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A conversation is composed of customers who wish to receive messages about a particular topic or product. Connect gives customers the ability to participate in the conversation on their own terms -- they can subscribe to or unsubscribe from any conversation.
In Connect, subscriptions are called conversations because they represent an ongoing dialogue between you and your customers. Every time you use Connect to send an e-mail message to a customer, that customer can reply, click a link embedded in the e-mail, or make a purchase based on the information you sent. Any of these scenarios can create follow-up messages from Connect and more responses from your customers.
After you create a set of conversations, you can associate them with campaigns. Define audience models for the conversation, segmentation models for the audience models, messages for the segmentation models, and so on.
It is important to understand that a campaign can only have one associated conversation. However, you can associate a conversation with multiple campaigns. When customers subscribe to a conversation, they can receive messages from all campaigns associated with a single conversation. When customers unsubscribe from that conversation, other campaigns associated with that conversation cannot send mail to that customer.
If a customer opts out of one conversation, they are not opted out of other conversations and you can continue to communicate with that customer through other conversations. Remember, 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 conversations, think about your customers and the topics that might interest them, making them want to opt-in to the conversation. For example, if a company has three business areas they can create three conversations, one for each business area. This gives customers the opportunity to focus on the part of the business that interests them most.
Another option is to group campaigns by function like a newsletter, technical updates and customer registration to participate in contests and giveaways. A conversation is created for each function and customers have the freedom to subscribe to the functions that most interest them. Make sure your conversations are designed to keep your customer's interest. When you keep the customer's interest, you keep the customer.
Multiple conversations provide you with multiple lines of communications. A customer can be automatically subscribed to receive monthly account information when he makes a purchase at your site. Later, that same customer might subscribe to a weekly email newsletter but later decides to unsubscribe because he is tired of the weekly email. That line of communication between you and the customer is still open because he is still receiving the monthly account statement. The customer is happy because he can tailor the amount of email he receives.
With Connect you can create special campaigns that enable customers to opt in or opt out of specific conversations. These campaigns are called subscribe and unsubscribe campaigns, and they are handled at the conversation level only—you cannot associate specific audience models and segmentation models with them. For more information about these campaigns, see the section Subscribe and Unsubscribe Campaigns.