This article provides information for creating your Ribbon type Web Channel campaign. The Ribbon campaign displays only a narrow ribbon affecting only minimally your visitors’ browsing experience, which is a less intrusive campaign type. The ribbon is displayed at the top or bottom of the page or follows the user's scrolling. You can create a ribbon campaign for example to:
- Remind your visitors about an ongoing offer.
- Share a personal voucher code that is about to expire.
- Display a general cookie notification.
This feature must be enabled for you by Emarsys Support, and requires steps 1 and 2 of the Web Extend Data Collection Scripts to be implemented.
Prerequisites
Before you create a Ribbon type campaign using Web Channel, you need to perform the following steps:
1. Go to Campaigns > Web Channel > Campaigns tab and click Create Campaign.
2. Set your campaign strategy.
For Ribbon Web Channel campaign you can select opt-in repermissioning or unintrusive messaging campaign strategies or a blank campaign, as well.
3. Set the format of your campaign to Ribbon.
4. Select your editor type as you wish to use HTML editor or Visual editor.
5. Select the template you want to use for your campaign. Optionally, you can select a blank campaign, as well.
6. Hover your cursor over the selected campaign template and click Create Campaign.
Once you have selected your campaign template, the creation wizard opens at the Campaign Settings page.
Creating the Ribbon campaign
Campaign settings
1. Name (or later rename) your campaign, choose the website where you would like to display it, set the audience with the Recipient source options.
Optionally, you can define various filter options in the Browsing session filters menu of the Campaign Settings.
Click Save and Continue to proceed to the Placement step.
Placement
2. Define how and where your campaign is displayed on your website, in the Show on these pages drop-down menu on the Placement page.
The available options are:
- All pages – By default, your Overlay campaign will be shown on all the pages of your website.
- Product Details Page only – Show your Overlay campoaign only on the product pages where users can see the details of a single product.
- Search Results Page only – Show only where your website displays product search results.
- On the post-purchase page only – Show only after the customer made a purchase.

Content
4. Choose a layout, modify the content according to your needs and test your campaign on the Content page.
- On the Layouts tab, if you use the Visual Editor then you can select from a series of pre-built layout templates and edit the content in the live editor window.
- With the Variables Editor you can customize and fine-tune the elements of your campaign's layout.
- If you use the HTML editor you can choose between using image or HTML source.
- Image source cannot be personalized and leads to a single URL.
- In the HTML source, you can insert personalization tokens, if the recipient source permits.
- For both, you can set what to display for desktop and mobile versions.
Personalization (HTML source only)
Optionally, you can personalize the text content of your campaigns by using variables to populate your message with values from your Emarsys database fields or other external data sources. To personalize your text in this way, proceed as follows:
Please bear in mind that if customers already found in your contact database visit your website from a new device or browser they will be treated as unidentified visitors until they log in or perform any other action on the basis of which we can identify them.
When the message is displayed on your website, these personalization tokens will be replaced by values from the data fields you selected, for example, by your contact’s first name in the salutation.
Important
- At this stage, no preview is provided for personalization tokens.
- Personalization may show outdated values for fields in which values change often, such as
last session products
orlast abandoned products
, as changes in these fields propagate to Web Channel with a delay. Please take this into consideration when using such fields for personalization.
Settings tab (For Ribbon and Embed campaigns only)
The Settings tab is available for Ribbon and Embed type of Web Channel campaigns.
There are three options for placement and behavior on the Settings tab:
- Fix position/ribbon at the top: Ribbon position is fixed at the top of your website.
- Fix position/ribbon at the bottom: Ribbon position is fixed at the bottom of your website.
- Floating ribbon at the top: Ribbon follows the scrolling of the visitors of your website.

Test
Optionally, you can test your newly designed Web Channel campaign in a new tab or window.
Click the Test button in the upper-right corner. You can test the mobile version of your campaign without using a mobile device. For this, use your Web browser's built-in mobile device emulator. You can select a mobile device type to emulate it then load your campaign page. For more information on testing, see Testing a Web Channel campaign.
Click Save and Continue to proceed to the Trigger & Scheduling page.
Trigger & Scheduling
5. Save and Activate your campaign on the Trigger & Scheduling page.
Before activation, here you can set when you want to display the Web Channel content, in the following settings:
- Scheduling – Defines the duration of the campaign appearance. The default is 7 days from the actual day.
- Time zone – By default, scheduling is based on your account's default time zone. To select another time zone for your campaign, click the drop-down.
- Under Display frequency, you can define how many times and how often you want the campaign to appear for a given contact.
- To show the campaign only once.
- To show once in every session.
- To show in every defined day.
- Always show the ribbon.
Let the machine decide (AI) feature enables an algorithm to calculate when and how often would be the best to show the campaign.
The option Let the machine decide (AI) is currently an experimental feature, available for development purposes only.
7. Click Save then Activate the campaign, which will become visible on the Campaigns tab.