| Campaigns / Conversations | |
A conversation is a collection of all possible customers who wish to receive messages about a particular topic or product for a campaign. Connect gives customers the ability to participate in the conversation on their own terms, allowing them to subscribe to or unsubscribe from any conversation that they wish. This allows the customer to tailor their messaging that they receive from you and your organization.
After you create a set of conversations, they are associated with campaigns. You are then able to create a specific target audience by defining audience models for the conversation (e.g. only message customers in a certain age or territorial range). Audiences are then further able to be more specifically targeted using segmentation models which allow segments to be messaged individually from other segments (e.g., segmentation by state/province). As well, email addresses that cannot be messaged are removed from the conversation using a suppression list.
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 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.
Connect also allows you to add a "Refer-a-Friend" link to the outgoing e-mail messages. Customers can use the Refer-a-Friend link to forward the email to friends through Connect. When customers click the Refer-a-Friend link, a customized form appears allowing the customer to provide the friend’s contact information. They then submit the form. The referred friend receives the email and is added to the conversation. For more information on using Refer-a-Friend, please see Using Refer-a-Friend.
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 (e.g. Wireless, Internet, Home Monitoring), they can create three conversations for each business area. This gives customers the opportunity to focus on the part of the business that interests them most.
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 can subscribe to a weekly email newsletter. Later they may decide to unsubscribe because he no longer wishes to receive the weekly email. That line of communication between you and the customer is still open because they are still receiving the monthly account statement. The customer is able to tailor the amount of messaging they receive specific to the conversations that have been made available.
Connect allows you to create special campaigns that enable customers to opt in or opt out of specific conversations. These campaigns are called subscribe and unsubscribe campaigns. They are managed at the conversation level only. That is, you cannot associate specific audience models and segmentation models with these specific campaigns. For more information about these campaigns, see Subscribe and Unsubscribe Campaigns.