AIM: Getting Started

Send Classification

The send classification standardizes the settings of any automatic email or SMS messages you choose to send to your subscribers. This keeps your information over multiple sends. To create a send classification, you must also create a sender profile and a delivery profile.

Messages

You can set up triggered email messages to automatically send messages when certain actions take place, such as a subscriber subscribing to a new mailing list. Follow the steps below to create a triggered email interaction:

1. Create your email message
2. Create the triggered email interaction
3. Pause the triggered email interaction to change, delete, or archive

Activities

Activities manipulate data contained in subscriber lists or data extensions in order to let you use that data to better access your subscribers. The ExactTarget application makes several different activities available for you, and you can place these activities inside programs to automate your data manipulation tasks.

• Data Extract
• Filter
• Report
• File Transfer
• Import
• Query
• Group Refresh

Programs

Programs let you automate processes within your ExactTarget account. For example, you can automatically extract data from your data extension and move that information to a file on your FTP site at the same time every day using a program. In this case, you would follow the steps below in the order they are presented:

1. Data Extract Activity
2. File Transfer Activity
3. Create your Program
4. Start your Program

Remember that programs are made up of separate steps, and you need to complete each step before moving on to the next one. If the next action requires a previous action before moving on (such as importing a file after it has been moved to the FTP site), those actions need to be in separate steps. If actions can be performed at the same time independently of each other (such as two separate imports to two separate lists), you can place those actions in the same step.

If you were trying to work with two data extracts at the same time, you could create the program using the following steps with multiple tasks:

1. First Step
   1. Refresh Group A
   2. Refresh Group B
   3. Refresh Group C
2. Second Step
   1. Extract Data from Group A
   2. Extract Data from Group B
   3. Extract Data from Group C
3. Third Step
   1. Transfer Data from Group A to FTP
   2. Transfer Data from Group B to FTP
   3. Transfer Data from Group C to FTP

The steps included multiple tasks, but each task operated separately from the other tasks included in that step, and the actions taken by the steps flowed in a linear, logical manner.