Marketing System Description

The Marketing System is a high-performance, versatile platform that you use to perform targeted personalized e-marketing through the Web or electronic mail. It assists e-commerce enterprises in effectively communicating relevant messages to shoppers in order to improve sales either directly or indirectly.

The Marketing System includes support for the following functions:

Content targeting, up-sell and cross-sell capabilities, advertisements and testing, discounts, and coupons.
Combining and prioritizing campaign items. Campaign methods include the following:
- Discounts. Create and edit discounts, combine discounts, set discount interactions, apply order-level discounts, shipping and leveraged discounts. An example of a discount is buy one product, get a second product at a 20% discount.
- Suggestive selling. Create expressions that you can use to target discounts.
Enabling business managers to create and manage discounts that they use as marketing tools to increase sales.
Publishing campaigns into production so that campaigns only become visible to the run-time system on activation and approval.
Generating reports to measure key metrics.

The Marketing System integrates with the Catalog, Orders, and Profiles Systems:

Campaigns. Manages the campaigns, customers, advertisements, and discounts which form marketing programs. The Campaigns module is integrated with both the Profiles System and the Catalog System through expressions. Expressions enable you to target advertisements to users and to apply discounts to products.
Content Selection Framework (CSF). A platform-level framework for building targeted content delivery applications on the Internet and making customization and extension of the advertising and discount delivery systems easier. The CSF allows for multiple pieces of content to be retrieved as a record set with only one call, which creates a significant time saving.
Expression Evaluator Engine (EEE). Provides the logic to evaluate expression objects. An expression is a condition against profiles to determine whether to deliver content, or perform another action. For example, an expression might be user total visit > 100. If this expression evaluates to True, a specific piece of content displays to a user who has visited your site more than 100 times.
List Management. Manages lists of users created for a campaign. You can create, import, and export multiple lists focusing on different user profiles. You can maintain opt-out lists and references as part of a campaign. The mailing list management database maintains direct mail lists, per job opt-out lists and global opt-out lists.

Features

The following table describes the Marketing System features and enhancements:

Table 1. Marketing System Features
Feature	Description
Campaign Data Management	Publish campaign content to the Web. Display discounts on the Web site. Campaign expressions. Define a condition that Commerce Server evaluates against profiles to determine whether to deliver content, or perform another action. Manage campaign goals. Specify goals and track the number of advertisements delivered in a specified period. Set campaign goals by clicks on an advertisement, by requests for an advertisement, at the campaign-level, or at the advertising item-level. Clear data. Remove inactive or expired campaign items.
Discounts and Coupon Data Management	Runtime filtering and discount/coupon display. Display discounts based on discount target information, basket subtotal, or pre-tax and post-tax discounts. Manage discounts and coupons. Create custom-defined discounts, coupons, and coupon-enabled discounts, and define discount interaction policies. Import/export of coupon codes. Support for exporting and importing batches of coupons. Marketing discount pipeline components. Orders System integration for order and item level discounts. Basket pipeline. Discount pipeline components.
List Management	List-based expressions. Mailing list management and direct mailer support list-based expressions. Opt-out lists. Maintain campaign-level or site-level opt out lists. You can automatically subtract opt-out lists from a direct mail list.
Application Programming Interfaces	Campaign item management API. Manage discounts programmatically. Campaign management API. Manage campaign entities programmatically. Customer management API. Manage your campaign advertisers programmatically. Reference table management API. Manage reference tables programmatically. Web Service API. Perform distributed management of the Marketing System programmatically.
Applications	Marketing Manager. Manage campaigns, advertisements, and discounts by using the new Windows Forms-based Web service.
Staging	Marketing data caching. Update run-time and design-time marketing data. Promotional code staging. Perform full or incremental updates of promotional codes/coupons during staging. Refresh cache. Update the marketing data cache on destination servers.
Command Line tools	Clear data command line tool. Remove deleted data: customers, campaigns, global expressions, campaign items, discounts and coupon codes that are older than the "deleted number of days" specified.
Security	Granular security. You use Windows Authorization Manager to manage scopes, roles, tasks, and operations in the Marketing System. Collection or view-level security. Security levels are included on each of the individual view states throughout the Marketing Manager to allow for role-based access. Task-based roles. Support for the following task-based roles: Discount Author. Create and manage discounts. Global Expression Author. Create and manage global expressions. Marketing Administrator. Has complete access to all tasks and assigns roles to other users. Marketing Approver. Approves campaign items, discounts, ads, and direct mails. Marketing Author. Create and manage customers, campaigns, campaign items, and coupons. Can import and export, and generate user lists. Marketing Viewer. Can only view Marketing System information.
Supportability	Run-time performance counters. Record events associated with the run-time performance. Evaluation Expression Engine, and caching. Pipeline performance counters. Record events associated with the run-time performance of the marketing pipeline components, such as average execution time, errors total, errors per second, execution total, and more. Management-time performance counters. Record events associated with the run-time performance of the Marketing Manager Web service, such as total marketing updates performed, average time per marketing update request, number of marketing lookups per second, and more. Windows event tracing. Use to help with troubleshooting.