Sitecore Personalization on EXM is not working

Question

We use Sitecore 9 update 1 and we utilize the out of the box Email Experience Manager (EXM) of it. But we encountered an issue with regards to personalization of an email campaign. It seems the personalization using rules/condition is not working.

Anybody from this community experienced and solve this?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

This has been fixed in the cumulative hotfix for EXM 9.0 Update-1

The problem is that the contact is never being identified during dispatch. This needs to happen in the ensureSessionContext pipeline.

Add the following pipeline processor

public class LoadEmailRenderSessionContact
{
    public ContactRepositoryBase ContactRepository { get; set; }

    public void Process(InitializeTrackerArgs args)
    {
        if (!ExmContext.IsRenderRequest || ExmContext.ContactIdentifier == null || ContactRepository == null)
        {
            return;
        }

        Contact contact = ContactRepository.LoadContact(ExmContext.ContactIdentifier.Source, ExmContext.ContactIdentifier.Identifier);

        if (contact == null)
        {
            return;
        }

        args.Session.Contact = contact;
    }
}

and add it to the ensureSessionContext pipeline:

<ensureSessionContext role:require="Standalone or ContentManagement or DedicatedDispatch or ContentDelivery">
    <processor type="FooBar.LoadEmailRenderSessionContact, FooBar" x:before="processor[@type='Sitecore.Analytics.Pipelines.EnsureSessionContext.LoadContact, Sitecore.Analytics']" resolve="true">
        <ContactRepository ref="contactRepository" />
    </processor>
</ensureSessionContext>

Additionally, you should make sure that the tracker is enabled for the site as MVC personalization will otherwise not work i.e. set enableTracking="true" on the exm site e.g..

<site name="exm" enableTracking="true" inherits="shell" virtualFolder="/" physicalFolder="/" startItem="/none" cacheHtml="true" htmlCacheSize="50MB" />