The Smart Insight Self-Service tool is a configuration wizard available directly in the Marketing Platform UI that greatly simplifies the Smart Insight setup process. It makes it possible for you to set up and configure Smart Insight for yourself.
Prerequisites
The Smart Insight Self-Service tool is not activated by default. Please contact your Implementation Consultant to activate the tool for you.
If you cannot access the Smart Insight Self-Service tool, then change your user access role to BI Administrator as follows:
- Click the Edit icon on the Management menu > User management page.
- Select BI Administrator from the drop-down under Access role.
If you cannot change your user access role, then please contact your Account Owner. For more information, see User roles and permissions.
What will you need to prepare
- A sales data file, with at least 2 years of sales history, that conforms to our specifications.
- A product data file that conforms to our specifications.
- (Ideally) A list of product and sales data fields that you would like to use for filtering in Smart Insight.
- If you already have carried out your own eRFM parameter analysis, then prepare it.
- (If you would like to use Web Extend) Completed implementation of the Web Extend data collection scripts on your website.
Training video
This video walks you through the entire setup process, which is described below in detail.
The setup process
The setup process requires completing the tasks listed on the Checklist page. These tasks can be completed in any order and your progress will be saved for you. If you have prepared everything in advance, the setup can be completed in under half an hour, but you can stop and return later.
If you encounter any difficulties during setup, please contact Emarsys Support.
Starting the Smart Insight Self-Service tool
To start the Smart Insight Self-Service process, proceed as follows:
- Go to the Management menu > Smart Insight Settings page.
- Click Start Setup.
The configuration steps
This will take you to the Smart Insight Self-Service Checklist page which is a step-by-step integration checklist that guides you through the process. It lists the five major steps you need to perform to set up Smart Insight in the account, we recommend that you start at the top and work your way down.
The setup consists of the following steps:
Please note that you can perform the steps in a different order, but again we recommend that you start from the top of the list. Additionally, your setup state will be saved automatically, so you can get back to it later.
Setting up your SFTP account
You have to regularly upload your product and sales data files to Smart Insight. You can do that by using our SFTP server, that is the reason why you need to set up an SFTP account.
You should create an SFTP account even if you would like to upload your data through the API.
To have the credentials that are required to access a secure SFTP server to which you will upload your product and sales data regularly, click Create Account.
Please take the following into consideration:
- It is very important to copy and save your password securely once the account has been generated as this is the only time when it is displayed. After clicking Done, your password cannot be retrieved from the Emarsys Platform anymore.
- Due to a change in our back-end, after regenerating your password, you no longer need to send your new password to Emarsys Support in order to update it manually.
Selecting contact fields for filtering
In the second step, you can select the unique identifier that should be identical in your sales data file and in the Emarsys database that is used to:
- identify your contacts when they make a purchase and
- store their registration date.
Depending on how you would like to upload your data, the unique identifier can be set up differently.
Here you can also select the contact fields that you would like to use to customize your Smart Insight reports and contact segments to your needs.
The contacts_extract.csv file is created automatically that is processed by Smart Insight every day (it’s displayed on the Data Loads tab). Smart Insight has its own database and fetches data from the Emarsys database and from the product, purchase and contact files. Only the contact fields that you configured on the Smart Insight Settings page are stored in this database. So, if you have to reset the contact data in Smart Insight, then contacts will not be deleted from the Emarsys database.
The following flowchart helps you select the right unique identifier, the field we use to identify contacts:
Changing the unique identifier after the Smart Insight setup severely impacts the Loyalty Add-On. In such a case, you need to reimplement the add-on.
You can choose a unique identifier only from the Contact Fields that are offered to you on the UI. Via the Data Export menu in Emarsys, you can gain access to identifier fields generated and used internally by Emarsys, for example, user / contact ID. Do not rely on these in any way, using our internal variables outside Emarsys as identifiers is considered a risky implementation practice.
- If you would like to use Web Extend, make sure you have already implemented the Web Scripts data collection scripts in your store, otherwise you will not be able to use the Web Extend web behavior fields for filtering.
- If you use
emailas the Contact identifier in your sales data file and you send your sales data via the Sales data API, then Emarsys will hash the email addresses and this field will change topredictUserId. In this case, you need to change the Unique identifier topredictUserIdon the Smart Insight Settings > Contact Fields tab. This is how your settings should look like:
- If you upload the sales data into Smart Insight via Sales data API or JS API and use, for example,
emailas the Unique identifier and you use the same Unique identifier during upload (regardless of which method you use), then the email addresses will be hashed and the Unique identifier will change topredictUserId. As a result, the number of unidentified contacts and sales data that is not attributed to contacts (i. e. the result of duplication) will increase. To prevent or fix this issue, set the Unique identifier topredictUserIdon the Smart Insight Settings > Contact Fields tab and do the same during the upload.
Furthermore, if you have already uploaded sales data via Predict or JS API and used email as the Unique identifier, then you can fix this issue by changing the Unique identifier to predictUserId on the Smart Insight Settings > Contact Fields tab and by doing the same during the next upload to sync all data.
- If you change the Unique identifier in the contact fields and the Contact identifier in the sales data file, then it will not create duplicate contacts in the Smart Insight database. In this case, you don’t need to reload your data because the contacts will be identified retrospectively during the next data load.
Please consider the following when choosing the unique identifier:
- If you have a custom alphanumeric ID field in your file instead of email addresses, select that field from the drop-down.
- If you have email addresses in your file and you would like to use the sales data API, select a Predict user ID field.
- If you would like to use the SFTP server and you have email addresses in your files, select the email field as the unique identifier.
Configuring your product data
This step consists of the following procedures:
- Select the data source you would like to use. You can choose from the following options:
- Upload custom CSV - Choose this option if you would like to upload your product data to the SFTP in CSV files. Smart Insight will automatically fetch your product data files daily.
- Using the Flexible Product Catalog - Choose this if your data is handled by our Flexible Product Catalog solution. For more information, see Flexible Product Data Integration.
If you select the Using the Flexible Product Catalog option, then you don’t need to upload the first 5-10 rows of your product data file (as described in Step 2) and Emarsys will configure certain fields by default.
- After clicking Next, copy the first 5-10 rows of your product data file and paste them here, then click Next.
Notes:
- This step is only required if you have selected the Upload custom CSV option.
- Make sure that the first row contains the field names (header).
- The Emarsys Platform tries to automatically detect the format of your product data files, and then recognizes the delimiter and quote characters used in your file. Here you can modify the product file name pattern. If the product catalog is enabled in your account, we recommend that you use the default file name pattern.
This step is only required if you have selected the Upload custom CSV option.
- The system detects the fields you use for identifying your products and for storing category paths and product names. Check the result of auto-detection and select the right fields if necessary. If you use custom naming convention and auto-detection resulted in a mismatch, then select the right unique identifier keys from the drop-downs.
- At the Product Field References you can select the field you use to identify your products and link them to purchases. The values of this column will be matched to the product identifier field values in your uploaded sales data files. You can select as many fields as you want for filtering.
If you use Predict catalog or Google Product Feed that is also synched through Predict, please contact Emarsys Support to get a file sample from the final product CSV.
Make sure that the first row of the sample file contains the column headers and that these correspond to the data structure you will actually use. Otherwise the CSV sample does not have to contain valid product data as we only use it for detecting the structure and the special characters used.
File name
On this page, you can also enter a file name pattern that you will use for your product data files. We can accept any name, the only thing we require is a wildcard character before the .csv extension (e.g. my_catalog*.csv). This will allow you to make each file name unique, for example, by adding a timestamp to the name.
If you upload your product catalog through the Predict Data sources site and you would like to use the same file in Smart Insight, then we recommend that you keep the default file name (i.e. product*.csv). In this case, the product data file that you upload to the Predict Data sources site will be loaded into Smart Insight and its name will follow the default pattern.
Make sure that you are familiar with the file name pattern you enter here as you will always have to use this naming convention in the future to upload your product data to our SFTP server.
Important: If the name of the product data file that you upload to the SFTP server does not correspond to the naming pattern you provide here, the file will not be accepted. Changing the file name of the uploaded file on the SFTP server will not help either!
Configuring your sales data
This step consists of the following procedures:
- Select the data source you would like to use. You can choose from the following options:
- Upload custom CSV - Choose this option if you would like to upload your sales data to the SFTP in CSV files. Smart Insight will automatically fetch your sales data files daily.
- Upload via Plugin - Choose this option if your sales data will be handled by the Emarsys Shopify or Magento plug-in. For more information, see Magento 2 Integration Manual (v2) - Orders and Uploading Shopify Orders to Emarsys.
If you select the Upload via Plugin option, then you don’t need to upload the first 5-10 rows of your sales data file and Emarsys will configure certain fields by default.
- After clicking Next, copy the first 5-10 rows of your sales data file and paste them here, then click Next.
Notes:
- This step is only required if you have selected the Upload custom CSV option.
- Make sure that the first row contains the field names (header).
- The Emarsys Platform tries to automatically detect the format of your sales data files, and then recognizes the delimiter and quote characters used in your file. Here you can change the file name pattern. If you are using the API, leave the file name pattern as it is.
This step is only required if you have selected the Upload custom CSV option.
- The system automatically detects the fields used for identifying contacts, products, orders, purchase date, the total price of the order and the purchased quantity. If you use a custom naming convention and the auto-detection resulted in a mismatch, select the right unique identifier keys from the drop-downs.
- You need to select the fields from the sales file that you would like to use for filtering and for creating contact segments.
Notes:
- We recommend that you select all the necessary fields for filtering at this stage because changes after the first historical data load will require a full reload.
- To avoid having issues with timestamps and timezone in the Revenue Attribution Service, we recommend specifying the timestamp in local time with timezone offset information. For more information, see the timestamp standard field.
Make sure the required fields are entered case-sensitively, or otherwise those will not be recognized by the system. 'Price' is not the same as 'price'. 'Price' is recognized as a custom field and will get a prefix, such as f_, which will look like f_Price. In this case the price field will be missing.
Make sure that the first row of the sample file contains the column headers and that these correspond to the data structure that you will use. Otherwise the CSV sample does not have to contain valid sales data as we only use it for detecting the structure and the special characters used.
File name
On this page, you can also enter a file name pattern that you will use for your sales data files. We can accept any name, the only thing we require is a wildcard character before the .csv extension (e.g. my_sales*.csv). This will allow you to make each file name unique, for example, by adding a timestamp to the name.
If you would like to upload the sales data file through the API, then we recommend that you use the default file name (i.e. sales_items*.csv). In this case, the sales data file that you upload through the API will be loaded into Smart Insight and its name will follow the default pattern.
Make sure that you are familiar with the file name pattern you enter here as you will always have to use this naming convention in the future to upload your sales data to our SFTP server.
Important
- If the name of the sales data file that you upload to the SFTP server does not correspond to the naming pattern you provide here, the file will not be accepted. Changing the file name of the uploaded file on the SFTP server will not help either!
- On the Sales Data Fields page, select all the fields that you may ever want to use for Smart Insight filtering, as adding/removing new fields later will require a complete reload of your entire sales history.
- When uploading your historical sales data file to Smart Insight, make sure that you upload your historical product data file as well at the same time. To ensure that Smart Insight calculations and analytics work properly, the product catalog has to include the items the sales data file is referring to. Otherwise, Smart Insight reports will contain unknown products and this issue cannot be resolved even by uploading your historical product data file again.
Configuring your store data
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This step consists of the following procedures:
- The Emarsys Platform tries to automatically detect the format of your store data files, and then recognizes the delimiter and quote characters used in your file. Here you can change the file name pattern. If you will upload your store data file to our SFTP server, then we recommend that you use a file name that corresponds to the naming pattern you specified during the configuration.
- The system automatically detects the fields used for identifying stores, store names, country or region code, address and postal code of stores etc. If you use a custom naming convention and the auto-detection resulted in a mismatch, select the right unique identifier keys from the drop-downs.
- You need to select the fields from the store file that you would like to use for filtering and for creating contact segments.
If there are changes after the first historical data load, then you have to upload only the store data file containing only the changes. This process involves updating already existing data.
Make sure that the first row of the sample file contains the column headers and that these correspond to the data structure that you will use. Otherwise the CSV sample does not have to contain valid store data as we only use it for detecting the structure and the special characters used.
File name
On this page, you can also enter a file name pattern that you will use for your store data files. We can accept any name, when uploading the complete store catalog, it is recommended to use a wildcard character before the .csv extension (e.g. store*.csv). Otherwise we recommend adding a timestamp to the file name. This will allow you to make each file name unique, for example, by adding a timestamp to the name.
Make sure that you are familiar with the file name pattern you enter here as you will always have to use this naming convention in the future to upload your store data to our SFTP server.
Important
- If the name of the store data file that you upload to the SFTP server does not correspond to the naming pattern you provide here, the file will not be accepted. Changing the file name of the uploaded file on the SFTP server will not help either!
- On the Store Fields page, select all the fields that you may ever want to use for Smart Insight filtering because if you would like to add new fields later, then we recommend uploading the entire store data again.
Setting up the eRFM parameters
The eRFM parameters are the result of your eRFM analysis. eRFM analysis or profiling is a method used to quantitatively determine the different stages of your contacts by examining their engagement level, the recency and frequency of customer purchases and how much your customer spends (monetary). For more information, see eRFM scoring parameters.
To set your eRFM parameters, proceed as follows:
1. Select the currency you would like to use.
Please consider the following:
- You can only have one currency for the purchases.
- Smart Insight cannot transform data from one currency to another.
2. The eRFM parameters will be set to default values. You can choose from the following options:
- If you would like to use the RFM Advisor, then accept the default values. After uploading your product and sales data files to Smart Insight, you can check and accept the recommended eRFM values on the RFM Advisor page.
The accepted values will take effect after the next product and sales data file upload.
- If you would like to use your own eRFM parameters, then you can overwrite the default values.