Moving your data to the Emarsys Marketing Platform and implementing our data collection scripts are the most important parts of the onboarding process. We offer a number of integration methods to suit your available resources and business needs.
In this article, you will find an overview of these methods and links to the information you need to complete this step with the minimum effort and in the shortest time.
Before you start, you may want to familiarize yourself with the standards and conventions that Emarsys uses to transfer data.
Contents
Where to start?
Start your e-commerce data onboarding on the Data Sources page (Admin menu > Data Sources).
At this stage, this page is a step-by-step integration checklist that guides you through the process. It displays a number of boxes, each representing an integration step. They either link to the page where you can upload the relevant data, or contain instructions on what you need to do to complete that step.
The vertical alignment of the boxes on the left indicates the recommended order of the data onboarding steps, so you should ideally start with the top box and work your way down.
Selecting your base currency
If you have not configured your base currency yet, you can do so in the Account Settings box on the right-hand side. Base currency is the currency in which you want to track your revenue statistics, regardless of the number of currencies actually used on your website.
If your currency is not shown in the drop-down list, please contact Emarsys Support.
Your revenue (and therefore your data collection) is recorded in a single base currency. This base currency is used to display website revenues and campaign revenues. Your site may offer products in different currencies and prices, but this is not relevant for data collection. Data collection must always use your base currency.
Uploading your product data
Your first action to integrate your e-commerce data is to make a single upload of your product data. This should be a single .csv file, formatted as per our guidelines, or a Google Product Feed.
In your product data file, you should include all the products you have ever stocked, whether or not you still sell them. This is important for both the contact profile and the product affinity models.
Once you have prepared your product data file, click Upload your product catalog in the Product Catalog box to make your initial upload and set up your schedule for synchronization.
Integrating your web behavior data
The Emarsys data collection scripts collect all the visitor behavior on your website and pass it to Emarsys. This includes browse behavior as well as sales data. Installing our JavaScript snippet on your website takes a matter of hours and can begin to generate accurate product recommendations within a couple of weeks.
To display the tracking code snippet you need to add to your website, click the Show Tracking Code button in the Web Behavior box.
Importing your contact data
The Contact Import box on the Data Sources page is currently inactive. It will be enabled in a future release.
Now you need to import your entire customer database into Emarsys. To do this, you will need to ensure that all the required data fields exist in both databases, and that the .csv file containing the data is correctly formatted.
Contact data synchronization
Once you have imported your entire contact database, you will then need to make sure that your contact data is kept up to date. There are different ways to do this, depending on your requirements.
Synchronizing Emarsys with an external contact databases
This is our most common scenario, where new registrations and updates to existing contacts are collected in an external database (such as a webshop) and the changes (delta) are synchronized either in real time or once a day with the Emarsys database. The recommended option is to use the Emarsys API for this. However, you can also set up automated imports from your own SFTP or FTPS server, or from a WebDAV folder that we set up for you.
You may also be able to use one of our custom integrations with leading e-commerce platforms.
If Emarsys is your only contact database
If Emarsys is the only application that you use to store and manage contact data, you still have a number of options available.
Integrating your sales data
Sales data is used by Emarsys to build contact profiles and product affinity models, and is used by a variety of Emarsys applications, eg. Smart Insight uses historical and current sales data to build the eRFM scoring model that your lifecycle segments will be based on, etc.
We provide a manual upload function for initial/larger data imports, and a simple HTTP API for recurring updates.
Checking your integration’s health
Once your initial data uploads have been completed, the Data Sources page becomes a status monitoring dashboard where you can check if your data sources have any issues to address, or if the data uploaded is consistent with the data collected in the your web store by the Emarsys data collection scripts.
FAQ
I am not an Emarsys customer yet. Is there anything I can do to prepare for my data onboarding?
Since you do not need an Emarsys account or a signed contract to get started, you can save time on your overall data onboarding by starting to work on this straight away. All the information you need to prepare your product catalog and historical sales data files, and to implement the Emarsys data collection scripts on your website, is freely available on this site.
To start collecting data before you have an Emarsys account, you just need to request a merchant ID from Emarsys Support. Since the data collected is anonymous until it is associated to an Emarsys account there is no risk to data security to start this process early.
Additional information
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CSV guidelines
This guide will help you ensure that your import file is correctly formatted and encoded. -
Data exchange resources
An overview of the Emarsys database fields and transfer protocols using API, WebDAV and FTPS. -
About Emarsys database fields
An introduction to the fields used to store contact data in Emarsys. -
About Emarsys forms
An introduction to the forms used in emails and on web pages to capture contact data and registrations. -
The Emarsys API
An introduction to the Emarsys API.