There are five different emails that can be sent from the You're a Winner! service. These are:
In each case except for the last, most of the content will be the same, only the
first few sentences will change.
We have tried to make the insertion of repetitive content relatively easy when you are designing the emails you are going to send by creating a translation facility in the email processor portion of the service. The way it works is this: There are twelve different files that can be uploaded to the server in addition to the five email templates mentioned above. These are labeled as follows:
Normally the logo file will be a .png image while the others may be .png images or .html files. If we take a look at the sample winner notification email template file that's included with the You're a Winner! service it looks like this:
%logo%
%facility_name%
Win a Dinner Weekly Draw Winners
Congratulations, You're a Winner!
This message is for:
%first_name% %last_name%
Terms and conditions:
Drop by the store before %expiry_date% to pick up your certificate. The certificate entitles you to dinner for two (to a maximum of $70.00). Alcoholic beverages, taxes and gratuities are extra.
Certificates are good any day except Saturdays from 6-10 pm.
Certificates must be picked up in person by the contest registrant.
%insert%
%footer%
There are several items that are a keyword surrounded by % characters. These are tokens that correspond to values that are calculated when the email is generated.
The tokens that are supported are as follows:
| %first_name% | Subscriber's first name |
| %last_name% | Subscriber's last name |
| %birthday | Subscriber's birthday (month, then day) |
| %winner_name% | Winner names of the current draw as an html block |
| %anniversary% | Anniversary date (month, then day) |
| %expiry_date% | Gift certificate expiry date |
| %facility_name% | Your business name (from your client configuration page) |
| %number_of_days% | Number of days visit tag is valid |
| %ident_code% | Customer Identifier - client license code, then customer identifier, then customer validation |
| %facility_address_1% | Your street address (from your client configuration page) |
| %facility_address_2% | Your city, your province, state or region, your postal code as one line of text (from your client configuration page) |
| %facility_phone% | Your telephone number (from your client configuration page) |
| %footer% | Email footer block (automatically placed at the bottom of the email if not otherwise specified |
| %draw_date% | Draw date of the current draw in text form (e.g. December 31, 2021) |
The sample advertising insert file that exists when you subscribe to the You're a Winner! service is a standard HTML file. It is shown below:
Merging two (or more) HTML files isn't straightforward. There can be only one <html></html> tag pair in a document and only one <head></head> section and only one <body></body> section in an HTML page (or email). When the service merges two .html files it locates the </head> tag in the parent document, marks that as its "storage location", then reads through the document to be merged, copies all the text between the <head> and </head> tags and inserts this text at the "storage location" in the parent document.
It then does something similar with the <body></body> portion of the child document except that it replaces the keyword in the parent document with the body copy from the child document.
Files with a .png extension are merged into the parent file as inline images.
The service repeats this process using the newly created document as the parent, until all keyword tags have been resolved.