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About Designing Marketing Programs

A program is a multistep dialogue in which you can set up a series of communications to your customers and prospects. In the Programs screen, you can use the graphical drag-and-drop Program Flow view or the Program Explorer view to design and execute multistage, triggered, and recurring marketing programs using new or existing campaigns, lists, and segments.

You can establish multiple stages for a marketing program. Each stage can have multiple campaigns, lists, segments, and segment trees. Subsequent stages can be based on a customer response or any other event. For example, a visit by a sales person to a premium customer might trigger a follow-up email to that customer for the selected product.

In the workspace, you can use the right-click menu to manually start Marketing Server tasks. To schedule server tasks to be started automatically, use the Schedule calendar.

The graphical Marketing Program Flow designer is integrated with the workflow engine and Marketing Server. Therefore, when defined, the entire program can be automated from the initial customer segmentation through communication, to response collection and analysis. This capability is especially useful when programs are set to recur, such as a monthly welcome package campaign to new customers.

In previous releases, allocation was done across campaigns, and segment trees were at the stage level. Now, segmentation is performed within a campaign, a campaign is a direct child of a program, and a stage is an optional attribute of a campaign.