Start Integrating “External” Content Into Your Emails

• Today we released a new feature system-wide: external attributes
• External attributes allows you to merge in data from your own website when sending emails
• This feature is now publicly available (not in beta) to customers on our higher plans: email us to enable it

What it’s all about

The idea behind it is to let you integrate “external” content into your emails. This means pulling data from outside Vero into an outgoing email.

Currently, if you wanted to include a product recommendation section in an outgoing Vero email you’d have to have supplied the data to Vero when you tracked a customer or their actions in the past. This works well but has two problems:

1. Products and their availability will change.
2. You can’t do your own complex filtering within Vero, you’re limited to what Liquid provides.

How to get started

If you had planned ahead and saved an array of the related products for a specific user, you would currently have a template that looks a little like this:

{% for product in event.related_products %}
 {{name}}: ${{price}}
{% endfor %}

With our new external attributes feature enabled you could, instead, do something like this:

{% fetch_html | "https://www.yourdomain.com?user={{user.email}}" %}

Before each email is sent we query this URL and dump the returned HTML directly into the outgoing campaign (don’t worry, we cache where possible!). This means that you can run your own end-point and do all sorts of fancy if/else statements as required.

Get to it!

For the full details, check out the brief Knowledge Base article.

Over the last six months we’ve worked with a number of customers trying to solve advanced customization challenges and external attributes is the result. We look forward to seeing what customers dream up with this!

This is the first of a number of updates we are currently working on.

As ever, we’d love to hear your feedback in order to make Vero the best targeted email tool out there so send an email to damien@getvero.com with any comments.