The power of using a CMS to create email templates

Published in

WeAreIDA

3 min readJun 12, 2018

Please be aware that some prior knowledge about CMS systems, and AEM specifically, might be helpful to understand the content of this post.

The power of using Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as a content management system is that marketeers can use a set of components available in AEM to change the content on the website without the need to request additional changes to the IT department. As such, the marketing team can react to changes in the market, promotions, and even the weather, right as they happen instead of being forced to plan ahead of time.

When it comes to creating email marketing campaigns, marketing teams still often depend on IT or technical people to adjust email templates before they can be used to communicate the latest promotions to customers.

It only makes sense to combine the extensive possibilities of AEM and to reuse them for email communication by combining AEM with Adobe Campaign.

Email templates can then be built using email-specific components to ensure that the email is responsive and works in every email client.

Setting up AEM with Adobe Campaign

Together with our customer, our team created a set of email components and used the Foundation for Emails framework to create components quickly and to focus on the added value of the component to the marketeer. We also implemented the best practices provided by Litmus when building our email components.

The set-up in AEM is very easy. By default, AEM contains an integration with Adobe Campaign using its cloud services.

The advantages of combining AEM with Adobe Campaign

The integration allows the marketeer to:

Personalize the email using information about the recipient
Reuse existing content blocks from Adobe Campaign
Link a email with a delivery in Adobe Campaign
Use context data in AEM after linking the AEM email with Adobe Campaign

Some practical information on combining AEM with Adobe Campaign

Inside AEM, you can find a Campaigns folder that can contain email templates. Inside each offer folder, an Adobe Campaign email can then be created. When working with Adobe Campaign, you can also choose between their standard or classic versions (stay tuned for our next post explaining the difference).

The default email components offer great functionality out-of-the-box, while still offering customisation through personalized texts, images and headers.

In Campaign, the email can then be synchronized from AEM. With only limited alterations to the default components, you can quickly create variants of your emails and change the content depending on the different customer segments.

Using this integration, the marketeers can focus on getting the right content to the customer which results in a happy customer.

If you are interested in discussing the possibilities of advanced email marketing for your organisation, please contact us at info@ida-mediafoundry.be.

If you are interested in follow-up articles covering the technical side of working with Adobe Marketing Cloud or interesting technological developments, comment below.