Email provider integrations connect Playable with your own Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM), Email Service Provider (ESP), or other data management or marketing automation softwares.

Email providers, as storage integrations, are used to automatically transfer player data to your own system so you don't have to manually export it from your campaign.

To know more about how to set up storage integrations read here.

In this article, you will learn about:

We have pre-built API integrations with many CRM or ESP systems including Agillic, Mailchimp, APSIS One, HubSpot, Salesforce and Dotdigital.

The process for setting up email provider integrations varies slightly depending on which CRM, or ESP system you are using.

However, there are some steps that are common to all of them. Typically, you will need to go through the following steps:

The first step you will take is to grant Playable access to the CRM, ESP you are using.

To do that, you typically need to insert authentication details from your system into the Playable integration settings. This is often an API key or a Client ID and secret, but it could also be something else.

Email provider integrations can be used to transfer new information, but they can also update the data that already exists in your CRM or ESP.

Before sending any data via an email provider integration, Playable searches for existing users. This way, you won't end up with duplicates in your database.

This is why, under the integration's general setting, you need to decide what happens if a user already exists in your CRM or ESP. You can choose to:

If you want to send information from Playable, you need to tick the box 'update profile if it already exists' in the general integration settings.

If you don't tick this box, data from existing users will not be sent via the integration. Most email provider integrations use an email address as the unique identifier, so an existing user is one you already have an email address for.

Once you have selected the integration's settings, you need to decide which event will trigger the integration. This event is what needs to happen before Playable tries to send information through the integration.

The default setup is to use form fields. You choose one field from the registration form, and if that field is filled in when the form is submitted, the integration will be triggered.

Typically, we recommend selecting the checkbox your players use to accept terms and conditions. That way, the integration will only send data to your system after players accept your terms and conditions.

An advanced event trigger should only be used if you want to filter which players' data is sent through the integration. For example, you might send data only for players who have a specific game outcome (metric data) or who selected a specific response in the registration form (form field data).

Most email providers and storage integrations allow you to send data from the following parts of your campaign:

* You have to turn on game flow and bulk prize data mapping at the top of your integration settings before you can use them.

Think about which data you would like to export and why. Then, "map" each field from your campaign to a field in your own system using drop-down menus. This drop-down is where you select where in your CRM or ESP or storage solution the data should be sent.

If you have decided to send Playable information for users already existing in your database, when you map each field, you will need to choose if you want to:

Since the email address is used as the unique identifier, other data fields might be additional personal information such as phone number or postal code, or it could be information such as source or preferences.

It is up to you whether you want to update these other fields with the information collected in Playable. For example, if a player enters a phone number in your campaign's registration form, but there is already a phone number associated with them in your ESP, would you like to overwrite the existing phone number with the new one? Or would you only like to send the phone number collected in Playable to users for whom you don't have a phone number on file?

Next to each field collected in the registration form, you have the option to edit this setting to define whether it should only insert data into empty fields, update existing fields, or do both.

You can add static information when you want to track something that is true for every player but is not collected in the campaign automatically.

For example, you can use static information if you want to track Playable as the user "source" in your database.

Once you enter a static value, you can map the field as you would with any other data field.

We recommend testing the integration before going live. You can test integrations without publishing the campaign.

For a thorough test that includes game data, campaign information, and static information, you should play the game via the demo URL and submit a registration in the frontend.

After you register, go to the campaign backend. Under the Activity tab, you can see a note under each registration confirming whether or not the data was successfully sent through the integration.

If the integration fails, you can troubleshoot by looking at the log file. To learn more about troubleshooting your integration read here.