E-mail activities and e-mail activity templates

E-mail activities

E-mail activities allow you to deliver news and promotions to customers using e-mail. This allows you to reach customers who may not have visited your site in some time, or to keep regular customers up to date regarding upcoming events or products.

E-mail activities are created using the e-mail activity dialog in the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator.

E-mail activities can be either pending or delivered. They are considered pending while being created, and while awaiting delivery. Thereafter, they are considered delivered.

E-mail activities send a single dynamic e-mail message to multiple recipients. An activity is not sent as a single e-mail with multiple target addresses, but rather as an e-mail sent multiple times, once each to every selected target e-mail address. This eliminates the ability of a recipient to see the e-mail addresses of the other recipients, and should reduce privacy concerns.

Care should be taken in any endeavor to mass e-mail customers. There is growing concern, and in some places, laws forming, around exactly what is allowable depending on the level of consent, whether there is no consent, implied consent, or full consent. Any customer e-mail activities should ensure compliance with the latest developments in this area.

E-mail activity templates

E-mail activity templates are JavaServer Pages, which define the address and subject of the e-mail, in addition to the content. The templates contain data beans, which are capable of accessing the commerce database to generate dynamic content, such as the individual addresses of the target customer profile, the subject, the return e-mail address, and finally the body of the email. Any of these pieces of information can be changed dynamically according to your business needs.

The e-mail activity templates, once created, must be stored in a location accessible by the commerce server. They must also be registered in the commerce database by a database administrator before they will be available to the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator.