In the preceding sections, you will have learnt about the individual steps required to send emails to your customers and to evaluate the response to these using statistics. However, this is by no means everything you have at your disposal. This is why the OpenEMM incorporates a number of features that extend beyond the simple sending of mailings. By way of example, you can enter into a dialog with your customers (based on their interests profile) and expand these profiles. This will enable you to launch targeted and, as such, more successful mailing campaigns. The OpenEMM provides you with tools for performing what is known as closed-loop marketing in addition to the archive functionality for optimizing the way you address your customers.
Such mailings essentially work as follows. An action-based email for the recipient contains one or more links. The link addresses include codes describing the recipient and the type of action. As soon as the recipient clicks on a link, the OpenEMM registers the click and starts the corresponding action. This action could be to modify the recipient’s profile and/or to send out a follow-on mailing.
Date-based mailings, on the other hand, send a “standing order” to the OpenEMM. The system checks every day whether a recipient fulfils set search criteria and sends out a mailing to that person. Date-based mailings are ideal for sending out birthday greetings automatically, for instance.
However, before thinking about mailings, you will learn about the individual modules the OpenEMM provides for managing customer profiles.
• | You will create new fields in the Profile Database to store additional information about your customers. |
• | You will create actions defining what happens if a recipient clicks on a link in the mailing. Such an action could be to edit a field or to activate a new mailing. |
• | You will create trackable links for a mailing which trigger previously defined actions. |
• | You will create mailings which will be sent to recipients after the corresponding action has been triggered. |