Common Usage Scenarios

The following scenarios illustrate some uses for custom content.

• A music e-retailer sends out a weekly email newsletter to its 10,000 registered subscribers. A Custom Content servlet enables the content in the newsletter to be customized, inserting that week’s top 10 country albums in one subscriber’s email with a web link in the content going to the Country section of the e-retailer’s website, while another subscriber receives the list of the top 10 R&B albums with a link to the R&B section of their website.

• A networking company sends out a weekly customer newsletter. When the customers sign up to receive it, they can specify which of the 6 categories of the newsletter are of interest to them. Each week, they get new content delivered for their categories. At any time, they can modify their profiles to change which categories they wish to receive, and that change will be reflected in their next newsletter.

• An online mortgage broker gathers preferences from customers on the specific types of loans they are interested in (home, car, and so forth), the terms of the loan (fixed, variable, balloon payments), the overall amount of the loan, and so on. Customers opt in to receive email each time a new loan is available that meets their criteria. Each day, the new loan data is loaded in the broker’s database. Online Marketing is used to send out a daily email that pulls the latest loan information from the broker’s database.

• A financial institution sends out a monthly financial update to their subscribers and tailors the information to the individual customer. Customers who are more than 60 years old and who have 401ks see a section of information about low-risk mutual fund choices for 401ks in their emails. Customers who are in the 20- to 30-year age bracket and who do not have 401ks see a section in their emails encouraging them to set up a 401k, showing the benefits of starting to save when they are young.

The following scenarios illustrate some uses for custom actions.

• A company wants to send leads that are generated using Online Marketing to their Sales Force Automation system. They want to ensure that the leads are well qualified before sending them, so they continuously update a prospects lead profile with the strength of a lead and the lead’s timeframe to buy. A custom action can take this profile information and export it into an SFA system on a scheduled basis or when triggered by an event, such as a contact filling out a registration page.

• A company wants to distribute their leads using a “round-robin” system where, for each sales representative in a region, the company sends one lead to each person in that region, then starts again at the first person. Custom actions can be used to first determine the region where a lead should go (based on demographic or other information) and then to track where the next lead should be sent, ensuring that the correct representative receives the information.

• A company wants to update their Online Marketing profiles with information from their customer support database. They want to know the last time that a customer opened a trouble-ticket so they can periodically follow up with a custom support survey. A custom action can be used to update the profiles in real time.

• A company wants to have multiple lead profiles for each contact, as one person can be interested in multiple products at different times. A custom action can update their lead profile, a “many rows per contact” profile. As a prospect fills out a registration form, they answer questions that help the company determine how strong a lead that prospect is. Using a custom action, they can populate the lead profile with the quality of the lead (Hot, Warm, or Cold), where the lead was generated, and other information from the qualification questions (such as their timeframe to buy and whether they have an approved budget).