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Setting up Md5 encrypted hashes for email advertisements

Earnlink’s monetization division offers expert set-up, training, improved payment terms, and advanced reporting to Earnware and Campaigner users for any advertiser interested in adding tags to their email ads.

Advertisers with a direct account should follow the set-up instructions below to properly implement tags into their email ad templates.

Once advertisers receive their HTML tags from Earnlink or their representative, they should replace certain variables in their email ads with the following merge codes.

Campaigner merge codes

For email [Contact.contactId]

For campaigns [Campaign.Id]

Earnware ESP merge codes

For email [contactId]

For campaigns [campaignId]

*The contactId field contains an encrypted Md5 hash of the user’s email address, which is sent to the advertiser. While it is possible to send the plain text [Contact.Email] instead, this would reveal the actual email addresses of your clickers to the advertiser. To avoid this, we recommend sending an Md5 hash instead. To achieve this, you must first populate your subscriber database with Md5 hashes and keep them up to date. This process is simple and will ensure that your subscribers’ email addresses remain secure. This recommendation applies to all advertisers

How to populate your Campaigner contact list with matching Md5’s.

By using your Earnware middleware as your primary importer to Campaigner, you’ll get Md5 automatically as long as you set-up the custom field “contactId” in Campaigner. This is easy to do. Login to your Campaigner account and follow these steps: Navigate to Contacts > Manage Fields > Click the orange button “New Custom Field” > Name = contactId (with capital i) > Default Value = placeholder > Save and Close. As long as Earnware sees it, Earnware will populate it on every export/import to Campaigner. Earnware forms and workflows also build and populate Md5’s automatically.

Risks

The risk is that you forget to use Earnware as an importer and use Campaigner’s import system directly. That will break your ads. They will literally error if you don’t merge in the variable it is expecting. The risk can be eliminated by making a policy to only import through Earnware and export to Campaigner vs. directly importing a CSV into Campaigner.

Final Thoughts

As the saying goes, “the devil is in the details” and the opportunity to monetize extremely well vs. moderately well depends on the time and care you can give your set-up and optimizations. Earnlink full service monetization was established to make email monetization easier and ultimately get us all paid better and faster. If you’d like additional details, feel free to inquire with the team.