About the Unica Interact Message Connector

The Unica Interact Message Connector allows email messages and other electronic media to make calls to Unica Interact to allow personalized offers to be presented at open-time, and when the customer clicks-through the message to the specified site. This is accomplished through the use of two key tags: The image tag (IMG), which loads the personalized offers at open-time, and the link tag (A), which captures information about click-through and redirects the customer to a specific landing page.

Example

The following example shows some HTML code that you might include in a marketing spot (for example, within an email message) that contains both an IMG tag URL (which passes information when the document opens to the Unica Interact server and retrieves the appropriate offer image in response) and an A tag URL (which determines what information is passed to the Unica Interact server on click-through):

<a href="http://www.example.com/MessageConnector/offerClickthru.jsp?msgId=1234&linkId=1&userid=1&referral=test"><img src="http:// www.example.com/MessageConnector/offerImage.jsp?msgId=1234&linkId=1&userid=1&incomeLevel=5&incomeType=numeric"/></a>
In the following example, an IMG tag is enclosed in an A tag, causes the following behavior:
  1. When the email message is opened, the Message Connector receives a request containing the information encoded in the IMG tag: the msgID and linkID for this message, and customer parameters that include userid, income level, and income type.
  2. This information is passed through an API call to the Unica Interact runtime server.
  3. The runtime server returns an offer to the Message Connector, which retrieves the URL of the offer image, and provides that URL (with any additional parameters included) and redirects the image request to that offer URL.
  4. The customer sees the offer as an image.

At that point, the customer may click that image to respond to the offer in some way. That click-through, using the A tag and its specified HREF attribute (which specifies the destination URL) sends another request to the Message Connector for a landing page linked to that offer's URL. The customers browser is then redirected to the landing page as configured in the offer.

Note that a click-through A tag is not strictly necessary; the offer may consist of an image only, such as a coupon for the customer to print.