Marketing Manager – practical tips

Into Marketing Manager, Contacts are taken from NCDB, from Customer List in Customers section (in left vertical main menu). Into this NCDB section, information about customers are taken from all modules within the ALIVE Platform. Many pieces of information are collected and grouped into “Customers“. This process has its inner logic and is quite complicated and it is far beyond the scope of this tutorial to describe it.

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  After the Customers are formed in NCDB, they are automatically exported into Marketing Manager. In Marketing Manager, the Customers are called “Contacts” and can be found under Contacts item in the main vertical menu.

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The vital information is that the Contacts are created dynamically – so (for example) when new card is issued for an existing Cardholder, this event of issuing new card is added to the Customers in NCDB and from there, to the Contacts in Marketing Manager. In other words – all contacts should be up to date at (nearly) every moment. The basic scheme of how the workflow in Marketing Manager works can be described by the image below:

Core section

Description of some from the above data:

• Marketing consent – if yes, the contact allowed you to use his/her data for marketing purposes.

• Legal Basis Until – in case there is no marketing consent for the contact, the Legal Basis Until says until when you can use personal data for the contact (usually this is certain time after the card validity ends).

• Points – contacts can get points, for example for opening emails, going to URLs etc. It’s up to you for which activities the contacts get the points. You can for example easily choose the most active contacts (they will have highest numbers of points).

• My ISIC Profile – if 1, it means that the profile has activated his/her profile in My ISIC.

• Favourite Discounts – this information is taken from Discount Manager and tells for which discounts the verifications/transactions for the Contact were made.

Social section

Personal section

Description of some from the above data:

• Mifare Chip Number – number of the electronic chip of “Mifare” type, in case such a chip is integrated into the plastic card

• EM-Marine Chip Number – number of the electronic chip of “EM-Marine” type, in case such a chip is integrated into the plastic card

• Insurance Tariff Code – only for health insurance available in the Czech republic (not available for other markets)

• Affiliate Partner Name – if this field is filled, a card of the Contact was issued through Online Ordering Affiliate Partner Form

• Card Issuing Distributor Name – name of Distributor from Card Issuing, in case the card has been issued through the CI module of the ALIVE Platform

• In Marketing Manager – are there already contacts exported from NCDB (from „Customers“ section)? Are there all of them? Do I understand structure of their data?

• Is it necessary to import contact list from previous mailing system? It is most advisable to import the contacts in background. We don’t advise to import more than 000 contacts at the same time.

• When importing contacts from some old mailing system, the „Black list“ should also be imported (it makes certain that tag „DoNotContact“ will be added to contacts from the old black list and no emails will be sent to them).

• Do I understand all things about Marketing Consent? Do I know how Marketing Consent is formulated for my company/country?

Contacts are basic units of Marketing Manager. To make email campaigns, the contacts are grouped into larger units called “Segments”. Segments group contacts with some same properties (for example all contacts that have valid ISIC cards, all contacts from one university, all contacts with name “Jane” etc.).One contact can be part of more segments at the same time. So, to start building a campaign, best way is to create a segment (based on some properties) and after that, to trigger an action (for example send emails) for all contacts in this segment. Without having contacts in the segments, you can’t use Marketing Manager properly. Making a segmentation (defining a segment) should always be your first step.

USE CASE – SENDING EMAIL TO CARDHOLDERS WHOSE CARDS WILL TERMINATE SOON

Defining a segment Let’s say that in our use case, you want to send an email to all Contacts from the University of London, whose virtual ISIC or ITIC cards’ validity will end within September 2019. So, at first, you have to define a segment. In your left vertical menu, go to Segments and click “+ New” button (in upper right corner). See the picture below.

Into Name field in Details tab, enter a name of your new segment. It is recommended to use a convention for naming your segments, because it is possible that in near future, there will be tens of segments and you will not orientate which is which. So, naming them “Segment1, Segment2, ….” could not be recommended. You can add a description of the segment as well. After choosing an appropriate name, click the Filters tab. There, you define the properties of your contacts that will be added to this particular segment. Define the contacts using logical operators in connection with Contact’s properties.

After the segment is defined, publish it and make it a Public Segment. After some time, Contacts that fulfill your criteria will be added to your segment. Adding Contacts to a Segment takes its time, the synchronization job is triggered approximately every 5-10 minutes. Important! The segments are created dynamically. This means that when a new Contact is added into your Marketing Manager, it will be added also into all segments, which criteria it fullfills and all published campaigns defined for these segments will be triggered! This is great functionality, but on the other hand, it can be really tricky. In case you want to send an email with marketing content, when defining your segment, you should define it only for Contacts whose marketing consent is “Yes”. Hint: Defining a segment from this case study is a relatively easy task, because only “AND” operators are used. Mind that when you want to use “OR” operator, the filter has to be constructed as follows (the picture below is for illustration purpose only, it was taken from different email campaign).

Defining email

To define an email, please select Channels -> Emails in left vertical menu. In the second step, select “New Segment Email”.

Now, you have to define both layout and content of your email. You can either select one of predefined email layouts and adjust it to your needs, or you can create your template from the scratch (in this case, use “Code Mode”). When you decide for a template, click the “Builder” button. In this mode, you can add/remove Slots to the email template, customize them and add variables. This is a simple WYSIWYG editor, so feel free to experiment with it. If you select a Slot with a mouse, then, in the right column, you can customise it (change colours, texts, add variables, etc.).  

Adding variables

Into your email, you can easily add variables (such as name or card number) which will be included into sent email. The syntax of adding variables is as follows: {contactfield=value} Marketing Manager allows you to use a whisperer, so when you want to add a variable and you are not quite sure about its name, type first letters and the system will give you some choices. For example, you can formulate your text as follows:

Please mind that in every email with marketing content, the “Unsubscribe” button should be added. To this button, please tie the variable {unsubscribe_url}, which redirects your contacts to the Unsubscribe page.

When your template is ready, close the Builder.

CARD {contactfield=cardnumber} {contactfield=cardtype} {contactfield=cardissuedon} {contactfield=plasticcardissuedon} {contactfield=cardissuername} {contactfield=cidistributorname} {contactfield=mifarechipnumber} {contactfield=emmarinechipnumber} {contactfield=plasticcardpartnumber} {contactfield=cardvalidto} {contactfield=plasticcardvalidto} {contactfield=cardform}

CONTACT  {contactfield=firstname} {contactfield=lastname} {contactfield=birthdate} {contactfield=address1} {contactfield=address2} {contactfield=zipcode} {contactfield=district} {contactfield=countrycode} {contactfield=favouritediscounts} {contactfield=institutionname} {contactfield=mobile}

Sending email

To send the email, more details in the right column have to be filled (see picture below).

 Add a subject for the email and an internal name. Select a Contact segment – when published, this email will be sent to all contacts in this segment. Very important are fields “Publish at (date/time)” and “Unpublish at (date/time)” which define the timespan in which the email will be sent to contacts from defined segment. This email will be sent to all contacts in the segments and if a new contact is added into the segment, the email will be sent to it as well.

Next, you can add more details into Advanced tab. Add also a textual form of your email, which can be generated using “Auto Generate” button.

When everything is finished, just click the “Apply” button (in top right corner) and at the defined date/time, the emails will be triggered. Tip: It can happen that you want to use the same email for different countries and you don’t want to built the email from the scratch again and again for every market (this is a good option for example for STA countries, where are multiple markets with similar needs). In such a case, there is the following way how to transfer your email. In case you created your email in WYSIWYG template and when you are satisfied with your design, you can switch this email into “Code mode”. Doing this, Marketing Manager translates your content into HTML code which you can copy and paste into the emails for your other markets. However, from the code mode, it is not possible to get back to WYSIWYG! This can make troubles in case the emails for your different markets will not be quite identical, because you will have to make the changes in code mode. However, it is not so difficult, you can see on the fly how the layout reacts to your changes in the code.  

Email details

When your campaign is triggered, you can see details how your campaign was successful. In detail of the email, you can inspect how many emails have been sent, how many have been read etc. Below is an example of these statistics. The below picture is for illustration purpose only.

Whenever making an email campaign, your customers should have the opportunity to unsubscribe from mailing list. When they unsubscribe, a tag “DoNotContact” will be added to them. With this tag, the Contacts are still added to different segments, but no emails are sent to them. To add a simple unsubscribe button to the body of your email, just put a text and add {unsubscribe_url} into URL connected to this text. Marketing Manager makes by itself the redirection to the default unsubscribe page. See the example below (click for enlargement).

However, you can also make the unsubscription through a form. Into this form, you can collect reasons why your customers are leaving you. Knowing that could be valuable for your future activities. How to do it? You have to make two major steps:

a/ Define the form that will be displayed when someone clicks on the Unsubscribe button To do so, please go to Components -> Forms and click the “+New” button.

In the next step, for this simple example, choose “New standalone form” (this form won’t be part of any campaign, it will be just a form tied to unsubscription of an email).

b/ Tie the form to an email The second step is to tie this form to the email. This can be done in creating/editing the email. From the drop-down menu “Unsubscribe feedback form” select your form which should be displayed to the customers, after he/she clicks “Unsubscribe”.

ALLOWING CONTACTS TO RERUN A CAMPAIGN

Contacts can go through campaigns more than once Contacts may now move through Campaigns multiple times. You can now “re-add” the Contact to the current Campaign, based on criteria you have created in the Campaign (if they haven’t filled out a Form you’re guiding them to, or they fail to end up on a Landing Page, you may want them to restart the Campaign). Once you select Change Campaigns, look in the Add contact to option and select This campaign (restart the campaign).  Any Contact who meets the criteria before this Action will restart the Campaign. A new option is available above the “Publish” Setting when editing or creating a Campaign which allows you to enable contacts to restart the campaign:

Imagine the following situation: In your Marketing Manager, there are already all your Contacts. At this moment, to some of them, you need to add a “doNotContact” tag from a blacklist which you used in your old mailing system. How can you do it? As the first step, you have to create new .csv file, which contains (at least) email addresses of your Contacts and a column doNotContact. Into this file, add emails for the Contacts that you want to mark with a tag “doNotContact” (the basic structure of this file is very simple and you can see it in the picture below).

After the .csv file is uploaded, you have to match its columns with columns inside Marketing Manager. The crucial fields are email and the doNotContact field, that has to be matched with the same field in Marketing Manager (this action is described in the next picture).

After these actions, the Contacts are marked as “doNotContact”. This means that these Contacts are still added into the segments and run through all campaigns, but NO emails can be sent to them.   How to remove the doNotContact tag When the “doNotContact” tag was added in the way discribed above, you can easily remove it from the Contact again. Just open the detail of the contact and you can remove the tag clicking at the cross in this tag (see the picture below).

When a new virtual card is issued, the Cardholder gets an “onboarding” email with basic information about his/her new card (this email also contains links to download the mobile application). This email is sent by Marketing Manager. The process is described by the scheme below.

The basic setting of this email was prepared for you by the ALIVE Platform team. However, you can adjust is according to your needs. Mind that in Marketing Manager, there are always more ways how to build campaigns, the way that is prepared for you is only one of them.  

Defining a segment

In this section, we will have a look at how the segment for onboarding email can be defined. In our example, let’s assume you have one Online Affiliate Partner for which you want to send out specialized emails. Therefore, TWO segments should be defined – the first one for default Online Ordering Form, the second one for your Online Ordering Affiliate Partner. Below you can see filters in the two segments.

 Setting up an email

In Channels -> Emails, you’ll find our predefined email layout. By detault, it is called “General virtual cards onboarding email”.  It was created using the WYSIWYG “Order sent to customer” template. You can of course change content of this email. Mind that if you want to send special emails for different Partners or Card Issuers, each version should be defined as a new email – no conditions in email formatting are possible.   Building a campaign

The onboarding emails are sent through a campaign, which is called “Virtual cards onboarding email” by default. As mentioned earlier in this course, there are more ways how the campaign can be constructed. One of them is described by the scheme below.

In case you want to have different emails for your Partners/Card Issuers, the easiest way is to build specific campaigns for each of them (with specifically defined segments and emails). It is of course possible to integrate all into one large campaign, but doing so, it becomes a bit messy.

IMPORTING CONTACTS INTO MARKETING MANAGER FROM PREVIOUS MAILING SYSTEM

Maybe you have some older mailing system full of your contacts and you want to transfer these contacts into Marketing Manager. There is no need to transfer any contacts that are already in the ALIVE Platform (they will be imported into Marketing Manager automatically), but maybe you have your list of contacts that are not included in any of the modules of the ALIVE Platform – and for these contacts is the following tutorial. As a first step, all contacts have to be exported from the old mailing system (into excel file, .csv, …). When all contacts are exported from the old system, you can prepare them for importing into Marketing Manager. Into Marketing Manager, best way how to get the contacts is through a well structured .csv file, created for example in MS Excel or some other table software.  

Preparing a file for import

In the first line of the excel file, there should be a header with names of the columns. Best practice is to name the columns with some self-describing names. You will need names of the columns in further steps. You can put all data about your contacts into this excel file, but mind that only columns that have their equivalent in Marketing Manager will be imported. (In Marketing Manager, you can define your custom columns in Settings->Custom Fields. Be careful about setting correct Data Type when creating new fields!) For every contact, you should put the email address into the excel file. Marketing Manager is a system for mailing automation, so importing contacts without emails doesn’t make sense. You also have to create a column called “Marketing consent” and into it, put 1 for contacts from that you have their Marketing consent. For other contacts, please put “0” into this column.

When you are ready with that, click “Import in background”. Importing starts with some delay, according to when the importing job in Marketing Manager is run. After the import is completed, you will see a message telling you the results of the import – how many contacts were created, how many existing contacts were updated (the contacts are paired based on the email address) and how many contacts were ignored (for example contacts with non existing email address).

In Marketing Manager, you can define which address will be seen as Sender address in your mailings. Basically, there are three places where you can set this and they are in a hierarchy. The basic settings should be done in Marketing Manager -> Settings -> Configuration -> Email Settings. In the first two columns, you define the name of email sender and email address (see the picture below). The email address is already defined in your system by default, in case you want to change the email address, please let us know (support@aliveplatform.com), it is necessary to consult this with us regarding the spam rate of sent emails.

However, these settings can be overridden. When you for example have some special mailing that should be sent using a different sender name and/or different sender email address, you can define it in detail of the email. When creating the email, go to the “Advanced” tab and fill the “From name” and “From address” fields. Please mind that these values will override basic settings (described above), but will be used only for this one email!

Besides the possibilities mentioned above, there are also the third (and most powerful) settings. When you go back to Settings -> Configuration -> Email Settings, you will see the possibility “Mailer is owner”. This means that as Sender name and Sender address, the values from your profile in Marketing Manager will be used. So, if you are for example logged in as John Doe (with the email john.doe@gmail.com) and at the same time, the “Mailer is owner” choice is set to “YES”, all other settings will be overridden and your name and email will appear as sender name and sender email in emails which you create and send from Marketing Manager.

Basically, the main source of your Contacts for Marketing Manager is NCDB. When a card is issued, data about its Cardholder is transmitted into Marketing Manager, new Contact is created and you can work further with it. Other way is to import Contacts from your other mailing system via .csv file, as mentioned in one of the previous sections of this course. However, there is also another way how you can enrich your Contact database, and it is through the Forms. In simple words, within Marketing Manager, you can create a Form with defined input fields and this Form can be implemented to your website. When your customer fills the Form and confirms it, the data is sent to Marketing Manager and new Contact is created/existing Contact is updated. The primary key to identify whether the Contact already exists is e-mail address. This can be advantageous for updating the Contacts, but it can also lead to some issues (see later in this lesson).  

How to create a simple Form

Within this lesson, let’s create a simple Form for collecting Contacts. In this example, we want to collect First Name, Surname, University and of course Email address. Log into Marketing Manager and go to Components -> Forms and click „+New“. The wizard for creating new form will be opened for you.

For this case, let’s choose „New Standalone Form“, because our form won’t be part of any campaign and will be implemented as a standalone form into the website. Select a name for your form and define which action should be performed after the form is submitted and successfully sent.

Now, let’s move to the „Fields“ tab. Here, you can specify which fields will be included in your form and above all, you also define to which fields in Marketing Manager the form fields should be matched.

As part of the form, it is good idea to insert also a captcha field with some basic question. This makes it more difficult for robots to fill your form and your database with fake contacts and other garbage.

Within the wizard for Creating the Form, there are much more possibilities that can be set up. The above is only a basic example.  

How to implement the Form to your website

When you want to take a look at the Form you’ve just created, you can do it using the „Preview“ mode (see the picture). You can test that after filling the form with some data and submitting it, new Contact within Marketing Manager is created.

It is easy to insert your Form into a publicly available webpage which you create within Marketing Manager (so called „landing page“). All you need is to create a blank landing page and insert  the string “{form=XY}”, where XY is ID of this form, into its body. Alternativelly, you can use the pregenerated HTML code which can be edited and adapted to your needs.