Introduction to Agillic

This portal is a toolbox for developers, kept updated with new Agillic features relevant for developers. The future will bring more public APIs as well as more examples and documentation of technical features in Agillic.

The topics, documentation and examples are meant to provide you with an overview of the building blocks available to prime, fine-tune, optimize and extend your use of the Agillic platform.

What is Agillic?

Agillic is a cloud based Customer Marketing Platform. A data driven tool that enables you to collect, organise and utilise customer data to create personalised marketing initiatives to suit each individual customer.

The Agillic UI consists of several modules that allows the marketer to:

  • Manage data
  • Manage media assets
  • Create content
  • Design campaign flows
  • Publish campaigns to production

In general the marketer is able to work quite independently. However, to support the marketer in their daily tasks, data synchronisation, content templates, and potentially custom flow elements must be established – and that’s where developers come to save the day.

Staging and Production

Every Agillic solution comes with a staging and production instance, allowing the marketer to configure and test content and campaigns thoroughly before publishing the changes to the production environment, where the live recipients are located. When working with Agillic as a developer, you should consider which instance your actions should be directed to.

As a general rule: start all work using test data towards the staging instance. When tested thoroughly, you can coordinate with your marketing team to publish the Agillic entities to production, and begin using production credentials, with live recipient data.

Profiles

Access to the Agillic UI and Agillic related services are controlled by Groups and Profile settings from the Administration module. As a developer you will need an Agillic profile with developer specific accesses to use Webdav and to verify Imports, API calls and so on. In most cases it is an Agillic superuser that will have the necessary access rights to administer groups and profiles.

Data synchronisation

Agillic, being a “best of breed” marketing automation platform makes it often just one piece of the larger Martech ecosystem – hence integrating with systems like CMS, CRM, eCommerce, PIM and BI is a very common first step in the onboarding process. First and foremost, to make sure that data is synced between the two integrated systems and that other systems can trigger campaigns in Agillic.

Agillic supports a set of different data structures, covering needs for segmentation, personalisation and reporting. The structures are by default flexible – so by naming and creating relations between the structures the actual Data Model is constructed – specific for each customer.

Data can be moved in and out of Agillic in many different ways: APIs, file imports/exports, ETL, extensions and Webhooks. A data workshop during the onboarding process will often shed light on which methods makes most sense – considering the data type – e.g. recipient data, transactions or products and frequency – realtime or batch.

Templates

In parallel with designing and developing the data integrations, often HTML developers work on the master templates. In Agillic, master HTML templates are made for email, webpages, print (.pdf) and push notifications. Even though content editing in the Agillic UI is quite similar, the way the channel templates are written differs. To make the marketers work with content as efficient as possible, it is vital that the templates are written to be flexible, yet following the corporate style guide and the industry guidelines for that specific channel.

Extensions

JS extensions are not a must for all our customers but can be very handy default campaigns step in Agillic are not enough. Often extensions are using APIs to contact 3rd party systems and potentially request feedback. Extensions can also be used to make calculations and write values to Agillic.

Applications

An application is a set of pages where input fields prompts the recipient to give and submit information. This could be a signup form, a permission manager, a survey or similar. Agillic comes with a list of these, which you can use out of the box. If you cannot use the standard applications for specific use cases, you will have to build a custom application.

Want to know more about Marketing Automation?
Visit agillic.com or the Agillic Support site support.agillic.com

Getting Started with Agillic

Agillic is as such “empty” when you open it. In collaboration with the Agillic onboarding team, your Marketing team or a Partner you will identify the necessary actions to get Agillic ready for campaign execution. While some are strategic, other more creative, there are in most cases also a list of tasks for developers.

Some of the first steps would be:

Others are more lightweight and do not necessarily require technical resources to complete: