Capability

Input data

Customer Data Platform (CDP) pulls the following input data:

• Full master contact list with the latest main subscription status

  CDP cannot pull any additional contact demographics such as first name, and last name.

• Send, open, click, bounce, subscription, and unsubscription events

  • Daily: yes

  • Historical load: Cheetahmail only sends the last 7 days of events. Hence, the email event history is built based on the daily loads. This means that ML models relying on email engagement can only be turned on after 2 or 3 months of email pull to have enough history. To retrieve historical data older than 7 days, you must perform an ad hoc export by CheetahMail. Separate S.o.W. with Cheetahmail. CheetahMail exports the files in the exact same format as the daily feeds.

Output data

An xDB is an external “campaign ready” file that stays for 14 days and can be referenced when building a campaign. Columns in the xDB must already exist on the master subscriber list to be usable. Email addresses in the xDB must already exist in the master subscriber list to be usable. xDBs are viewable in the CheetahMail UI at: Reports > Subscriber Reports > Data Upload Report.

If you do not use the xDB functionality, CDP pushes the audience and content of your campaigns to the master list (list 0). In such a case, you need to space out your campaigns since a contact can only be linked to a single campaign in this configuration. When exporting to the master contact list, new values (including nulls) overwrites the existing demographic fields from previous exports. This occurs so that the current state of the master contact list always represents the most recent campaign and does not contain any old data.

If you have xDB enabled in Cheetahmail, CDP pushes the audience and content to xDB tables. Hence, different campaigns can be linked to different xDB tables, which allows more flexibility for marketers to run multiple campaigns at the same time.

Setup

The following are the requirements of the setup:

• Set up a daily Cheetahmail export to FTP. This is a separate S.o.W. with Cheetahmail.

• Provide CDP with a Cheetahmail Admin account.

• Provide CDP with an API user.

• Allowlist CDP’s IP addresses in Cheetahmail.

• Enable the xDB functionality.

Limitations

The following are the limitations:

• Recipients must exist in the Cheetahmail database before you execute any push operation. Otherwise, the connector fails to update the attributes.

• Create all field names before setting up Cheetahmail.

• All field names must be uppercase with no special character.

• All date fields must be date type with format DD/MM/YYYY.

• Connector never creates new recipients or changes subscription status of the recipients. It only updates related fields based on context.

• If a user belongs to multiple lists, fields that belong to users are updated for both lists.

ESP - Cheetahmail