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Marketing System

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The Commerce Server 2009 Core Marketing System (Marketing System) is a high-performance, versatile platform that you use to perform targeted personalized e-marketing through the Web or electronic mail. It assists e-commerce enterprises in effectively communicating relevant messages to shoppers in order to improve sales either directly or indirectly.

The Marketing System includes support for the following functions:

  • Content targeting, up-sell and cross-sell capabilities, advertisements and testing, e-mail campaigns, discounts, and coupons.

  • Combining and prioritizing campaign items. Campaign methods include the following:

    • Discounts. Create and edit discounts, combine discounts, set discount interactions, apply order-level discounts, shipping and leveraged discounts. An example of a discount is buy one product, get a second product at a 20% discount.

    • Awareness advertisement. Create and edit ads. For example, showcase a newly introduced product on the homepage of the Web site.

    • Suggestive selling. Create expressions that you can use to target ads or discounts. For example, if a shopping cart contains Product A, show banner ad B.

    • Direct mail. Create and send direct mail to lists of users. For example, send a newsletter or promotional mail piece to all active customers each month.

  • Managing campaigns for customers who compete in the same industry so that the competitor's ads never appear on the same page.

  • Enabling customers on the Web site to see ads and apply discounts by using coupons or entering promotion codes.

  • Enabling business managers to create and manage campaign items such as discounts, ads, and direct mail that they use as marketing tools to increase sales.

  • Publishing campaigns into production so that campaigns only become visible to the run-time system on activation and approval.

  • Generating reports to measure key metrics.

Marketing System Integration and Feature Areas

The Marketing System integrates with the Commerce Server 2009 Core Catalog, Orders, and Profiles Systems, and the Data Warehouse. It includes these five main feature areas:

  • Campaigns. Manages the campaigns, customers, advertisements, and discounts that form marketing programs. The Campaigns module is integrated with both the Profiles System and the Catalog System through expressions. Expressions enable you to target advertisements to users and to apply discounts to products.

  • Content Selection Framework (CSF). A platform-level framework for building targeted content delivery applications on the Internet and making customization and extension of the advertising and discount delivery systems easier. The CSF allows for multiple pieces of content to be retrieved as a record set with only one call, which creates a significant timesaving.

  • Expression Evaluator Engine (EEE). Provides the logic to evaluate expression objects. An expression is a condition that Commerce Server 2009 evaluates against profiles to determine whether to deliver content, or perform another action. For example, an expression might be user total visit > 100. If this expression evaluates to True, a specific piece of content displays to a user who has visited your site more than 100 times.

  • Mailing List Management. Manages lists of users created for a direct mail campaign. You can create, import, and export multiple lists focusing on different user profiles. You can maintain opt-out lists and references as part of a direct mail campaign. The mailing list management database maintains direct mail lists, per job opt-out lists and global opt-out lists.

  • Direct Mailer Service. A fast, scalable service that you use to send personalized e-mail messages from a Web page, or non-personalized mailings from a flat text file, to large groups of recipients. Direct Mailer tracks e-mail and records which messages are sent and which are clicked (opened). This enables you to analyze the success of a direct mail campaign. The Direct Mailer service is designed to send bulk personalized e-mail messages to millions of users.

Features Overview

The following table describes the Marketing System features. For information about the features available from the Marketing Manager application, see Marketing Manager.

Feature

Description

Campaign data management

  • Publish campaign content to the Web. Display ads and discounts on the Web site.

  • Campaign expressions. Define a condition that Commerce Server 2009 evaluates against profiles to determine whether to deliver content, or perform another action.

  • Manage campaign goals. Specify goals and track the number of advertisements delivered in a specified period. Set campaign goals by clicks on an advertisement, by requests for an advertisement, at the campaign-level, or at the advertising item-level.

  • Manage competing advertisements. Make sure that competing advertisements never appear on the same page.

  • Manage advertising charges. Charge advertisers based on the number of advertisement requests they want their advertisements to receive.

  • Clear data. Remove inactive or expired campaign items.

Advertisement data management

  • Display target advertisements or discounts. Display advertisements or discounts to customers who have a specific profile. Host expression-based, targeted advertisements on your site for your products, or for the products of other companies.

  • Expression-based targeting. Create expressions that define the customers or context you want to target and the type of content you want to deliver.

  • Targeting context. Build target expressions based on a customer's organization profile, and support targeting to any number of arbitrary profiles.

  • Complex target expression. Create targeting expressions that depend on other expressions.

  • Run-time integration. Target content for delivery by using the Content Selection Framework (CSF).

Discounts and coupon data management

  • Runtime filtering and discount/coupon display. Display discounts based on discount target information, basket subtotal, or pre-tax and post-tax discounts.

  • Manage discounts and coupons. Create custom-defined discounts, coupons, and coupon-enabled discounts, and define discount interaction policies.

  • Import/export of coupon codes. Support for exporting and importing batches of coupons.

  • Marketing discount pipeline components. Orders System integration for order and item level discounts.

  • Basket pipeline. Discount pipeline components.

List management and direct mail

  • List-based expressions. Mailing list management and direct mailer support list-based expressions.

  • Direct Mailer pipeline components. Process lists of recipients. You can add new components to the pipeline, integrate the components with line-of-business systems, or replace them with components supplied by third parties. For example, you can change the template that you use with the mailings.

  • Opt-out lists. Maintain campaign-level or site-level opt out lists. You can automatically subtract opt-out lists from a direct mail list.

Application Programming Interfaces

  • Multi-Channel Commerce Foundation. Use for:

    • Campaign item management. Manage discounts, direct mail items, and advertisements programmatically.

    • Campaign management. Manage campaign entities programmatically.

    • Customer management. Manage your campaign advertisers programmatically.

    • Direct mail list management. Manage lists of users for direct mailings programmatically.

    • Reference table management. Manage reference tables programmatically.

    • Web Service. Perform distributed management of the Marketing System programmatically.

Applications

  • Marketing Manager. Manage campaigns, advertisements, and discounts by using the new Windows Forms-based Web service.

Staging

  • Marketing data caching. Update run-time and design-time marketing data.

  • Promotional code staging. Perform full or incremental updates of promotional codes/coupons during staging.

  • Refresh cache. Update the marketing data cache on destination servers.

Command line tools

  • Direct Mailer command line interface. Create, run, and manage direct mail job files.

  • Clear data command line tool. Remove deleted data: customers, campaigns, global expressions, campaign items, ads, discounts, Direct Mail templates, and coupon codes that are older than the "deleted number of days" specified.

Analytics and reporting

  • Analytics integration. Generate reports on integrated campaigns with new full discount functionality to measure your key sales and activity metrics. The following reports are supported:

    • Ad Reach and Frequency by Date

    • Ad Reach and Frequency per Advertiser

    • Campaign Item Summary

    • Campaign Event Summary

Security

  • Granular security. You use Windows Authorization Manager to manage scopes, roles, tasks, and operations in the Marketing System.

  • Collection or view-level security. Security levels are included on each of the individual view states throughout the Marketing Manager to allow for role-based access.

  • Task-based roles. Support for the following task-based roles:

    • Ad Author. Create and manage advertisements.

    • Direct Mail Author. Manage direct mails.

    • Discount Author. Create and manage discounts.

    • Global Expression Author. Create and manage global expressions.

    • Marketing Administrator. Has complete access to all tasks and assigns roles to other users.

    • Marketing Approver. Approves campaign items, discounts, ads, and direct mails.

    • Marketing Author. Create and manage customers, campaigns, campaign items, and coupons. Can import and export, and generate user lists.

    • Marketing Viewer. Can only view Marketing System information.

Supportability

  • Run-time performance counters. Record events associated with the run-time performance of the Direct Mailer Service, Evaluation Expression Engine, and caching.

  • Pipeline performance counters. Record events associated with the run-time performance of the marketing pipeline components, such as average execution time, errors total, errors per second, execution total, and more.

  • Management-time performance counters. Record events associated with the run-time performance of the Marketing Manager Web service, such as total marketing updates performed, average time per marketing update request, number of marketing lookups per second, and more.

  • Windows event tracing. Use to help with troubleshooting.

International

  • Multilingual. Support localized Direct Mail subject lines and basket display string for discounts.

See Also

Other Resources

Marketing Manager

Before You Start Developing with the Marketing System

Development Platform and Commerce Server Systems