Sending personalized attachments with Exact Target - possible?

October 24, 2013 8:14 AM

I have a client who uses Exact Target, and they have asked us to look into a project they would like to do. They have a database of 5,000 names they would like to send an email to, but they want to include a PDF for a $200 coupon in each email that has the recipient’s name on it. So in essence, they would be sending 5,000 individual PDFs, not one universal document. Is this something that is even remotely possible?
posted by starvingartist to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Does it need to be a PDF attachment? I've achieved something similar in the past by generating a given number of unique coupon codes for my site, which could be claimed at unique URLs, then adding a custom field to the email list in Excel and generating a unique email for each recipient. This was in Campaign Monitor, but I imagine ET is pretty similar.
posted by third word on a random page at 8:22 AM on October 24, 2013 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: I considered something like that as well. I have to see if they will accept it, or if it must be a PDF.
posted by starvingartist at 9:57 AM on October 24, 2013

It would be a bit of a hassle, but far from impossible (at least, based on my quick look at the Exact Target site.) The brute-force way would be to just run off 5000 PDFs with a Word mail merge and a PDF printer like Bullzip or CutePDF. Upload the 5000 PDFs to Exact Target's FTP site and use their scripting language to attach the file corresponding to each recipient. You could get more complex by programming to their API, but for a 5000-recipient job it seems like it's not worth it to me.
posted by pocams at 10:49 AM on October 24, 2013