Overview
This quick-start guide is intended for users of the Dotdigital for Magento connector who aren't looking to get too technical. It focuses on the most important things you need to know and do, in order to get going once the installation is complete.
This guide doesn't cover advanced features. Full and comprehensive guidance can be found at Dotdigital for Magento.
Sending from Dotdigital to your Magento contacts
Once your installation is complete, you’ll have three new address books in your Dotdigital account.
But what do they mean?
- Customers: Contacts who've created an account with you; these aren’t necessarily people who've purchased.
- Guests: Contacts who've purchased with you but have opted not to create an account.
- Subscribers: Contacts who've chosen to opt into your marketing emails; these contacts can also appear in 'Guests' and 'Customers'.
Breakdown of the 'Dotdigital' menu
Log into your Magento admin panel, go to System > Configuration, scroll down and on the left you’ll see the 'DOTMAILER' menu.
But what is each tab for?
- API Credentials: This is for your agency/developer to manage the integration with.
- Data Mapping: These is where all of your Magento data fields, and transactional data fields, are mapped to your Dotdigital contact data fields. You can also create custom attributes here if your agency hasn’t already done so.
- Sync Settings (some syncs require Dotdigital's Insight data to be enabled): This lets you select the Dotdigital address books ('Customers', 'Subscribers', 'Guests') that you want to sync to. It also allows you to select the data you want to sync, such as orders, quotes (abandoned baskets), wishlists, reviews and catalog.
- Abandoned Carts: Once you’ve created your abandoned cart emails in Dotdigital's Automation > Triggered campaign content section, this allows you to select which emails to be sent out and when.
- Automation: This allows you to enrol new subscribers, new customers, first customer orders, customer orders, guest orders, approved reviews and new wishlists onto an automation program that you’ve activated in Dotdigital. Order status emails and review reminders are also set up here.
- Dynamic Content (known as external dynamic content (EDC) in Dotdigital): Here you can select the types of 'live' content you’d like to use in your emails created in Dotdigital - things like abandoned cart content, reviews of orders, coupon codes, product recommendations, etc. Copy and paste the relevant URLs that are listed and add it into an EDC building block in Dotdigital.
- Transactional Emails (which requires Dotdigital's transactional email service): This lets you connect your Magento transactional emails to Dotdigital so you can make use of Dotdigital's service to send, manage and track all of them.
- Configuration: This is for your agency/developer to control how all of the above behave and are configured - such as transactional data, easy email capture, selecting how frequently someone receives abandoned cart emails, catalog syncing, etc. This is where your external dynamic content is styled (as Dotdigital has no control over how this is displayed within emails).
- Developer: This is used to determine things like your contact sync size, set debugging, manage cron timings, and so on. You won't need to use this one.
Navigating your Magento storefronts
When you want to start configuring each of your individual stores, you can find them in the top left of the Magento admin panel by clicking on the dropdown menu under 'Current Configuration Scope:'.
Select the store you want to configure for.
If you only have one store, you won’t need to worry about this.
Address books
If you have more than one store under one Magento admin panel, each storefront will need to have a unique configuration.
Your agency will typically look after this, but if not, make sure you let them know that they’ll need to be able to identify each store differently when it comes to address books - such as a format using names like 'Storefront1 Magento Customers', 'Storefront2 Magento Customers', etc. These address books will then get synced within Dotdigital, meaning you don’t need to worry about all customers ending up in one address book.
To do this, click on Sync Settings in the 'DOTMAILER' menu and deselect the 'Use default' options to the right. Create the necessary address books and then select the address book you'd like to add customers to by selecting them from the 'Add Customers/Subscribers/Guests To' dropdowns.
Default versus custom settings
As above, each of your storefronts will need a unique configuration if you want your automations to enrol to different programs, or if you want to select different campaign content.
Setting up everything on the default storefront will simply result in all of your settings cascading down to your other stores.
To avoid this happening, you should go into each storefront and deselect the 'Use Default' checkbox. You’ll then be able to select your triggered campaign or active program you've created in Dotdigital on a per storefront basis.
Data fields
Other than the standard data field values that are synced such as customer information, shipping and billing addresses, sales and system history (unlike order history, sales history is flat data like your last purchase date, last purchased brand, most purchased category, etc.), you also have the option to create new and unique data fields.
To do this, select Data Mapping and click on Create Data Field, which gives you the ability to create a data field based on the information you want to collect on your store/catalog.
By the way, if you’re selecting the data field type as numeric, ensure none of your numeric values start with a 0. If they do, then you’ll need to create them as a string instead (ideal for phone numbers).
Automation - welcome emails
Using automation with your customer activity is a great way to get the most out of the connector and enrol certain behaviours to selected programs.
Firstly create your program in Dotdigital and activate it with no scheduled enrolment, then head over to the connector's Automation section under the 'Dotdigital' menu. The types of visitor actions you can enrol upon are displayed below.
Automation - abandoned cart emails
Abandoned cart automation works a little different to the standard welcome automation. Rather than creating your program in Dotdigital, all you need to do is set up the triggered campaign content in Dotdigital instead.
Once you’re satisfied, head back to the connector's Abandoned Carts section under the 'DOTMAILER' menu and select the delay prior to sending each campaign. All your triggered campaign content will appear in the 'Campaign To Send' dropdown menu, so make sure you keep to a naming convention that’s easily identifiable.
After setting this up, you'll want to test your abandoned cart emails, but you won’t want everyone to receive them. In which case, you’ll need to set up an exclusion list. To do this, select Marketing Automation > Exclusion Rules from Magento admin panel's top navigation bar and then click on Add New to the far right.
The first screen to appear will be 'Rule Information'. Give your rule a name.
The second tab is 'Conditions'. Click on this and then click on Add New Condition.
Ensure you select 'Email' as the attribute, set your condition to 'is not' and then add your email address as the value. This will result in excluding everyone who is not you. If you want to use more than one email address, change the 'Conditions Combination Match' to 'ANY'.
Once you’re happy with your testing, you can delete the exclusion rule, or use it to create other rules, such as excluding anyone who’s basket value is less than a certain amount.
If you want to prevent contacts from receiving too many abandoned cart emails within a certain time period, then you can change the rule set to impose a limit. Go to Configuration under the 'DOTMAILER' menu, select Abandoned Carts, click on the 'Abandoned Cart Limit' dropdown and select the time period until the next abandoned cart email can be sent.
Read about including a link back to an abandoned cart in an abandoned cart email »