Email treatments

You create internal email treatments and email accounts for initiating email distribution within Pega Customer Decision Hub. You can design the email content either in Pega Customer Decision Hub or in an external HTML editing software, such as Dreamweaver, and Stripo. However, the final email assembling happens in Pega Customer Decision Hub.

Pega Customer Decision Hub provides two common patterns for designing an internal email treatment:

• You can design the email content directly within the email treatment in Pega Customer Decision Hub. Use this pattern only when the email content is relatively simple and does not require any complex HTML design.
• Marketing departments can outsource email content designs to professional designing agencies who do not have direct access to Pega Customer Decision Hub. These agencies use HTML editors, such as Dreamweaver, to build visually appealing content. You can import the HTML with the externally designed email content directly into an internal email treatment.

For both scenarios, your Pega Customer Decision Hub instance requires a direct integration with an SMTP server to send the emails. When you run an outbound schedule and the system triggers emails, Pega Customer Decision Hub constructs the email content by replacing the placeholders with personalized data and then sends the content directly to the SMTP server.

With internal email treatments, you can use the email treatment forms to view the content, map placeholders, send test emails, and track impressions and clicks. You then internally assess the performance, throttling, and maintenance.

You create external email treatments in Pega Customer Decision Hub too, but the email content is mapped to a file or database template. Pega Customer Decision Hub writes an outbound schedule run results to a file or database table that is shared with a third-party email service provider for sending the outbound emails.

For external email treatments, Pega Customer Decision Hub does not store email content. In this common case, Pega Customer Decision Hub does not have direct integration with an SMTP server, but a third-party email service provider handles the service. These providers typically rely on file and database integrations and have a defined format of the data that they expect. Their environments host the email design.

When you use external email treatments you create output data from Pega Customer Decision Hub in the format that the integration demands. Typically, the output of the file or table consists of personalization data, a type of identifier that links the email treatment with a template that the service providers use, and additional identifiers to process the email responses that Pega Customer Decision Hub receives from the provider.

With external email treatments, Pega Customer Decision Hub only generates the data that is required to send the emails. The provider designs and sends the email messages and manages the performance and scaling of the whole process. Pega Customer Decision Hub requires additional integration to process the responses, update the interaction history, and train adaptive models.