Scenario

Every day, a marketer at Northern Trail Outfitters creates a group of catalog subscribers whose birthday is that day. Prior to creating the group, they update their catalog subscriber list to make sure that recent subscribers are included.

This process is simple but time consuming and difficult to accomplish on the weekend when no one is in the office. The marketer decides to create a program to contain the activities that automate this process. This example could also contain a step to send a message to the birthday list after the group is created.

First, the marketer creates a rule-based group that will be refreshed by an activity. This group identifies subscribers on the Catalog Subscribers list whose dob attribute is equal to Today. The Include Year checkbox is not selected because the birth year is not important in selecting the subscribers to include in the group.

Next, the marketer creates an activity definition that will import the updated catalog subscriber list before the group is refreshed. This steps makes sure that the list is as complete as possible so that subscribers are not accidentally left off of the birthday list.

Because Northern Trail Outfitters use an opt-in form for their catalog subscription that accepts sensitive personal information, the file must be encrypted before transferal.

The file must be unencrypted before it can be imported to the catalog subscriber list. To prepare the file, the marketer creates a file transfer activity.

The marketer includes date placeholders in the name of the file so that the activity acts on the correct file on the enhanced FTP server.

After the file is unencrypted, the marketer wants the application to import the file into the Catalog Subscribers list.

The marketer creates an import activity definition. The file name on the file transfer definition had a .GPG extension because the file would still be encrypted when that activity began. The file name on this import defection has a .CVS extension because the file type of the unencrypted file is comma-delimited.

The marketer identifies the subscriber list to update with the information in the import file. The marketer could also have chosen a data extension to update with the information in the import file. Using a data extension allows you to import information in addition to subscribers. For example, you could import product descriptions into a data extension and include those descriptions in your email messages dynamically.

At this point, all of the pieces of the program are created and are ready to be associated to each other in a program so that they can be started automatically at a scheduled time.

The marketer creates a program called Birthday List that brings all of the pieces together in a particular order.

The program has a separate step for each activity because each activity must be completed before the next can begin. If the activities could have been done in parallel, for example, if there were two different import definitions importing different files into different lists, then both of those activities could have appeared in the same step of the program because one activity does not need to be completed before the next can begin.

To schedule the program to execute every day at 2:00 p.m., the marketer returns to the grid that contains all of the programs, selects the Birthday List program, and clicks the Schedule button from the toolbar.

The Schedule window appears, allowing the marketer to input the time the schedule runs, the start date, end date, and recurrence information.

Beginning at 2:00 p.m. on the start date, the application initiates this program, unencrypting the catalog subscriber file with the current date in the name, importing the file in to the catalog subscribers list, and refreshing the group of subscribers from the list whose birthday is the current day. Once the program completes each day, the group is ready to be acted upon, for example, to have a birthday greeting email sent to it.
 

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