What Are the Marketing System Elements?
This section describes the elements of the Marketing System.
Customers
- A customer is the parent of one or more campaigns.
Campaigns
- Each campaign is associated with a parent customer. A campaign may contain one or more advertisement, discount, and direct mail items.
Advertisements
An advertisement is part of a campaign. Campaigns can contain one or more advertisements. An advertisement cannot exist without a parent campaign.
Discounts and Promotion Codes
Discounts are a specific type of marketing promotion in which you invite shoppers to save money on specific products or product groups. Discounts are part of a campaign. Campaigns may contain one or more discounts. A discount cannot exist without a parent campaign. Run time discounts are computed in the Basket, Checkout, and Total Pipeline components. You can attach promotion codes to a Basket object during checkout. For an example, see How to Accept Promotion Codes for a Discount.
Direct Mail
Direct mail distributes e-mail message ads that you target to a specified group of users by using mailing lists. DirectMail objects are associated with a campaign, which in turn are associated with a customer record.
Direct mail lists may be either static or expression-based. You populate static lists by importing a list of records from a text or comma-separated values (.csv) file. Expression-based lists are dynamically generated from profiles based on a logical expression.
You can customize the body of the mail by using an ASP.NET template. A sample ASP.NET template for direct mail personalization is available in the %COMMERCE_SERVER_ROOT%/Extensibility Kits/Samples/Marketing directory. Personalized ASP.NET Web pages are specified in the Message Body Source of the Direct Mail Properties in a Marketing Manager Direct Mail definition, or programmatically in the SourceLocation property of the DirectMail object. For example, use https://localhost/startersite/DirectMailPage.aspx as a source location. Lists that are marked as active are scheduled by the DirectMail engine to send out as e-mail messages.
See Also
Other Resources
What Is the Content Selection Framework?
What Are Order Processing Pipelines?