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Spec: Email Events

Spec: Email Events

This guide explains what data should be sent to Segment from Email tools and hence is targeted to partners who send Email data back into Segment rather than targeted to customers themselves. The semantic events detailed below represent the ideal for Email events; not every Email tool supports all of these events or all of their properties.

Overview

Every Email tool is built around the idea of delivering emails to recipients. A user sends one or many emails through an email tool, and the email is either delivered to a recipient or bounces if the email is undeliverable.

When an email is delivered, a recipient can take one or many actions on it: They might open the email, click on a link in the email’s body, mark the email as spam, or unsubscribe

Events

The email category has the following semantic events:

Email Bounced
Email Delivered
Email Link Clicked
Email Marked as Spam
Email Opened
Unsubscribed

Email Bounced

This event should be sent when an email tool receives notice from an email server that an email is undeliverable.

Properties

This event supports the following semantic properties:

Property	Type	Description
`email_id`	String	An ID used to identify the email.
`email_subject`	String	The email’s subject line.
`campaign_id`	String	An id used to identify a campaign
`campaign_name`	String	A name used to identify a campaign

Context

This event supports the following semantic context properties:

Property	Type	Description
`context.traits`	Object	An associative array about the email’s intended recipient.
`context.traits.email`	String	The intended recipient’s email address.

Example

{
  "user_id": "019mr8mf4r",
  "action": "track",
  "event": "Email Bounced",
  "context": {
    "ip": "67.207.109.102",
    "user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.118 Safari/537.36",
    "traits": {
      "email": "pgibbons@example.com"
    }
  },
  "properties": {
    "email_id": "18vzF7u3z",
    "email_subject": "First shirt on us!",
    "campaign_id": "123",
    "campaign_name": "New Customer Discount"
  }
}

Email Delivered

This event should be fired when the receiving mail server confirms receipt of an email.

Properties

This event supports the following semantic properties:

Property	Type	Description
`email_id`	String	An ID used to identify the email.
`email_subject`	String	The email’s subject line.
`campaign_id`	String	An id used to identify a campaign
`campaign_name`	String	A name used to identify a campaign

Context

This event supports the following semantic context properties:

Property	Type	Description
`context.traits`	Object	An associative array about the email’s intended recipient.
`context.traits.email`	String	The intended recipient’s email address.

Example

{
  "user_id": "019mr8mf4r",
  "action": "track",
  "event": "Email Delivered",
  "context": {
    "ip": "67.207.109.102",
    "user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.118 Safari/537.36",
    "traits": {
      "email": "pgibbons@example.com"
    }
  },
  "properties": {
    "email_id": "18vzF7u3z",
    "email_subject": "First shirt on us!",
    "campaign_id": "123",
    "campaign_name": "New Customer Discount"
  }
}

Email Link Clicked

This event should be fired when the recipient clicks on a link in the email’s body.

Properties

This event supports the following semantic properties:

Property	Type	Description
`email_id`	String	An ID used to identify the email.
`email_subject`	String	The email’s subject line.
`campaign_id`	String	An id used to identify a campaign
`campaign_name`	String	A name used to identify a campaign
`link_id`	String	An id used to identify a link
`link_url`	String	The URL the link points to.

Context

This event supports the following semantic context properties:

Property	Type	Description
`context.ip`	Object	The opening computer’s public IP address.
`context.traits`	Object	An associative array describing the email’s intended recipient.
`context.traits.email`	String	The intended recipient’s email address.
`context.user_agent`	String	The opening browser’s user agent.

Example

{
  "user_id": "019mr8mf4r",
  "action": "track",
  "event": "Email Link Clicked",
  "context": {
    "ip": "67.207.109.102",
    "user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.118 Safari/537.36",
    "traits": {
      "email": "joanna@chotchkies.com"
    }
  },
  "properties": {
    "email_id": "18vzF7u3z",
    "email_subject": "First shirt on us!",
    "campaign_id": "123",
    "campaign_name": "New Customer Discount",
    "link_id": "101",
    "link_url": "https://www.buymyshirts.com?promo=NEWCUSTOMER"
  }
}

Email Marked as Spam

This event should be fired when a recipient marks an email as spam.

Properties

This event supports the following semantic properties:

Property	Type	Description
`email_id`	String	An ID used to identify the email.
`email_subject`	String	The email’s subject line.
`campaign_id`	String	An id used to identify a campaign
`campaign_name`	String	A name used to identify a campaign

Context

This event supports the following semantic context properties:

Property	Type	Description
`context.ip`	Object	The opening computer’s public IP address.
`context.traits`	Object	An associative array describing the email’s intended recipient.
`context.traits.email`	String	The intended recipient’s email address.
`context.user_agent`	String	The opening browser’s user agent.

Example

{
  "user_id": "019mr8mf4r",
  "action": "track",
  "event": "Email Marked as Spam",
  "context": {
    "ip": "67.207.109.102",
    "user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.118 Safari/537.36",
    "traits": {
      "email": "mwaddams@example.com"
    }
  },
  "properties": {
    "email_id": "18vzF7u3z",
    "email_subject": "First shirt on us!",
    "campaign_id": "123",
    "campaign_name": "New Customer Discount"
  }
}

Email Opened

This event should be fired when the recipient opens the email.

Properties

This event supports the following semantic properties:

Property	Type	Description
`email_id`	String	An ID used to identify the email.
`email_subject`	String	The email’s subject line.
`campaign_id`	String	An id used to identify a campaign
`campaign_name`	String	A name used to identify a campaign

Context

This event supports the following semantic context properties:

Property	Type	Description
`context.ip`	String	The opening computer’s public IP address.
`context.traits`	Object	An associative array describing the email’s intended recipient.
`context.traits.email`	String	The intended recipient’s email address.
`context.user_agent`	String	The opening browser’s user agent.

Example

{
  "user_id": "019mr8mf4r",
  "action": "track",
  "event": "Email Opened",
  "context": {
    "ip": "67.207.109.102",
    "user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.118 Safari/537.36",
    "traits": {
      "email": "pgibbons@example.com"
    }
  },
  "properties": {
    "email_id": "18vzF7u3z",
    "email_subject": "First shirt on us!",
    "campaign_id": "123",
    "campaign_name": "New Customer Discount"
  }
}

Unsubscribed

This event should be fired when the recipient unsubscribes from the email. The unsubscription can either happen for a particular list, or globally from all marketing emails, depending on the tool. Typically you cannot unsubscribe from a transactional email such as a password reset.

Properties

This event supports the following semantic properties:

Property	Type	Description
`email_id`	String	An ID used to identify the email.
`email_subject`	String	The email’s subject line.
`campaign_id`	String	An id used to identify a campaign
`campaign_name`	String	A name used to identify a campaign
`list_id`	String	An optional id used to identify a list
`list_name`	String	An optional name used to identify a list

Context

This event supports the following semantic context properties:

Property	Type	Description
`context.ip`	String	The opening computer’s public IP address.
`context.traits`	Object	An associative array describing the email’s intended recipient.
`context.traits.email`	String	The intended recipient’s email address.
`context.user_agent`	String	The opening browser’s user agent.

Example

{
  "user_id": "019mr8mf4r",
  "action": "track",
  "event": "Unsubscribed",
  "context": {
    "ip": "67.207.109.102",
    "user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.118 Safari/537.36",
    "traits": {
      "email": "pgibbons@example.com"
    }
  },
  "properties": {
    "email_id": "18vzF7u3z",
    "email_subject": "First shirt on us!",
    "campaign_id": "123",
    "campaign_name": "New Customer Discount",
    "list_id": "1425",
    "list_name": "New customers"
  }
}

This page was last modified: 09 Mar 2020

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