How to Create a Direct Mail Campaign
Marketing Manager provides an interface for creating direct mail. You can manage Direct Mailer jobs for each direct mail campaign through the Marketing Manager. You can create new direct mail campaigns, personalize messages, and modify properties. You can add attachments to your direct mail, and you can schedule when the Direct Mailer jobs will run. You can also test your direct mail using a test mailing list before sending it to production. The Direct Mailer service must be running before you can run the Direct Mail Campaign.
To create a Direct Mail campaign
Configure the Direct Mailer properties. You use Commerce Server Manager to control how you run your Direct Mailer jobs.
Develop the message body you want to deliver to recipients. For example, if you are delivering personalized message bodies, develop a personalized active server page (.aspx) that will provide the message body to Direct Mailer.
Identify and set up the data source that contains data about the recipients:
To generate a list of recipients from a file, you need the path of the file.
To generate a list of recipients from a SQL Server database, you need the connection string and the SQL Server query string.
Create and schedule the direct mail campaign. Use Marketing Manager to specify the following information:
Name of campaign and customer.
Name of the list of recipients.
Start time and date of the direct mail campaign.
URL or static file where Direct Mailer should get the personalized message body. The URL of the personalized message body must have a valid HTML content type extension, such as .htm or .aspx. Invalid extensions such as .xml cause a Collaboration Data Objects (CDO) error and the message will not be sent.
The direct mail campaign runs at the scheduled time.