The integrated solution of Acoustic Campaign and Optimove helps increase customer engagement and spend by using predictive customer modeling to personalize retention campaigns.
Marketers use Optimove to plan their customer marketing campaigns based on advanced customer segmentation available in the product. Using Optimove’s customer modeling system, marketers are able to easily define and discover interesting groups of customers to target – groups that the company’s marketers wouldn’t have been able to identify and otherwise target.
Every night, the Optimove software generates the specific lists of customer IDs to receive each pre-planned marketing campaign – along with the Acoustic email template ID and scheduled send time. Optimove pushes the lists to Acoustic via API and Acoustic Campaign sends out each personalized campaign at the specified time.
During and after the campaign’s execution, Optimove reports on the financial success metrics of each campaign (compared to a pre-selected control group) or the winner of an A/B campaign test, and incorporates email delivery, open and click metrics acquired via Acoustic’s API.
To summarize, the Optimove software connects to Acoustic via API for two purposes:
- To instruct Acoustic to send out a particular email template to a specified list of customer IDs.
- To receive from Acoustic email campaign metrics (delivery rate, open rate and click rate).
1. Prepare Customer Database in Acoustic Campaign
Once the marketer has opened the Acoustic account, his first step is to export the required customer data into Acoustic Campaign. At a minimum, this data will include customer ID, first name, last name and email address. It is important that the freshness of his data be maintained on a daily basis, e.g., when new customers join, their information must be promptly updated in Acoustic.
2. Prepare Customer Data for import into Optimove
The marketer, usually with assistance from internal IT staff, prepares the company’s raw data into specific formats required by Optimove. These customer profile tables, which describe each customer’s attributes, will be imported daily by Optimove. Optimove uses this data to segment customers into a variety of dimensions (lifecycle stages, micro-segments, etc.) and to track the behavior of customers and target groups over time.
3. Connecting Optimove to the Acoustic API
In order for Optimove to connect to the Acoustic API, it needs to receive login credentials to the client’s API instance as well as the ID of a particular customer database in Acoustic. All communication between the Optimove and Acoustic servers is via XML over HTTP.
4. Using the Joint Optimove-Acoustic Solution to Create and Send Customer Campaigns
Retrieving the List of Email Templates
When the marketer sets up an email campaign in Optimove to be sent via Acoustic, the software retrieves a list of all available email templates via the Acoustic API. The user can choose the desired template for the campaign from a drop-down list and can also view a preview of the email itself from within Optimove.
Sending an Email Campaign
Each time Optimove actually sends an email campaign via Acoustic, Optimove connects to the Acoustic API and performs the following steps:
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Optimove creates a Acoustic “query” inside the Optimove folder of the Acoustic query library. This query contains the list of customer IDs to receive the email. This customer list is generated by Optimove according to the target group segmentation defined within Optimove.
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Optimove instructs Acoustic to send the email by providing the following parameters: the ID of the previously-created query, the ID of the email template to use (this is selected by the user, in Optimove’s Run Campaign wizard, from among all the email campaign templates created by the user inside Acoustic) and the date and time of day when Acoustic should deliver the email (this is also specified by the user in the Run Campaign wizard).
Note: Optimove does not store actual customer addresses in its database. Rather, the customer IDs used by the client to identify each customer are used by both Optimove and Acoustic.
Retrieving Email Campaign Metrics
Once each day, for a period of one week following the sending of each Acoustic mailing, Optimove connects to the API in order to retrieve delivery rate, open rate and click rate metrics for the campaign. These metrics are displayed within Optimove’s Campaign Analysis page for each executed campaign.
Passing HTML code through the API call
How to pass the full HTML code in an API call.
Can you advise on how to pass the full HTML code in the API call?
Look into following solutions that are listed in the API content:
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SaveMailing – Update a template (when the template is not an automated message ready to be triggered) and in this call you can send the entire HTML.
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ScheduleMailing – Schedule a template to be sent and allows for substitutions to be used. For example, %%HTML_BLOCK_1%% can be in the template and be replaced by code that is submitted as part of the XML.
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SendMailing – Could possibly be used, but would have to use personalization from either a database or Relational Table. These updates would already have to be made to code saved in those columns.
Note: The character limit for storing HTML code in these columns is 3600.
You might also want to discuss alternative solutions with Client Support.