About Email and Sales Representative Personalization

The ability to personalize content in email messages and Web pages with Oracle CRM On Demand Marketing smart tags, or insertion tags, benefits both a company and its customers and prospects. Messages targeted at an individual are more relevant and have a higher likelihood of eliciting a response. Personalization can be done through variable insertion or conditional content.

Variable insertion involves inserting the value of a specific variable dynamically, such as a prospect's first name and last name.

Conditional content involves inserting blocks of text in Web page content and applying filter conditions so that text is relevant based on a prospect's profile. For example, you might display strategic content for executive management and display technical content for line management. Conditional content allows the creation of one email campaign and one template for a target audience, including both job levels.

Personalizing emails, landing pages, and Thank You pages is a powerful method to improve user experience and increase the rate at which prospects open and respond to emails. Whenever possible personalize emails with a prospect's name, for example, Dear John or Dear Mr. Doe. Personalization using other smart tags representing other attributes is also possible with Oracle CRM On Demand Marketing and can be used as applicable. Unfortunately, many marketing managers do not personalize emails, but instead they send emails with generic content, for example, Dear Customer, or Dear Subscriber.

About Email Personalization

The ability to dynamically insert data from specific fields in a prospect's known profile into email body content is known as personalization. For example, your email template for an outbound email program can include Dear ${Demographic.FirstName}. This smart tag is for each individual prospect's first name in the contact record. When the outbound email program is launched, the smart tag is replaced by the prospect's first name dynamically at run time, for example, Dear John, Dear Judy, and so on. You can set a default value to be used for the personalization attribute in the event that there are contacts in your program target list where no value exists for the selected personalization attribute. For example, if First Name is selected, and you suspect that there are contacts included in your list that do not have values in the First Name field, enter the values Customer or Professional or the default value of choice to be used when no value exists in the contact record.

About Sales Representative Personalization

An additional level of email personalization can be achieved for sales-focused campaigns and initiatives. For example, if you know the sales representative responsible for the lead or contact account, emails can be sent with personalized sales representative contact details, such as the email signature, email address and phone number. Personalization helps to start or to build a relationship between sales representatives and their prospective customers by providing a more personalized user experience. Sales representative personalization can be accomplished in the following ways:

If a campaign is developed in Oracle CRM On Demand Marketing to reach one specific sales representative's accounts, you can embed that sales representative's contact information into your email template.
If a campaign is developed in conjunction with many sales representatives, you can import or manually assign a contact owner to each prospect in the target list. When contact owners have been assigned, you can include smart tags for contact owner attributes in your template or insert them into your email invitation using the WYSIWYG editor within Oracle CRM On Demand Marketing when developing or editing the email content.

Before using smart tags for prospect attributes or contact owner attributes, check your contact database to make sure the values for the attributes are present. If there is no value in the first name attribute for a prospect, Oracle CRM On Demand Marketing is unable to replace the tag at run time and an email might be sent with the following salutation: Dear, leaving a space where the first name would have been.

Template Personalization and Optimization

Smart tags for attributes can be used when creating templates for outbound email messages, microsite and landing pages, postregistration Thank You Web pages and so on. In addition to contact information attributes, smart tags are available for almost every attribute in Oracle CRM On Demand Marketing, including standard and custom attributes pertaining to programs, campaigns and offers.

The following examples indicate when you can use smart tags:

Use smart tags for offer name, description, offer type and thumbnail image in both the email template and the branding template for landing pages, Web forms, and postregistration Thank You pages. This feature reinforces the offer and provides continuity as a prospect registers and downloads the offer.
Use smart tags for the program name and description to enhance the campaign branding and subject matter repetition.
For event campaigns, such as Webinars or seminars, create custom program fields for event date, time, and location. You can then use the smart tags for these custom fields in your outbound email invitation, registration landing page, and confirmation and reminder emails.

Personalization is helpful in achieving optimization of email templates, landing pages, and Thank You pages resulting in reduced maintenance. For example, if your company branding changes, it is easier to update a fixed set of templates than individually updating hundreds of emails. Using smart tags to personalize templates also allows the same template to be used for many campaigns.

Localizing the User Interface

The user interface can be localized so that users can work in their preferred languages.

To change your preferred language, use the controls in Oracle CRM On Demand.

For information on localizing custom fields, see Localizing Custom Fields.