| Customers and Segmentation |
In this section we'll discuss the concept of "conversations" in Connect. In essence, a conversation is a list of customers who have signed up to receive messages about a particular topic or product. Connect gives customers the ability to moderate their participation in conversations -- they can subscribe to any conversation and opt out of any conversation at will. Usually, customers opt in to conversations from a website.
In Connect, these subscription lists are called conversations because they represent an ongoing dialogue between you and each of your customers. Every time you use Connect to send an e-mail message to a customer, that customer may send a reply back, click on a link embedded in that e-mail, or purchase goods or services based on the information you sent him or her. Any of these scenarios may also prompt follow-up messages from Connect and continued responses from your customers.
Once you have a set of conversations to work with, you can associate them with campaigns. You can then define audience models for the conversation, segmentation models for the audience models, messages for the segmentation models, and so forth.
It is important to understand that each campaign can only have one conversation associated with it. However, you can associate a conversation with any number of campaigns. When customers subscribe to a conversation, they can receive messages from each campaign associated with that conversation. When customers unsubscribe from that conversation, no campaign associated with that conversation can send mail to that customer.
On the other hand, remember that if a customer opts out of one conversation, they are not opted out of other conversations that they've subscribed to. Therefore, you retain your ability to communicate with that customer. Conversations enable you to talk to your customers on more than one topic.
It is up to you to determine what conversations make sense for you. When you create your conversations, think about your customers and how they may want to opt-in or opt-out of particular topics. For example, if a company has three business areas, such as trading stocks, training stock analysts, and managing mutual funds, they might create three conversations, one for each side of the business. This gives their customers the opportunity to focus on information about the aspect of the business that they are most interested in.
In another example, a company might group campaigns by function, such as a newsletter, technical updates for users, and customer registration for participation in contests and giveaways. A conversation would be created for each of these functions, and customers would have the freedom of choice to subscribe to those functions that most interest them.
You'll want to design your conversations so that you have the greatest probability of pleasing each customer with the material of your e-mails, thereby retaining that customer. For example, let's say you've set your system up so that a customer buying goods from your website is automatically subscribed to a general conversation that sends a monthly statement regarding the customer's account.
Perhaps later, that same customer, while browsing your website, signs up to participate in a conversation on another topic that sends a message on a weekly basis. After a time, that customer gets tired of receiving e-mail every week, and unsubscribes from the weekly campaign. This action would stop the weekly e-mails, but would allow the customer to keep receiving the monthly account statements. You've pleased the customer by allowing him to tailor the amount and content of the mail he receives, and you've retained the ability to regularly communicate with that customer.
Whatever the reason for dividing your conversations, remember that every campaign can contain only one conversation, but a conversation can be associated with any number of campaigns.
With Connect you can create special campaigns that enable customers to opt in and opt out of specific conversations. They're called subscribe and unsubscribe campaigns, and they're handled at the conversation level only -- you can't associate specific audience models and segmentation models with them. For more information on these campaigns, see the section Understanding Subscribe and Unsubscribe Campaigns.