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LiftIgniter + Iterable Integration

The LiftIgniter + Iterable integration lets you easily personalize recommendations for your users.

In this article

Setup instructions

Step 1: Integrate LiftIgniter into a website or app

To integrate LiftIgniter with a website or mobile app:

  • Website

    Use the Tracking Beacon (Javascript SDK). Follow the steps in LiftIgniter's Javascript Integration Overview document.

    In some cases it makes sense to follow a hybrid approach and use the SDK and API together. For more information, see LiftIgniter's API Integration Overview document.

  • Mobile app

    Use the LiftIgniter API. For more information, see LiftIgniter's API Integration Overview document.

Email personalization happens because of a unique user ID for each user. For more information, see LiftIgniter's How does LiftIgniter generate personalized recommendations when someone opens the email document.

A user ID sent to LiftIgniter from Iterable should match the user ID of the user on the website or mobile application. If you have a pre-existing user ID you want to use, you can overwrite the LiftIgniter user ID using $p("setUserId"), and save this in an Iterable user profile as LI_UserId.

During the LiftIgniter onboarding process, the LiftIgniter customer success team will guide you through the beacon installation/API steps and update you on the status of the data and inventory items collection. LiftIgniter will let you know when your website/application is ready for personalized email campaigns and other personalization products.

Step 2: Create recommendation URLs in LiftIgniter

LiftIgniter provides an “upon-open” real-time product/content recommendations service. As you're building your email template in Iterable, instead of inserting static product/content images and titles, you'll insert links that request images from LiftIgniter (the recommendation URLs). When your users open an email, for each link, LiftIgniter will generate a picture in real time that shows a personalized item, along with its title and other information.

To make this work, you need to specify how you want the pictures to look (the HTML layout). For detailed instructions, read LiftIgniter's Creating LiftIgniter Email Templates article.

Step 3: Create an Iterable data feed for subject line personalization

NOTE

This section is only relevant if you are using subject line personalization.

Next, you'll need to set up an Iterable data feed to make a call to LiftIgniter's API to fetch the different parts of the email subject line.

  1. Navigate to Content > Data feeds and click Create New Feed.

  2. Set the URL to:

    https://api.petametrics.com/v1/email/iterable/subject/{{campaignId}}/TEMPLATE_ID?userId={{#urlEncode}}{{LI_UserId}}{{/urlEncode}}

  3. In the URL, replace TEMPLATE_ID with the LiftIgniter template ID that you're using.

  4. Add a custom header called x-api-key and set it to your LiftIgniter API key.

  5. Click Save feed.

Here's how it should look when you're finished:

Creating the data feed

Create one data feed per LiftIgniter template ID. The LiftIgniter template ID for the data feed must match the LiftIgniter template ID used for upon-open recommendations (the per-item HTML snippets).

Step 4: Create a template in Iterable

Next, create an Iterable email template and insert the recommendation URLs you created in Step 2.

NOTE

For more information, read:

LiftIgniter's newsletterId must match Iterable's campaignId. If you're using subject line personalizstion, the LiftIgniter userId should be set to the LI_UserId user profile field in Iterable. The per-item HTML snippet should look as follows, using Iterable’s template notation (assuming that the templateId is demo-template, following the example in the article):

<a href="https://api.petametrics.com/v1/email/link/{{campaignId}}/demo-template/1?jsk=<JS key>&userId={{LI_UserId}}">
<img src="https://api.petametrics.com/v1/email/image/{{campaignId}}/demo-template/1?jsk=<JS key>&userId={{LI_UserId}}" />
</a>

If you are using subject line personalization, make sure you check the Connect data feeds for dynamic template creation box and select the data feed you created earlier. In the Subject Line field, add a data feed placeholder like this:

In this example, slp is Iterable’s template Handlebars alias and title is the inventory attribute that holds each item's title (as specified on your website when scraped by LiftIgniter's beacon).

Adding the data feed to a template

When Iterable calls the LiftIgniter API to fetch the subject line personalization item, LiftIgniter returns a JSON object representing the metadata (URL, title, etc.) for a single item recommended for a particular user. This can be used to populate the subject line using [[metadataField]] syntax in an Iterable email template.

Step 5: Create a campaign in Iterable

Once you've created an email template in Iterable, create an Iterable campaign that uses this template. Note the campaign ID—you'll need it for registering the campaign with LiftIgniter. If you've already linked the template with the data feed, you don’t need to do that again.

In order for LiftIgniter to work smoothly with Iterable, the tools must understand each other’s user identification system. For each user in the listId, get the LI_UserId field from the Iterable user profile. This user ID is used for fetching email recommendations and subject line personalization. If this user profile field is not set, LiftIgniter won't be able to fetch any personalized recommendations. A sample CSV upload to set this field might look like this:

email, LI_UserID
steve@example.com, steve
tanya@example.com, tanya

Step 6: Register your campaign with LiftIgniter

To ensure your campaigns run smoothly, schedule them with LiftIgniter. This allows LiftIgniter to reserve infrastructure capacity (by pre-scaling the LiftIgniter clusters).

  1. From the LiftIgniter Settings tab, register your Iterable API key:

    Registering an Iterable API key in LiftIgniter

  2. Under the Email Campaigns tab, click + New Campaign:

    Creating a LiftIgniter campaign

  3. If you have already set up an Iterable campaign, LiftIgniter can use your Iterable API key to import its details:

    Selecting Liftigniter + Iterable

NOTE

Rate limiting (2000 requests per second) will kick in for large campaigns. LiftIgniter uses scheduled time and list size to pre-scale our cloud. For this version of the product, campaigns must be scheduled at least eight hours ahead of their kickoff.

Step 7: Send emails with Iterable

LiftIgniter will regularly ping Iterable to fetch the latest details about your campaigns. You only need to update them in LiftIgniter if you are:

  • Creating a new campaign
  • Cancelling a scheduled campaign
  • Switching email item templates (recommendation URLs)
  • Switching from using / not using subject line personalization

Step 8: Analyze your email performance metrics (optional)

LiftIgniter provides email campaign metrics that complement Iterable’s campaign performance dashboard. To access these metrics:

  1. Log in to LiftIgniter.

  2. On the Dashboard tab, click Explore.

    The LiftIgniter dashboard

  3. Click Email Analytics.

    The Email Analytics menu in LiftIgniter

  4. If you find these metrics useful, you can pin this table to the main dashboard so you can see it as soon as you log in to LiftIgniter.

    Email Analytics in LiftIgniter

Analytics on this screen include:

  • Open: Number of emails opened
  • Items Loaded: Number of URL (inventory) items loaded
  • Clicks Per Email Open: Total number of clicks / emails opened
  • Unique Email Clicks: Number of opened emails with at least one click
  • Unique Item Clicks: Number of loaded items with at least one click

You can also view these metric definitions by hovering over the column labels.

Step 9: Set up the email integration

After you have set up LiftIgniter to scrape your webpage for content, the next step is to do email-specific integration. The following documentation covers this process:

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