Siebel Marketing Guide > Defining Filter and Segment Criteria >

About Filters and Segments

Siebel Marketing's point-and-click Segment and Filter editors allow you to create complex expressions for campaign inclusion and exclusion without the need for in-depth familiarity with the physical database. Filters allow designers to exclude segment members from a marketing program based on predefined rules.

Using the Filters Detail and Edit Segment views, you can build criteria expressions using predefined measures, database fields, attribute values, and bucket values as criteria. Logical operators such as AND, OR, and NOT allow you to construct compound expressions.

When you want to select all contacts from an external table, you still need to define at least one segment criteria in your segment. A segment must have at least one segment criteria.

Although filters are commonly viewed as suppression tools, Siebel Marketing does not use them to resolve duplicates (deduplicate). In Siebel Marketing, filters can prevent some potential customers from being included in the snapshot (the target data set) for a marketing program stage. While creating a snapshot, the Marketing Server automatically eliminates duplicates of qualified persons who fall into more than one segment during segment allocation. This means that a contact will be assigned to only one campaign within a stage.

While segment criteria determine which contacts and customer data are included in the snapshot, filters prevent a those who do not qualify from being included in the snapshot. Filters use inclusion or exclusion criteria to restrict the snapshot data to only those contacts which satisfy the filter criteria. For more information on snapshots, see Generating and Maintaining Snapshot Files.

The following describes a typical business scenario for using filters and segments:

A marketer for a telecommunications company plans to roll out a campaign that provides a discount on long distance access for profitable cell phone customers within a certain area. Before performing segmentation to target her best customers, the marketer designs a filter that will be applied to the account data. The filter will include the residents of a particular state, but exclude every record flagged with a "do not mail" preference.

Because many households have multiple cell phone accounts, the marketer plans to target the primary account, those customers with the largest monthly account balance in the last quarter, when defining segmentation criteria for the campaign offer.

The marketer would, however, like to include other elements in the snapshot to broaden the information being collected, so that if her initial query does not result in the desired segment counts, the criteria can be revised using the additional elements, without having to generate another snapshot.

Use the following topics to define filter and segment criteria:


 Siebel Marketing Guide 
 Published: 23 June 2003