Add Everest seeds using SAP's Seed List option
In February 2020 SAP Marketing Cloud added an enhancement allowing customers to add seed list emails at the campaign level. This means that the seed list does not have to be uploaded as a contact before sending the campaign and can be added through the Seed List option.
However, SAP Marketing Cloud has a seed cap which means you can only add up to 250 email addresses. Sending email to a seed list exceeding 250 email addresses when using the Seed List option does not work.
If you are not able (or do not wish to) to reduce the number of seed addresses in your seed list and you cannot use the SAP Seed List option, add the Everest seed list as a contact list.
Before downloading your seed list from Everest, ensure the seed list contains a maximum of 250 email addresses.
How to reduce the Everest seed List
2. Navigate to In-Flight>Inbox Placement>Manage Seed List
3.Click Seed List Optimizer:Disabled to upload your subscriber list and apply seed weighting
4. Click Seed Weighting: Enabled after uploading your subscribers list and make sure the "Include zero-weight seeds" option is disabled. This will exclude any mailbox providers with 0% weight (these are the mailbox providers not present in your subscriber’s base) and will not include them in your seed list.
5. Check the Download Seed List section to see if your seed list is below the 250 address threshold.
- If your seed list contains over 250 addresses, move to the next step.
- If your seed list contains under 250 addresses, proceed to step 7.
6. To further reduce the number of seed addresses in your seed list, manually adjust the Seed Weighting of the different mailbox providers. For mailbox providers that are a small percentage of your list, adjust their weighting to zero.
- For example, in the screenshot below, Charter represents only 0.2% of your database and 0.3% for Century Link. Manually adjusting their weight to 0% removes their seeds from your seed list.
- Your total seed weighing must always be equal to 100%, if not, Everest will not let you save the new weighting. Once you have adjusted the weights of the less relevant mailbox providers to 0%, re-adjust the weights to your remaining mailbox providers so they equal 100% (we suggest adding the extra weighting to the mailbox provider with the highest percentage in your subscriber list).
- You will notice that the number of your seeds decreased. Keep following the above steps until the number of seeds is below the 250 seed threshold.
7. When you have less than 250 seed addresses, click the Actions button in the Download Seed List section and select Download: CSV.
To add your seed list to SAP Marketing Cloud:
1. Log in to SAP Marketing Cloud
2. After you create your campaign's email template using Content Studio, perform segmentation to add the Everest seed list into the target group.
3. Create new contacts for the seed list emails so they can be added to the target groups. In Segmentation add the seed list to one of your target groups.
4. Choose the target group you created in the previous step in the email campaign screen. The building block ‘Seedlist’ is selecting all of the contacts that were created for the seed list emails. Merge this list with your selected target group, so email is sent to the seeded email addresses.
5. Select the Send Email step in the campaign flow and choose the email template you created.
6. Start the campaign.
If your integration flows are not triggered automatically after you start the campaign, you have to ensure you have put the seed email addresses in an allowlist in the Campaign Execution Allowlist application. When the campaign deploys, you can see mailbox placement metrics for that campaign in Everest.
Email Seed List Guidelines
These guidelines are to help avoid exceeding the contracted # of seeded email but still monitor email deliverability.
Seed List Rules
Include the seed list:
- If target group is greater than (>) 2,500 emails
- If you have not added seed list to another email send that day
Do NOT include the seed list:
- If target group is less than (<) 2,500 emails
- If campaign is set as recurring
- In more than 1 email send per day
Seed list building block & target groups
- If you are already using a seed list only building block (BB), continue to add to emails that do not fall under suppression rules.
- If you are using a seed list BB combined with employee emails, these have been updated to just include employee emails. Please make sure to add global seed list BB* when suppression rules are not met and seed list should be included.
- If you reuse commonly used target groups, please edit to add the seed list only BB when applicable if you were previously using an employee/seed list combined BB.
- If reusing a target group that includes seed list only BB, please edit TG to remove seed list BB if suppression rules apply.
*Global seed list only building block is saved as ‘Seedlist’ under Public Building Blocks:
