What is an AMI message?
An AMI message has its content pulled from a url at the point of send. A campaign using an AMI message must be a ‘recurring campaign’.
So you can have a campaign, using an AMI message, repeat itself indefinitely. The subject line will be the same each time.
The AMI editor
In the emails page, via Messages in the top-nav. There is an option in the ‘new message’ menu for “Auto Message Import”.
Click that to create a new AMI message and enter the message flow at step 1.
Step 1 is the same layout as a new HTML message: message name, subject line(s) etc.
Click next to step 2 to get to the editor itself.
There are only two sections: Add the url for your HTML content, add the url for plain text content.
It is rare to build the dynamic urls for both html and for plain text, subsequently you have the option to switch the plain text content over to a basic text area.
From there you can type/paste in your plain text content and it will be the same every time.
Just make sure you include enough plain content to balance the amount of HTML in the message.
At least 500 characters helps avoid many spam checkers which might compare HTML and plain versions.
It is also a good idea to make the browserview link a CTA so anyone unlucky enough to have to read the plain version of emails has the opportunity to view your dynamic HTML version in their browser.
Once the two sections are complete, you can click next to step 3.
The message checks won’t be that useful here due to lack of content to scan as they won’t check the url.
The ‘full page preview’ and ‘send test’ will pull the content from the url(s) so you can see & test the full email without having to schedule a full campaign.
Once you finish and return to the emails page, you will see the message editor is “Auto Message Import”.
The preview and ‘send test to me’ will pull the content from the url(s).
AMI Campaigns
An AMI campaign must be a recurring campaign and you can set-up rules for how you want it to react if the HTML pulled in is the same as last time.
Given you have selected an AMI message for your campaign, when you get to step 3, the info bar will tell you that “An AMI message must be a recurring campaign”.
This message will vanish once you have set the recurring rules for this campaign.
Below that are the rules to follow if the HTML content at the end of the url is the same as the last recurrence.
By default, it will be set to simply send anyway and there are two other options:
If you only want the campaign to send if there is new content, choose: “Don’t send that campaign and roll to the next date as scheduled”
If when the content is the same, you want the campaign not to go out and you want the recurrence to stop altogether, for you to check what’s going on and reactivate in your own time, choose: “Don’t send that campaign and deactivate the recurring campaign”.
The latter two are popular in the publisher model depending on how frequent the recurrence is.
The last one has been useful for a real time based recurring campaign, so when the content stops being updated in the CMS, the recurring campaign stops itself for you.
Once you are set, hit ‘start’. The confirm window will let you know what you have set, hit start to return to the campaigns page, where your recurring campaign will have a recurring icon before the message name.
Publisher Example:
Where articles and content are being added to the CMS for the web-site all of the time.
Publishers with the resources have produced services in house which sits on a specific url, when this url is visited, the service pulls the latest articles from its own feeds and constructs an email.
They paste that url into the AMI editor and hit save, then schedule the campaign to recur and each time the campaign goes out the latest content is included with no extra effort.
Note:
At Pure360 we have project managed multiple integrations with CMSs to facilitate these scenarios, just contact account management for more information.