Please note that Open Time Content is not supported anymore. It is only available to clients already using it.
Open Time Content delivers contextualized, personalized content to your email campaigns, updated in real time.
Product documentation
Open Time Content is a third-party plug-in, and the user guides for creating widgets can be found on their documentation:
The Kickdynamic documentation may describe some features that are not activated for the Emarsys plug-in.
In addition to this, we have provided some guidelines on working with OTC in the Emarsys Platform:
- Use cases & examples
- Adding tags to emails
Further reading
As a quick reminder, here is the onboarding video about Open Time Content:
What is Open Time Content?
Open Time Content offers a variety of widgets that you can add to your email campaign to display different types of content, dynamically updated when recipients open the email. Here are just a few examples of how it can transform your messages:
How does it work?
Emarsys Open Time Content widgets are content placeholders, embedded as HTML tags in email campaigns to provide dynamic content, in real time, as customers access the email. This content can be taken automatically from your website, product feed or social feed and then further personalized to the customer’s context or behavior at the point of opening. All content is always delivered in the form of an image file, usually with an associated click-through URL.
Open Time Content widgets are easily created within the Emarsys user interface. Each widget results in an HTML tag that can be simply pasted into your email template; from then on, the tag does the work.
Widgets can be used in multiple campaigns at the same time, and can be grouped together for easy overview and reporting.
For an easy overview of how OTC widgets are created, watch this short animation:
Why should I use Open Time Content?
- Always relevant – Since content is taken live from websites, social feeds and product feeds, it will always be in season, on trend and up to date. You can set up automated programs and forget about them, confident that they will be as relevant in six months as they are today.
- Personalized engagement – Take personalization beyond simple preferences and tailor it to the time and place where the customer interacts with your brand.
- Stock management – Always promote the latest products and offers at the time of access, with no extra effort. Automate stock clearance campaigns to pick the right items to promote, every day.
- Better Marketing ROI – Deliver high-quality emails more frequently without increasing your budget or headcount. Open Time Content has an intuitive user interface which lets you set up your rules in minutes.
- Better engagement – Give your customers an engaging email experience each and every time an email is opened, and watch the results improve. Open Time Content is known to increase CTRs by 20% on average.
How easy is it to set up and work with?
Very. After this has been enabled for your account, it is simply a case of designing your widgets, getting the HTML tags and adding them to emails, which takes literally minutes.
OTC terminology: Campaigns, mailings, widgets and tags
To get started quickly with Open Time Content you should familiarize yourself with the terminology the product uses.
- Campaigns – Before you could create a widget, you must create a campaign. This is a top-level category for the widgets, grouping them together for reporting so that you can measure their combined effectiveness in relation to a single marketing goal. Campaigns can be thought of as the equivalent of Automation Center programs and we recommend that you use (wherever possible) the same names as the programs that contain the emails where the widgets will appear.
- Mailings – After you have created a campaign, you must create a mailing before you can build a widget. We recommend that you name the mailing after the email campaign where the widget will finally be used. This way, you can track all the widgets used in each email and view the reporting for all of them together. A campaign may contain many mailings, just like an automated program may contain many emails.
- Widgets – These are the containers for the tag. They are equivalent to a section in your email, and are the real estate within the email content where the dynamic content is displayed. Each widget must belong to one mailing.
- Tags – These are snippets of HTML code, which are the result of every widget you create. You add these to your email content and, when the email is opened, they pull in the relevant images from the Open Time Content servers and display them. Please note that tags will continue to reference the same image even after you delete the widget that generated them.
Limitations and technical considerations
Please read the following limitations and known issues regarding the Open Time Content widgets.
Location
- Widgets that require the recipient’s location first use their IP address, therefore the initial location is not 100% accurate. After that, the recipient must allow Mobile GPS before the widget can proceed, for example, to guide them to the nearest store.
- Location cannot be detected in the Gmail webmail & app.
- UK 3G/4G mobile connections (EE, Vodafone, O2) provide country/region-level data only, therefore location-based widgets will not be so effective with these customers.
Countdown timers
- Due to Gmail's logic for handling image extensions in html, we strongly recommend to use the extension *.gif instead of *.png in countdown timers.
- Countdown clocks will tick for 30 seconds by default, and up to a maximum of 70 seconds. After that, they stop and must be refreshed before they would show the correct time again.
- Countdown clocks do not tick in the Outlook app on Windows machines.
- Countdown clock images cannot be transparent.
- Authentication to your Instagram account is required before you can use the widget.
It is strongly advised to right-click the + account link and open it in a new page or a new tab. Otherwise the Instagram webpage sometimes struggles when opening within an iFrame. In the new tab or window, re-enter the user name and password and then content source automatically updates and recent images are displayed in any instagram tags you've made.
- Twitter hashtags must have a minimum of three tweets before they can be used. If you use the hashtag option, please note that the hashtag will pull any tweet that uses it, meaning you will have no control over the content presented in your email.
Content Automation
- The feed is limited in size and cannot contain more then two levels.
- There will be webpage limitations for sites that render in JavaScript.
Other
- All URLS must contain ‘http://’.
- Changes in templates do not automatically change the live widgets that have already been sent. You must change the template in the mailing by activating the Update template check box and reselecting the changed template.