Configure an EDP Email Campaign: Review

In the message building phase, the platform identifies the intended recipients of the Campaign, identifies all the possible content variations based on the Dynamic Content options used in the Campaign, and determines the Personalization values based on any Personalization fields used in the content. The steps in this first phase are often collectively referred to as the "queue" process.

In the message sending phase, the system merges together the data and the content in order to assemble the final messages. These messages are then transmitted to the recipients.

Campaigns that use EDP as the data source utilize a different flow than Campaigns that use a Cheetah Digital table as the data source. Because of this different flow, the concept of an "advance queue" (that is, queueing email messages up for some period of time prior to deployment) is not supported in EDP-driven Campaigns. Therefore, you can't define separate schedules for the message building phase and for the message sending phase, as you can for Campaigns built off a Cheetah Digital table. Instead, you must define a single Send Schedule, which encompasses both phases.

Send Schedule

To define the Send Schedule for an EDP-driven Campaign:

1. Within the Campaign Schedule section, next to Send Schedule, select either:

   • If you want the Send Schedule to begin immediately when the Campaign is launched, select Begin immediately (this option is selected by default).

   • If you want to set a custom start date / time at some point in the future, select Begin on, then select a date and a time.

In the "message building" phase, the platform identifies the intended recipients of the Campaign, identifies all the possible content variations based on the Dynamic Content options used in the Campaign, and determines the Personalization values based on any Personalization fields used in the content. The steps in this first phase are often collectively referred to as the "queue" process.

In the "message sending" phase, the system merges together the data and the content in order to assemble the final messages. These messages are then transmitted to the recipients.

Campaigns that use EDP as the data source utilize a different flow than Campaigns that use a Cheetah Digital table as the data source. Because of this different flow, the concept of an "advance queue" (that is, queueing email messages up for some period of time prior to deployment) is not supported in EDP-driven Campaigns. Therefore, you can't define separate schedules for the message building phase and for the message sending phase, as you can for Campaigns built off a Cheetah Digital table. Instead, you must define a single Recurrence Schedule and frequency, which encompasses both phases.

Recurrence Schedule

The Recurrence Schedule consists of the following parts:

• Recurrence Schedule Start: This component controls when you want the Recurrence Schedule to be active, or to go "live." You can either select "Immediately," meaning the Recurrence Schedule will go live immediately after the Campaign is launched, or you can set a start date / time in the future. You can also optionally set an end date / time for the Recurrence Schedule, or let the schedule run indefinitely (until the Campaign is stopped or cancelled).

• Recurrence Schedule Frequency: Once the Recurrence Schedule is active, this component controls when, and how often, the Campaign will build and send new messages.

• Recurrence Schedule Window: This component allows you to define a limited time range, or "window," during which time the platform will build and send messages. If the Campaign doesn't complete the process during the Recurrence Schedule Window, the remaining messages will get built and sent during the next window.

To set the Recurrence Schedule for an EDP-driven Campaign:

1. Within the "Date Trigger Schedule" section, next to "Recurrence Schedule," select either:

   • If you want the Recurrence Schedule to go "live" immediately when the Campaign is launched, select Begin immediately (this option is selected by default).

   • If you want to set a custom start date / time at some point in the future, select Begin on, then select a date and a time.

2. Define the Recurrence Schedule Frequency:

   • Daily: Enter an interval (every "X" days). The default setting is "every 1 day."

   • Weekly: Select one or more days of the week.

   • Monthly: Select one of the following:

     • A specific number ("15th of the month" for example).

     • Define a business rule to calculate a date ("second Tuesday of every month" for example).

   • Yearly: Select one of the following:

     • A specific month / day ("January 15th" for example).

     • Define a business rule to calculate a date ("second Wednesday in August" for example).

3. Define the time of day when messages are created and sent. The default option is "once a day, at 9:00 AM."

   • Once a day: Select the time of day when the system should create and send messages.

   • Several times a day:

     • Define the daily frequency for when the system should create and send messages.

     • Optionally define a Recurrence Schedule Window, during which time the system will create and send messages.

4. By default, the Campaign's Recurrence Schedule will run indefinitely, until the Campaign is stopped or cancelled. Optionally, to enter a Recurrence Schedule end date, select Stop Building On, then enter the end date and time.

Note: Configuring a Sender Profile to enforce the double opt-in status requires Administrator-level access to Cheetah Digital. Please speak with your Client Services Representative for assistance on configuring your Sender Profile.  

If using the double opt-in process, you typically need to send a "Confirmation request" email message to a consumer who has submitted their registration (either via a Web Form or an Email Submission Handler). However, the consumer's status at this point in the process is still "Not confirmed" because they have not yet confirmed the registration. In order to deploy email messages to an "unconfirmed" consumer, the platform offers an override feature. This feature is intended primarily for this use case, when trying to send confirmation email messages to unconfirmed consumers.

To enable the override feature for Confirmation emails, place a check mark in the Confirmation Email - send to unconfirmed email addresses check box. Please note that this check box is enabled only if the selected Sender Profile for this Campaign has been configured to "Require Confirmation."

For more information on the email double opt-in process, please see the Email Submission Handler Help topic.

The proofing function for an EDP-driven Campaign provides the following features:

• If you typically send Proofs to the same set of recipients, you can create a reusable EDP Proofing Group comprised of these recipients (see Proofing Groups for more details).

• Send one-off proofs to email addresses that may not be in the Proofing Group.

• Quickly select only the Dynamic Content you want to test, and test every iteration of that Dynamic Content.

• Send proofs of messages containing Dynamic Attributes (also known as "Member Functions"). For more information on Dynamic Attributes, please see the EDP Online Help. 

• Test Dynamic Content without having to find sample records that match the desired criteria.

• Use the main Campaign audience to select and populate proofing records, drive the dynamic content and send the proofs to the proof group members (Beta feature available on request).

• Create the random record user set and CC (Carbon Copy) it to all the proofing group members in the list (Beta feature available on request).

• Any Personalization within the Campaign content, such as EDP Attributes or Loyalty Objects, will render using a random Test Member pulled from your EDP database. If no data is available in that random Test Member for a particular Personalization field or object, the Campaign content will render using default values instead. 

Note: If you use the Proof option within the Preview window, you can add custom Personalization values to the proof; see the Content chevron for more details on that proofing method. 

To proof an EDP Campaign:

1. Within the Proofing and Auditing section, select the email format – either HTML or Plain Text.

2. The Send Proof to field allows you to enter the email addresses to which you want to send the proof. You can either:

   • Manually type in one or more email addresses. If entering multiple addresses, they must be separated by commas or semi-colons.

   • Send the proof to an existing EDP Proofing Group by clicking the Browse icon to the right of the Send Proof to field. A pop-up window is displayed, listing all of the existing EDP Proofing Groups. Select the desired group. The pop-up window is closed, and the field is populated with a comma-separated list of all the email addresses in the Proofing Group. Optionally you can then edit this list by removing or adding email addresses.

Note: The option Use Specific Records is available only in EDP Dynamic Proofing (Beta). When a Specific Records Proofing Group is used for EDP Proofing (other than Dynamic Proofing, in the non–beta mode), the platform will disregard the Specific Records Proofing Group Type and will randomly select records from the Campaign's audience to build and populate the proof message content.

3. If your Campaign contains Dynamic Content, the Dynamic Content tab is populated with a tree diagram, showing all of the Dynamic Blocks, along with the rules within each Dynamic Block. Place a check mark next to a Dynamic Block and rule that you want to test. By default, the first rule is selected for each Dynamic Block. You can optionally select multiple rules within a Dynamic Block, and / or select multiple Dynamic Blocks. For Dynamic Block that use the IF > IF structure, all selections will be contained in a single proof version.

Note: If your Campaign includes static Content Blocks, they will appear in the Dynamic Content tab as well. Content Blocks will automatically be selected and uneditable, as they will always be included in your proofs.

4. Based on the number of Dynamic Content rules that you select, the Proof Count in the top-right corner of the Dynamic Content tab indicates how many proofs will be sent to each recipient. The system imposes a hard limit of 250 proofs to each recipient. If you surpass this threshold, an error message is displayed. You must then reduce the number of selected rules in order to decrease the Proof Count.

5. When finished, click save and  send proof to generate and send the proofs.

Dynamic Proofing

Dynamic Proofing (Beta version) is available on request through your Marigold consultant. With this option you can use the main Campaign audience to select and populate proofing records, drive the dynamic content and send the proofs to the proof group members. All the existing EDP proofing groups will be converted to use random records.The system will effectively create the random record user set and CC (Carbon Copy) it to all the proofing group members in the list.

Note: This feature enhancement is available only in Regular, Date-Triggered, and Event-triggered EDP Email Campaigns with and without cells and splits. EDP SMS Campaign is NOT supported.

To use Dynamic Proofing:

1. Within the Proofing and Auditing section, select Use Dynamic Proofing (Beta).

2. Select the proofing group you want to send the proofs to in Send Proof To. Dynamic Proofing supports both random and specific record types. 

Note: Specific records and alternate data sets are usually small audiences. To reduce the time for proofing (time for the system to generate proofs), we encourage users to use specific records or an alternate data set instead of random records in Dynamic Proofing (beta). 

3. Enter the maximum number of proof messages to be generated and sent per proof group member, in Proof Limit.

4. Enter the proof prefix to be inserted in front of the subject line of the proofing email message, in order to help the recipient identify the message as being a test proof, in Proof Prefix.

5. When a Proofing Group with an Alternate Data Set defined is used for proofing an EDP campaign, at the campaign level, you can choose to use this alternate audience segment by selecting Use the Alternate Data Set defined in the Proofing Group. An alternate data set is usually a smaller segment used for generating proofs.

Note: If this option is selected and an alternate data set is not defined in the proofing group, you will be presented with an error when proofing.

Note: This option is always selected: 1) In an event-triggered campaign, so the system can use the alternate data set defined in the proofing group when proofing an event-triggered campaign.  2) When proofing a campaign with an EDP external file as its audience. You are required to define an alternate audience in the proofing group for proofing an event-triggered campaign. This setting is not required when proofing a regular or a date-triggered campaign. (see Proofing Groups for more details)

6. Dynamic Content options: 

   • From Records: the dynamic content will be populated by evaluating the dynamic content rules against the data in the campaign audience. With this option, the system will disregard the proof limit setting; each proof member will receive only one proof. The email content for proof is populated based on random records from the campaign audience.

   • Select Dynamic Content: the platform will choose N random members from the Campaign audience, populate the email content based on the dynamic content selected, and send proofs to all the members in the proofing group, where N is the number of permutations of the dynamic content selected. The system will generate the email content based on the dynamic content selected. If a campaign has five permutations, each proof member will receive five proofs. The type of the content can be:

   • Multipart: the proof will be sent to the proofing group members as a multipart email containing both HTML and Plain Text

   • Plain Text: the proof will be sent to the proofing group members as a plain text email.

Note: Please note that the number of proofs sent is also subject to the proofing limit set.

The Proofs status area shows the progress of the proofs as they are created and sent. See Review Proof Results for more details.

To view the results of a proof in an EDP-driven Campaign:

1. Each time you run Proofs, the system adds a new row to the grid in the Statistics History section of the screen. Click the desired row to see the results from that execution.

2. The row is expanded to show the start and end times of the proofing execution, the number of messages sent, and a link to the Preview window. Additional detail is provided for each step in the deployment process, along with the recipients of the proofing message (i.e, the Proofing Group, or the individuals).

1. Within the Proofing and Auditing section, the audit chart shows the following counts if you selected Member Record as the Campaign Audience:

   • Total Population: Database size.

   • Audience Count: Selected Segment count before any suppressions, such as opt-outs and invalid emails, are applied.

   • Mailable Count: Total count after suppressions are applied

The graph depicts the percentage of the total population that is mailable (Mailable Count / Total Population).

2. The audit chart shows the following counts if you selected a Campaign-ready File as the Campaign Audience:

   • List Size: Number of records in the file.

   • Mailable Count: Total count after suppressions are applied.

The graph depicts the percentage of the total population that is mailable (Mailable Count / List Size).

If you need to refresh the audit chart to reflect changes in the Campaign Audience, click the Refresh button in the top-left corner of the audit chart.  

Note: The audit chart isn't populated if you haven't selected a Sender Profile, a Segment, and / or a Campaign-ready File. Also, the chart is no longer populated once you launch the Campaign. 

1. At the bottom of the screen, click launch campaign. Optionally, you can also select Actions > Launch Campaign in the Tool Bar. The "Launch Campaign" pop-up window is displayed, which provides a snapshot of the Campaign.

2. Click save and launch. The system begins the Campaign launch process, and the Status section is displayed.