In this article
1. Feature Overview
Modern enterprise marketing requires content production and distribution to function as a seamless, high-velocity content supply chain. To maximize return on content investment, organization must address the "final mile" of automated distribution: delivering highly relevant content to subscribers without manual intervention or excessive operational overhead.
Personalized Delivery serves as the optimization layer of this supply chain. Instead of sending a single newsletter, blog or newsfeed email loaded with all your newly published content email, or managing complex, fragmented email campaigns, organizations can use Personalized Delivery to automate individual-level personalization at scale.
By matching real-time content publication (via RSS or Atom feeds) with granular subscriber preferences stored in your core Marketo person system of record, Digesto Personalized Delivery ensures that every recipient receives a custom-tailored email matching their unique interests.
What you gain:
Relevance at Scale: Deliver a single email execution where every recipient's version is uniquely compiled based on their specified interests, such as preferred content categories or authors.
Operational Efficiency: Automate the entire distribution loop. By reducing human intervention in program creation and list filtering, marketing operations teams can reallocate hours back to strategy.
Streamlined Asset Management: Consolidate campaign infrastructure by driving personalized execution through a minimized, highly efficient smart campaign framework.
2. Personalized Digest Processing Flows
The diagram and side by side comparison table below outlines the exact flow of operations for the Personalized Digest delivery method.
Test vs scheduled production run execution steps
Thee side-by-side comparison below outlines the exact flow of operations for Test and Scheduled delivery.
Step | Digest Test (Test Run) | Digest Schedule (Production Run) |
1. Get Content | Retrieves feed content up to the "Max Posts" limit. | Retrieves up to "Max Posts" of new content since last run. Halts if no new content. |
2. Build Recipients | Targets defined test records in the test smart campaign filters. | Queries "All Subscribers" smartlist, matches interests to content, and builds "Qualified" static list. Halts if no matches. |
3. Build Program | No Program build. Schedules campaign directly inside the program template. | Clones master template program to isolate execution and enable tracking data. |
4. Build Content | Converts feed content to scripts and populates master program tokens. | Converts matched personalized content to scripts and populates cloned program tokens. |
5. Schedule Delivery | Runs the test campaign to deliver drafts to the test list. | Schedules production campaign to deliver emails to the qualified list. |
6. Personalization | Idem | Filters articles based on test preference. Falls back to showing all articles if empty. |
3. Configuring a Personalized Digest
Feature Activation
Self-service: To enable this feature, you can easily upgrade your subscription to the "Personalized" plan from the Plans page accessible from Profile / My Account / Change Plan menu.
Talk to an expert: connect with us if you have additional question or require offline billing!
Enable Personalized Delivery
Once the feature has been activated for your account, head to the Digest Editor page and select the "Personalized" delivery method and follow the guided setup instructions to create your new Digest.
4. Configuration & Integration Requirements
Subscriber Database & Field Mapping
To deploy Personalized Delivery successfully, your content, subscriber database, and marketing automation platform must align with the following specifications.
Content Feed Specifications
Blog/news feed tagging: Articles must be “tagged” or “categorized” in your Content Management System (Ex: WordPress, Sitecore, Drupal) - with the required Categories and/or Authors dimensions.
The RSS/Atom feed elements must contain these elements in the designated feed elements: - For Categories, this corresponds to “<category>” in RSS feeds and “<category term>” in Atom. For Authors, this corresponds to “<author>” or “<dc:creator>” in RSS and “<name>” as sub element of “<author>” in Atom. Learn more about all feed elements supported by Digesto here.
Marketo data specifications
Subscription fields: Subscription for Categories and/or Authors must exist or be created on the Person record custom field. “Text Area” field type is recommended.
Subscription values: Multiple values must be semi-colon separated (standard format for multi-select Marketo form fields). Ex: Account-Based Marketing; Data Management; Data Quality.
Reserved Characters: Preference values must not contain semicolons (;) or pipe characters (|), as these are reserved as delimiters.
Matching Rules: The values stored on the person record must match the categories or authors in the content feed exactly (case-sensitive). If any value on the person record matches any value in the corresponding feed element, the article is qualified for delivery to that recipient.
API Integration
A dedicated API role, user, and web service must be configured with precise security and operational API access & permissions.
Activate Campaign
Approve Assets
Execute Campaign
Read-Only Campaign
Read-Write Assets
Read-Write Person
5. Technical Constraints & Limitations
To maintain optimal system performance, high deliverability, and stability across enterprise volumes, Personalized Delivery operates under the following parameters:
Payload Limit: Individual email content is limited to a maximum of 100KB per compiled message. This typically accommodates between 8 and 25 posts in a single email, depending on the length of each post's summary and markup.
Subscriber Capacity: The bulk lead import functionality used to identify and map qualified subscribers is optimized for a maximum of 250,000 subscribers per execution.
Data Volumes: Bulk export utilities support data limits up to 500MB daily across all shared web services (representing approximately 5 million records).
Personalization Dimensions: Personalization is evaluated along a single dimension (or a single consolidated level of values). To personalize across multiple distinct criteria (e.g., matching both Category and Content Type), values must be concatenated in the feed and on the subscriber record using a consistent delimiter (e.g.,
Webinar - Artificial Intelligence).Testing Functionality: Cloned execution workflows mean that native platform-side A/B testing frameworks cannot be applied directly. Traditional layout and feed testing methods must be used