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Activities

Warning

This is a legacy solution and will be phased out. Use Interactions instead which allow a lot more flexibility.

Activities are a flexible way to allow our customers to flag that a contact has experienced a certain event. This can then be used for segmentation and in automations.

For example, an Engage customer wants to keep track of which contacts took part in a certain competition. The customer adds this data to the relevant contacts using an activity, and use that further along, perhaps to inform those contacts of who won the competition.

Engage does not provide a visual overview of a contact's events, nor can these events be added or edited within Voyado Engage. They can only be used in segmentations and automations.

Example of use-cases in Voyado Engage:

  • Competitions

  • Booking and participation in customer events

  • Subscriptions

  • 2nd hand purchased garment

  • Repairs

  • Contact has talked to customer service

While it's not possible to edit an activity in the Engage interface, it can be updated (using the correct id and contactKey) by just importing it into Engage again with the new values.

File format for imports

Your XML file needs to have the following structure:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<activities contactKeyType="externalId" contactType="member">
	<activity>
		<id>553077-640233-Role</id>
		<contactKey>640233</contactKey>
		<name>2016-06-02, Competition X</name>
		<dateTime>2013-02-10T00:00:00</dateTime>

		<!-- Custom Fields -->
		<spare1>553077</spare1>
		<spare2/>
		<spare3>Role</spare3>
		<spare4>Competition location</spare4>
		<spare5>Type of competition</spare5>
		<spare6/>
		<spare7/>
		<spare8/>
		<spare9/>
		<spare10/>
		<dateSpare1>2013-02-10T00:00:00</dateSpare1>
		<dateSpare2/>
		<dateSpare3/>
		<dateSpare4/>
		<dateSpare5/>
	</activity>
</activities>

There are four mandatory fields:

  • id: A unique ID for the event (no two activities can have the same value)

  • contactKey: The reference to a contact in Voyado Engage

  • name: A name for your event

  • dateTime: The date and time when the event occurred

Below these are 10 custom fields for additional metadata. These are configurable string fields that can be used for segmentation in Engage using string matching or as options in a dropdown.

  • spare1 - spare10: For string metadata

There are also 5 dateTime fields. These allow you to include date-related data to perform segmentations on, such as days before/after, between and so on.

  • dateSpare1 - dateSpare5: For dateTime data

Doing the import

Activities are imported to Engage through XML files placed on your FTP.

[base ftp-url]/integration/activityImport

It is not possible to export activities.

Files sent to the FTP server should follow this naming convention:

[Timestamp]_[sequence number OR store id] activities.xml

  • [Timestamp] should be formatted as: YYYYMMDDHHmmss

  • The sequence or store id is only necessary if there is a risk that several applications could send XML files at the same time

Customizing your fields

It's possible to rename the “activities” section of the XML and also rename the custom fields to match your specific usage. Your Voyado team will help you so contact them about this.

Searching using activities

In Engage, it is possible to search for:

  • Contacts who have performed a number of activities during a specific time

  • Contacts who have performed one or more specific activities with specific conditions on all the data that is configured around the activity, such as name, category etc.

In this section: