Before You Start Developing with the Marketing System
For the latest version of Commerce Server 2007 Help, see the Microsoft Web site.
This topic introduces broad concepts about the Commerce Server Marketing System, and provides a context for the detailed information in other topics within this section. You can write custom code to use and extend the capabilities of the Marketing System, but before you begin, you must understand the concepts explained in Managing Your Marketing Campaigns.
Why Use the Commerce Server Marketing System?
By using the Marketing System, you can obtain several important benefits without implementing custom code. The Marketing System provides the following benefits:
Campaigns. Create campaigns, which are marketing programs that use many communication vehicles to accomplish a specific result, such as increasing market share, introducing new products, or retaining customers.
Discounts and promotion codes. Create and publish promotional prices on products or product groups to users that meet certain specified conditions. Discount interactions, order-level discounts, and targeting expressions are supported.
Content Selection Framework (CSF). Deliver personalized content to one or more customers, or to any other business entity that has a profile. For example, if you are running a sports Web site, you might want to deliver tennis-related information only to tennis players, or to users who are interested in tennis.
Targeted advertisements. Host expression-based, targeted advertisements on your site for your products, or for the products of other companies. You can charge your advertising customers based upon the page where their ads appear and the number of ad requests (clicks) they want their ads to receive.
Direct Mail. Distribute e-mail message ads to a targeted group of users. Direct mailings can include attachments, such as pictures, discounts, or URLs. The Direct Mailer service can send bulk personalized e-mail messages to millions of users.
Reports. The Marketing System integrates with the Data Warehouse so that you can generate reports to measure your key sales and activity metrics.
Programmatically Accessing the Marketing System
You can access the Commerce Server Marketing System as both a management system and as a run-time system. The components that you interact with vary depending on the way in which you are accessing the system. The following figure shows the components and data flow for both systems.
.gif "Marketing System Architecture")
See Also
Reference
Microsoft.CommerceServer.Marketing
Microsoft.CommerceServer.Runtime.Marketing