Campaign – Basic Concepts

Oracle Responsys streamlines the development of highly individualized, multi-channel campaign management with a single integrated software platform for building, executing, and managing all your marketing campaign efforts.

Oracle Responsys provides an on-demand, Web-based, easy-to-use graphical interface with wizard-driven and intuitive component-based tools. In combination, these automate the full lifecycle of your campaign objectives – from data integration to data source management and segmentation to message content and form development to testing to launching to recipient conversion to reporting and analysis.

Oracle Responsys provides: 

  • Guided navigation – Wizard-driven, Web-based interface, centralized campaign dashboards, automatic error detection, modular design tools.
  • List management and segmentation – Advanced list management, behavioral segmentation, filtering, and rules-based governance.
  • Campaign Resources – Reusable campaigns and pre-configured templates for simplifying and standardizing formats and content.
  • Dynamic content personalization – Individualized recipient-focused personalized text, images, forms, and visually oriented (WYSIWYG) content creation editor.
  • Reporting and analysis – Comprehensive metrics on campaign performance and customer behavior.
  • Account administration – Administrative tools to customize and maintain your account.

Campaign Lifecycle

The basic steps of a campaign are described below. following walks you through the full lifecycle of your first campaign.

1. Plan the campaign

Determine type of campaign, desired results, call to action, user experience and expected responses. how does it integrate into corporate objectives?

2. Create the campaign folder

To begin your process, create your campaign folder.

3. Create the recipient list and other data sources

Note: Every campaign is associated with a primary list of customer records. This core recipient database is always referred to as a List. All other data sources assigned to a campaign must be directly related to this primary List.

  1. Define your audience and requirements

    As part of your planning, you need to know what audience you want to target for your campaign, custom List fields/schema, what audience groupings (segmentations), profiles, and other personalizations are needed.

  2. Create your primary recipient List

    Begin by uploading/building your data using any of the following options – Load from File (wizard-driven load of delimited text files), Connect™ (with scheduled file transfers), Connect API, View and Edit page (for manual entries), and/or Form-triggered, customer-input submissions.

    Note: Other data source refinement activities to consider include adding custom-defined fields, supplemental tables, List segmentations, filters, suppression rules, and proof and seed Lists.

4. Create message content.

The content of any campaign is the comprehensive promotional or transactional package distributed to your targeted audience.

Campaign messages can be HTML and/or plain text files, HTML forms, and attachments (PDF files or Flash presentations). Content can also incorporate $text$ replacement fields for personalization of the message for each recipient, as well as dynamic content (For example: different articles for different recipients, depending on their expressed interests).

Campaign contents can include your direct marketing copy with information, links to offers, “calls to action”, and other types of automated communications between your company and your customers.

Other examples include automated welcome campaigns, periodic newsletters, reactivation and abandonment programs, cross-sell and up-sell campaigns or programs.

Note: Your campaign message can be formatted with HTML, plain text, or both. HTML-formatted messages can be personalized, built to support link tracking, contain images hosted by Responsys or at your designated site, include links to forms, Web pages, other campaigns, etc.

  1. Begin by creating your preliminary campaign message content. To add more complex and attention-grabbing content, use the convenience and feature-rich, WYSIWYG editor via the Document Editor.
  2. Build additional content functionality (optional)
    • Create content – Import files, images, and attachments; create original content; copy files from website location; create text versions of HTML messages.
    • Preview, edit, design content – Use the Campaign Designer or Document Editor (rich-text editors) to edit, assemble, and/or validate your messages, forms, and dynamic content.
    • Define dynamic content – Control dynamically inserted content when a recipient receives your campaign message or responds to an associated form.
    • Manage hosted content – Manage and upload images and other files to be hosted by Oracle Responsys.
    • Customize message footers – Customize, download, and upload message footers (administrators only).

For more information, see Understanding Campaign Message Content.

5. Create associated form and form rules (Optional)

A campaign form provides the opportunity to interact with your customers by using an automated mechanism for directly collecting and processing information from your campaign recipients and website visitors.

Like a campaign message, a well-designed form can be personalized and dynamic with as many of the input fields as possible prefilled with customer data from an associated List and supplemental data sources.

Note: Forms can be personalized by insertion of recipient data in the $text$ replacement fields, as well as by prefilling of as many of the input fields as possible.

Recipients use forms to directly respond to your campaigns, sign up for event notifications, submit information about what interests them, tell you how often to send your campaign message, what message format they prefer, etc.

All forms typically includes a “call to action” on the part of your recipients. Based on your defined form rules, conditions, and options – You can determine how the collected responses provided by your recipients are to be handled.

Note: All forms are HTML-formatted.

  1. Use the form-creation wizard to build your form.
  2. Use form rules to establish the rules that handle the recipient responses to your form.
  3. Use the Campaign Designer to further refine, preview and edit your form.

For more information, see Forms and Form Rules.

6. Create and assemble the campaign

  1. Use the campaign wizard to define your campaign components, including your targeted audience, message/form content, and campaign settings.
  2. Optionally, during the campaign creation process, you may also choose to build and associate other campaign functionality. For example, select suppression lists and related settings, create dynamic content, create and establish link tracking tables, set unsubscribe options.

7. Review and proof the campaign

  1. Conduct a general review/proof of your campaign, including a thorough proofread and spell check of all content.
  2. Test and resolve auto-detected errors highlighted on the campaign dashboard.
  3. Preview message content and associated forms using the Campaign Designer.
  4. Send campaign to associated proof List (pre-launch reviewers).

8. Launch the campaign

Set campaign schedule, and launch campaign based on defined settings and preferences.

9. Review campaign results and responses

  • Monitor and evaluate your campaign messaging programs with up-to-the-minute Live reporting and campaign and performance analysis.