TargetX Email Overview

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The TargetX Email tool sends broadcast emails to groups of contacts who meet common criteria.

Campaigns are the top level of the hierarchy, followed by:
- Templates contain the content/message that needs to be delivered.
- Recipients are defined by a query, typically by running a Salesforce report of Contacts who should receive your message. This query is combined with a Template, which contains the content/message that needs to be delivered. This combination is called a Broadcast.
- Broadcasts are the single send (or message) from a given campaign, delivered to a set of recipients. A campaign can have one Broadcast (one-time mass email) or multiple broadcasts (recurring emails). Each Broadcast combines one common Template with one report/query as a part of one campaign.

Each campaign may contain any number of broadcasts, though the recipient list for each Broadcast may vary, as the query will pull only those contacts who meet the specific criteria when the Broadcast is created and sent.

TargetX Email also Includes support for custom Merge Fields and Conditional Content blocks (also referred to as Condition Sets). This capability allows users to insert any field from a recipient’s record or associated record (e.g., application status, checklist items, etc.). Conditional/dynamic content blocks allow users to automatically present any email content (e.g., images, text, etc.) based on values from a recipient’s record allowing for almost unlimited personalization options in email campaigns.

Salesforce provides an Application Programming Interface (API) to allow third-party applications to exchange data with their platform. TargetX Broadcast Email utilizes the API to create a seamless experience for the user. Currently, it is not possible for TargetX to add client credentials for use with the Salesforce API. Due to this current limitation, a 'TargetX Integration' user is created in order for your Org to be able to communicate with the required APIs.

Email Terminology

Term

Description

Broadcast

A single send (or message) from a given campaign is delivered to a set of recipients. A campaign can have one broadcast (one-time mass email) or multiple broadcasts (recurring emails).

Broadcast Member Data

By default, email recipient data, also referred to as Email Broadcast Member Data (EBM data), is stored on dedicated TargetX servers outside of Salesforce. This is to minimize data storage consumption in your CRM. TargetX can push or import email data to the Email Broadcast Member object in the CRM if enabled. For details on limiting email recipient data, see Limiting how much email recipient data is stored in the CRM.

There are three ways to see data related to your email campaigns and broadcasts in the CRM:

Campaign Intelligence Data	Email Broadcast Member Data	"X" Summary Data Field
Mirrored in real-time from TargetX Email Server	Loaded several times a day into your TargetX CRM	Tabulated as a running total of data for a single broadcast
No impact on data storage limits	Significant impact on data storage limits	Minimal impact on data storage limits
Always available to view	Purged from CRM after a specified time period	Always available to view
Visible on Campaign, Broadcast, and Contact	Visible in EBM object and reportable	Visible on the Broadcast object and reportable

Campaign

A single kind of message (for example, our Fall Initial Inquiry email), where the who, what, and when of delivery is defined. In the TargetX tool, multiple broadcasts ("sends" of an email) comprise a single campaign so that while the overall delivery schedule, "source report," and Content is identical across all messages, the people receiving that message may change.

Example:
Every day, you have new prospective student data being entered into your CRM. To personalize the experience, you would like to send each student an email thanking them for their interest.

To support the above example, we can create a single email campaign named "Fall Initial Inquiry." We can then define the recipient population using a report of all students who inquired yesterday, which ensures it will update those eligible for the email each day. As for the message, we can create a "Fall Initial Inquiry" template with links to additional information on our website. Finally, we can set the campaign to send messages daily for the next six months because our report will update the recipient group each day (based on our filter logic), allowing us to automate the campaign.

Campaigns and Communication Plans

Continuing with the above example, an email campaign may be one element, or touchpoint, in your communication plan for new inquiries. The first email in our example above might be part of a series, with the second email sent two weeks later inviting them to visit the campus, and a third email delivered three weeks later to encourage them to apply. You would configure a separate email campaign in each case to determine who, what, and when.

Conditional Content

Conditional Content is Content that displays based on specific conditions. Conditional Content behaves similarly to a merge field: You add a code or reference number to your template, and then data from the CRM is merged. First name, application status, mailing state... the list goes on. With conditional Content, though, the code or reference number is called a condition set, and rather than merge in data from a field, the Email tool merges in a separate paragraph based on those conditions.

TargetX Email Dashboard Overview

The Email Dashboard is accessible from the Email Campaign Builder. From here, you can:

View Recipient Count, Send Time, and Current Status of all broadcasts.
Select a Date Range to view upcoming or past broadcasts.
Drill down to detailed Reports of individual broadcasts.
Read actionable error messages to ensure all your broadcasts are set up correctly.

The Dashboard displays a table of Broadcasts that were sent within the time period you select, with the following columns:

Broadcast ID (linked to Broadcast Detail page)
Campaign Name (linked to Campaign Detail page)
Folder where the Campaign is stored
Emails sent
Start Date/Time
Complete Date/Time
Send Time
Broadcast Status
- If the status is Failed, a simple error message will display to help you troubleshoot.

You can find additional information about the TargetX Email Dashboard in the article TargetX Email Dashboard FAQ.

Understanding Encoding standards

Encoding standards tell the web browser or email application how to interpret the text characters in your HTML or the body of the email, such as an outbound e-mail sent from Salesforce. The most popular character sets are UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1.

ISO-8859-1 (aka Latin1) includes only Latin based language characters. It is limited in size, and not compatible in multilingual environments. It has no apostrophe, nor single quotes, for instance – but it can still handle a lot of languages, from Kurdish to Swahili. It can’t handle Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian and Welsh particularly well, nor can it show the Euro symbol. Users whose outbound email contains English or other Western European languages should use this encoding. It is understood by virtually all receiving email reader software.

Unicode (UTF-8) supports almost all possible characters, including international characters. UTF-8 can represent any character in the Unicode standard. It is backward compatible with ASCII. Users who need to send emails with non-Latin data (e.g., the Euro symbol, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, etc.) should use this encoding. It is the preferred and most used encoding. For instance, if you’re sending any entirely non-ASCII messages (Asian languages, primarily), then UTF-8 is your best bet.

The Template Builder supports other encoding standards for international use, but we expect most of our clients to use UTF-8.