Campaign Execution Best Practices

Execution specific Best Practices

• Create derived fields or custom macros when you need an aggregation of data that doesn’t exist currently on the database.
• Create control groups at the lowest level of segmentation, and use the random selection functionality provided in the software.
• When building a new campaign meet as a group and brainstorm the new design before building it.  Then after the campaign is built, meet again as a group to review the design and evaluate the campaign from all three vantage points: Performance, Ease-Of-Use, and Flexibility.
• Define offer and promotion history so that each discreet contact with a customer can be identified in the database.
• Use Campaign user attributes to capture more information or create derived fields to support this requirement.
• Use ‘Check Syntax’ for syntax checking at all times.
• Use the ‘Summary Tab’ to capture Campaign metadata and descriptive information.
• Apply suppressions early in the Campaign design process (so that your surviving population is smaller as you progress down the processing chain).
• To obtain waterfall or cascading counts, use a separate process box for each Select or Segment process, the results can then be displayed with the cell waterfall report.
• Use the ‘Cell Size Limit’ function to limit output records to particular channels based on constraints.
• When entering multiple conditions in SELECT and SEGMENT process boxes, enter criteria piece per line and place the AND/OR operators on a separate/newline.  Enter the AND/OR operators in ALL CAPS.
• Use the ‘General Tab’ to capture comments about the processes you have created.
• When creating multiple cells in the same list process write the audienceID and offer information to a snapshot, then select all records from the snapshot to create your output file, contact history, and additional logging table outputs.  Campaign creates a query for each cell for each output, so if you have 20 cells then Campaign  will need to create 20 queries for the output files, 20 queries for the contact history logging and 20 queries for the additional logging table, using the snapshot approach will reduce this to 3 queries but using the offer data from the snapshot will mean you do not lose any reporting capabilities.
• Ensure when transferring files to the server to be used in UC they are transferred in BINARY mode to enable simple mapping process.

Hope this helps. Stay tuned for more in this series. If you have any recommended practice, leave a comment here.