What is this?
Interactions powers high-performing automated journeys fuelled by customer activities that enable you to send timely, contextually relevant and personalized messages.
It holds the promise of deeper, moment-by-moment customer understanding by using the most up-to-date data.
As a quick summary, here is the onboarding video for Interactions:
A few examples where Interactions shows its real strength:
-
Sending delivery status updates: You can send your customers various status updates depending on the payload, including “successful delivery”, “your order has been shipped” or “delivery has been postponed” messages through different channels. For example, you can send your clients:
- an SMS if the ordered product will be delivered on the current day.
- an email that provides them with the opportunity to rate the delivery service after they have received the purchased product.
- Preventing browse abandonment: You can target contacts who have visited your product pages more than once but have not added anything to their cart yet by showing them a free shipping Web Channel campaign while they are online.
- Encouraging premium users to subscribe to a service within your mobile app: You can send your contacts a premium discount In-app message after they visited the premium paywall page for several times within the last few weeks without subscribing to your service.
Have a look at a brief and portable summary of this Add-on along with some relevant customer testimonies.
Why is this good for me?
The world has become a different place: groundbreaking customer experience demands fast and relevant response. Delivering a message once a day, even if it is personalized almost perfectly, is simply not appealing enough anymore. Let your customers know that you really care. With Interactions, you can follow every single web page visit or mobile app activity and decide what the best response to that is.
How does it work?
Interactions can process high volumes of events and make decisions with millisecond-level accuracy. You can expect nothing less than to be able to work with the most up-to-date data in the Emarsys Platform as Interactions can retrieve all the available data sources from your account.
The secret lies in the engine of Interactions that is driven by events (i.e. the activity of your customers). Each and every customer action can trigger your programs and you can orchestrate their journey by making various decisions based on the event payload, their historical activity or the treatment they previously received. Feel free to experiment with the Interactions and let your customers enjoy a truly one-to-one marketing experience.
When to choose Interactions?
Interactions is designed to build time-critical, rule-based, and activity-driven customer journeys on a single-customer level. Besides creating such automated journeys, you can respond immediately to your customers’ behavior. The Automation Center is still there for you - its power lies in truly personalized, lifecycle-based customer journeys, which enable large contact lists to travel through your program from one node to another.
We recommend creating External event-based programs in Interactions as it provides more reliable performance due to its engine that was designed for single-contact execution. Interactions can process a higher volume of events at the same time, the delay between starting a program and sending the treatment is insignificant (if no Wait node is included in the program). You can also send Push notifications and SMS messages in real time, add contacts to Web Channel or In-app campaigns immediately and add contacts to Digital Ads campaigns (there is a 1-hour delay in synchronizing the audience between Interactions and Digital Ads). Also, you can easily create branches in your program based on event attributes with Interactions.
The table below lists the most important features of Interactions and shows you the differences between it and the Automation Center.
| Feature | Interactions | Automation Center |
|---|---|---|
| Time-critical, rule-based, automated communication at scale | ✔︎ |
X |
| Immediate reaction to customer behavior |
✔︎ |
X |
| Building activity- and event-driven journeys | ✔︎ |
X |
| Building programs for the whole customer journey | ✔︎ |
X |
| Journeys on single-contact level | ✔︎ |
X |
| Lifecycle campaigns for large contact lists | X | ✔︎ |
Supported trigger sources, channels and segments
Interactions is directly connected to multiple trigger sources without any further implementation effort:
- Mobile Engage - both custom and default events
- Web Extend default events - view, category view, cart update, purchase
- External events coming through API and from Adobe Commerce or Shopify events
Interactions supports the following channels:
- Push notification
- SMS
- In-app message
- Inbox message
- Digital Ads
- Web Channel
- Web Push
You can easily select the required attributes as all the available attributes of the selected event are listed in the drop-down if you click the attribute_name field in the Event happened and Event did not happen templates of the Decision and Decision splitter nodes (if you selected the Trigger attribute template, then the attributes of the chosen Trigger event are listed in the drop-down). You can enter attributes that you would like to use in the future manually.
The recommended Operators are automatically detected based on the attribute type.
You can use all segment types in Interactions programs.
This feature is being enabled gradually in accounts from September through October 2024.
For more information on all segment types available in Interactions, watch the August 2024 Product Release video:
To consider before you start
There are a few limitations that you should bear in mind before engaging with Interactions.
- As Interactions uses Triggered Email that ignores opt-in by design; it is strongly recommended to:
- insert a Decision (using the Included in segment template) node before email sending to make sure the contact opted-in for marketing materials and
- add the Email valid Equal yes contact criteria to your segment before the Send email node to avoid reducing the efficiency of email deliverability.
- Personalization doesn't support content personalization from historical events, therefore customers can only personalize with details (event attributes) from the trigger events (External Event personalization capability). Default Web Extend events (view, category view, cart update, purchase) only send the product ID (and personalization doesn't support Product Catalog personalization), therefore we recommend customers to use Predict widgets in their content as they have minimal information about the product left in the cart.