Data Feeds Overview

Use feeds to power your email or website with dynamic, personalized, and customizable content.

Introduction

Data feeds can supply content for all your communication channels, including email and your website via Site Recommendations. Data feeds contain all the necessary data to display your content items — titles, URLs, image paths, and much more.

When producing automated campaign emails with dynamic content, the three fundamental components needed are Templates, Lists and data feeds–the structure, recipients, and information, respectively. Similarly, triggered messages, which are each sent to a specific user, rely on templates and data feeds.

Below are descriptions of the different feed types, which should contain your product or content URLs:

  • Content Feeds – Feeds of items from your Content Library, produced by the Personalization Engine. Each feed can be filtered to include only certain types of items. Note: Some functions in your template code can pull data directly from the Content Library, and may not require a feed. The personalize function page lists the algorithms that have this capability.
  • External (URL) Data Feeds– Feeds that you provide, which may be generated by your content management system. It is recommended that you add these to your Feeds page so that the system can cache them, providing a proxy URL for each, and make them easier to select in templates or campaigns. JSON format is recommended.
  • Merged Feeds – Feeds that contain multiple Content and/or External data feeds, which is merged for you into a single feed. Each email or SPM template allows you to pull content from a single feed, so you can use a Merged Feed to include content from more than one source. See the Merged Feeds section on the Set Up a Data Feed page

For any feed type, Zephyr functions that you include in your email or SPM templates make it easy to pull data from the feed, including item titles, URLs, and metadata.

Before sending a campaign, you can use Recommendations to edit your feed’s content and sequence to customize the campaign. For example, pin a featured item to the first slot in your template and customize its title.

Whether or not you use Recommendations, your template’s Zephyr code can leverage the Personalization Engine, tailoring the feed item selections and sequence to each user’s individual interests.