Preparing for the Project Initiation call

The sooner you can give us the names you want to use for your Emarsys Platform accounts, the sooner we can create them. Ideally this step should be done before the Initiation call.

The first thing we will do in this call is make sure that we both have the same objectives when it comes to setting you up as an Emarsys customer.

For this we will need to understand in detail the kind of use cases that you will be focusing on, so we can confirm that the package of features you have signed up for will meet all your marketing needs. We also want to make sure that you have signed up for the right support package.

You should prepare your most important use cases, and include any edge cases that might require further consideration. You should also bring an overview of your existing data infrastructure for us to review.

We need to establish the degree of your technical self-sufficiency, in order to identify support risks and allocate the right resources.

Please read the following article and make sure that you have someone on your team capable of responsibility for each of the roles:

• Who's Who in onboarding

In case you are unsure about any of the steps involved in onboarding, prepare a list of questions for the Initiation call. 

Before we can enable your account to send emails, we need to check that you are compliant with the standards that we set for email deliverability. For this you will need to fill in the Email channel setup form.

A full list of the fields in this form and the reasons why we require this information can be found here (it may take some time to collect all the information so please make a start on this as soon as possible):

• Email channel setup form

Both of these steps can be done by you or by us. All the details can be found here:

• Configuring your DNS Settings
• SSL certification

The data you hold and collect on your customers is your most valuable asset, and getting it to us in the right format is the single most important part of the whole onboarding process. This data underpins all our AI-driven marketing technology which will enable you to engage with each of your customers on a personal and individual basis.

You should pass these links on to your data specialist and get them to start checking that all your data files are consistent and formatted in a way that we can process them.

• CSV Guidelines
• Preparing Your Product Data File
• Preparing Your Sales Data File
• Preparing Your Contact Database For SMS

The first question in this regard is whether or not you are using an e-commerce platform for which we have a connector. See:

• Emarsys for Shopify
• Emarsys for Magento 1
• Emarsys for Magento 2
• Emarsys for Salesforce Commerce Cloud
• Emarsys for Salesforce CRM

If not, you should pass these links to your web specialist so that they can familiarize themselves with the integration of our Web Extend data collection scripts, as well as the  workings of our web products:

• Web Channel - overview
• Implementing the Web Extend data collection scripts
• Predict Instant Search

You will need to migrate the designs and content for your existing email campaigns over to Emarsys, so that you can use them for your email ramp-up plan. 

You will also need to upload your images and any custom fonts to your Emarsys Media Database.

Finally, you will need to think about how you brand the sender of your messages, including the from email address for your email campaigns, your reply mail management, and your SMS sender numbers.

• The Media Database
• Your email ramp-up plan
• Reply management
• SMS end-user guide

If you plan to use Emarsys email templates, you must prepare your template requests in good time so that our development team can get them back to you in time for the end of your onboarding journey. If you are not, then you can read up on our guidelines for HTML email and pass them on to your creative team or agency. See:

• Ordering a template from Emarsys
• Creating emails with your own HTML code