beginning of an email send to include in each email in the campaign. Use this command to save time over HTTPGet when you don't need the content pulled separately for each instance of the email. You can also use this command to obtain notification from ExactTarget that an email send has begun. If the syndicated content is specific to the subscriber, use the HTTPGet command instead of this command.

Syntax

%%before;httpget "URL"%%

Arguments

URL

Example: Including the Same Ad in Each Email

You have multiple ads on your web server, but you want every subscriber in a particular email send to see the same ad. The web site address is http://www.example.com, and the filename of the script that pulls the ad is getmailad.pl. You enter the following code in the email body at the point where the ad should appear:

%%before;httpget "http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/getmailad.pl"%%

Example: Requesting Notification that an Email Send has Begun

You've written a script that records the start time of the email send. The web site address where the script is located is http://www.example.com, and the filename of the script is recordevent.pl. You enter the following code at the top of the email body:

%%before;httpget "http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/recordevent.pl"%%

The system runs your script at the time that ExactTarget begins processing the email send. This command does not cause content to be added to the email body. The before;httpget command is processed outside of the subscriber context because it retrieves
content that is used in the email for all subscribers. Therefore, the only personalization that is valid in the URL query string is the JobID substitution. For example:

%%before;httpget "http://www.example.com/cgibin/recordevent.pl?id=[jobid]"%%

After;HTTPGet command

Purpose

Include at the end of an email definition to perform an action one time at the end of an email campaign. This command does not include content in the body of the email. Use this command to provide notification to your CRM or CMS system that the email send completed.

Note: This call cannot be used with triggered emails sends because the triggered email send job
does not end after the message is sent.

Syntax

%%after;httpget "URL"%%

Arguments

URL

Example: Requesting Notification that an Email Send has Completed

You've written a script that logs that an email send has been completed.

The web site address where the script is located is http://www.example.com and the filename of the script is logsentmessage.pl. You enter the following code at the end of the email body:

%%after;httpget "http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/logsentmessage.pl"%%

The system runs your script at the conclusion of the email send. This command does not cause content to be added to the email body.

The after;httpget command is processed outside of the subscriber context because it is invoked one time after the send to all subscribers is complete. Therefore, the only personalization that is valid in the URL query string is the JobID substitution. For example:

%%after;httpget "http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/logsentmessage.pl?jid=[jobid]"%%

Empty Return Handling Options

The HTTPGET call can succeed without an error but return no content. By default, the system assumes that there is no syndicated content relevant to the context of the email and continues the email send. You can override this default behavior with an optional flag.

Syntax

%%httpget[;EmptyReturnHandlingOption] "URL"%%

%%before;httpget[;EmptyReturnHandlingOption] "URL"%%

Valid Values

0 (or none) - continue normal processing
1 - stop processing and set job status to error
2 (for a subscriber-level call) - skip the subscriber and continue the send
2 (for a before-level call) - stop the send and set job status to error

This flag is ignored for the After;HTTPGet command.

Example

You have multiple ads on your web server, and you have a script that will pick one randomly (so that each subscriber gets a randomly selected ad). If the script does not return an ad, you want the system to skip that subscriber and continue with the rest of the send.

The web site address is http://www.example.com, and the filename of the script is ad.pl, which is located in the cgi-bin folder. You enter the following code in the email body at the point where the ad should appear:

%%httpget ; 2 "http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/ad.pl"%%

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