Programs Scenario

Every day, a marketer at Northern Trail Outfitters sends a birthday message to catalog subscribers whose birthday is that day. Before sending the message, the marketer imports the updates to the catalog subscriber list and refreshes the group of birthday subscribers.

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 and messages that automate this process.

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 to 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 is 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 retrieval 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 retrieval definition had a .GPG extension because the file would still be encrypted when that activity began. The file name on this import definition 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.

With the activities for the program created, the marketer is ready to create the message that will be sent to the birthday group.

The marketer first creates the email message content. The process for creating the email message content to include in a program is the same as for creating the email message content for a triggered message interaction or a single send through the send wizard. The message can contain the advanced features of an email message, such as dynamic content, personalization, and international character encoding.

Next, the marketer creates the send classification. The send classification contains the CAN_SPAM classification, sender profile, and delivery profile that will be used for the email message send.

With the email message content and the send classification created, the marketer is ready to bring them together into a user-initiated email message interaction. On the interaction definition, the marketer can specify the following information:

• The message content to send
• The delivery classification and send throttling to use when sending the message
• The audience to which to send the message
• The message format
• The user tracking preferences

The email message content to be sent with this interaction is the message created earlier in this example. The Daily Birthday Message is available in the drop-down list. The Subject line is populated from the value on the message content, but the marketer can choose to override that value here.

The send classification for the interaction is the send classification created earlier in this example, but the marketer still has the option to override the sender profile or delivery profile for this interaction. The marketer does not choose to throttle the send.

The audience is the group that is refreshed by the group refresh activity earlier in this example.

The Message Format is Multi-part MIME and the marketer chooses to track links in this email.

Finally all of the activities and messages are created and ready to be combined into a program so that they can start 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 and message because each activity must be completed before the next can begin. If the activities and messages 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.

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 and performs its steps in order:

• Unencrypts the catalog subscriber file with the current date in the name
• Imports the file in to the catalog subscribers list
• Refreshes the group of subscribers from the list whose birthday is the current day.
• Sends the daily birthday message.

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