Personalized QR codes in e-mail lite

[JEFODB]

Dear experts,

We are exploring the possibility to manage events in SAP Marketing Cloud. In general we would send out 3 campaigns.

1. Registration mail with link to a form to register themselves.

2. Reminder mail containing a personalized QR code to enter the event. Once scanned an interaction should flow back to SAP Marketing Cloud. Therefore, the QR code should be personalized or contain a personalized ID to identify the attendants.

3. Feedback mail with link to external platform to answer a survey.

Do you know that there are any standard features available to cover the second campaign? I have already checked the SAP influence & community pages but could not find something.

Thanks in advance.

[maik_bosch]

Another way of handling it is to use for the second email the generic email adapter

This means the email is not forwarded directly to SINCH or Amazon SES but instead to SAP Integration Suite first and then to SINCH

Here you have all possibilities to create QR codes based on Java/ Groovy libraries

https://crunchify.com/java-simple-qr-code-generator-example/

Have fun

[vervinckt_joyca]

Ooooh. Smart!

[ilonka]

Hi Maik,

did you implement QR code generation based on this approach? If so, can you let me know how much effort it was?

Thanks

Ilonka

[maik_bosch]

Hi Ilonka,

unfortunately not.

But we have a lot of experience with this kind of extension.

We are using this way to send out emails in cc to sales people for C4C use cases.

And we are using this to add own logic for recommendation scenarios

I would say depending on the experience of the consultant it would be 8 to 10 days. Developer experience in groovy or Java script is a plus.

BR

Maik

[ilonka]

Thank you Maik 🙂

[ralf_freyler]

Hello Jef,

to understand: what do you mean with not future proof?

KR, Ralf

[JEFODB]

By future proof I mean, what if we start using coupons & offers in the future? We are afraid that once we will start using the offers & coupons features that it will conflict with our 'event' coupons.

Event access tickets are not really coupons or offers in our opinion.

[ralf_freyler]

Hello,

just an idea!

With the Offer & Coupon Objects you could manage this scenario:

Extend the offer with an event attribute, so that you have a kind of relationship between Offer & Event and the coupon manages the QR Codes and during distribution of the email the system creates the relationship between the QR-Code and the contact.

BR

Ralf

[JEFODB]

Hi Ralf,

We indeed thought about using Offer & Coupons however, we chose not to do so because it is not future proof.

Currently, we are not using offer & coupons but if we do use it in the future we might run into issues.

KR, Jef

[vervinckt_joyca]

Hi Jef,

It makes me think of a scenario for which I posted an Influence Request a while ago:

https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/#/idea/265955

It's unfortunately currently not possible to add the sap-outbound-id variable to an image url (by which you could make use of QR code generation services to actually generate the variable qr code).

In your particular scenario, you could maybe make the generated QR code not point to a landing page, but to a custom page somewhere, and include the contact's UUID as variable instead of the sap-outbound-id. Then the custom page could trigger an interaction back to marketing cloud with that UUID as identifier. But it's certainly not a standard feature no.

Kr

Joyca

[JEFODB]

Thank you Joyca,

I have voted for your request. A pitty that it is not possible in the standard. We are now looking into Mendix. If I understand your solution correctly

1) I should create one static QR code (always going to that same custom page) appended with the UUID

2) Use the UUID to identify the contact and send back interaction 'Event_Attended' to Marketing Cloud?

Kr, Jef

[vervinckt_joyca]

Hi Jef,

almost.

In step 1: as the image url in your email you should add for example (using the qr code service of your choice):

https://api.qrserver.com/v1/create-qr-code/?data=https://yourwebsite.com?CustomerID=123456&size=200x...

But instead of 123456 you must add the variable attribute of your customer's UUID.

So each image url in each mail will be sligtly different as the UUID is part of it, and thus each qr code will also be different.

[JEFODB]

Hi Joyca,

Thanks for the response. We will investigate your possible solution further and keep you posted if we have an update.

[ralf_freyler]

Hello,

there is no option to work with the event object but you could work with extensibility, this means you extend the contact with an additional attribute and use this in the email.

Best Regards

Ralf

[JEFODB]

Hi Ralf,

thank for your answer. Indeed we could generate a unique code for each event and attach this to the contact profile.

However, wouldn't this require either one extra field per event or one specific landings page per event? Otherwise, I cannot clearly see how we would differentiate between the different events.

In the meantime, we are looking into the Mendix collaboration to tackle our use case.