The Campaign Build Process has multiple business implications for Marketers even though technically the process is managed by an ESP. Think of all the Black Friday or Cyber Monday campaigns that struggled through the door and the number of times you have kept your fingers crossed hoping to get the Easter campaign out on Easter. Some of the critical implications of the Build process include but are not limited to

Time to Customer: 

• Marketing Campaigns, potentially addressing millions of prospects need to get through the door in a marketer specified time window.
• Service Campaigns like Drop Out Remarketing, Online Order Confirmation, Acknowledgement, Customer Welcome etc. need to reach out almost instantaneously.

Infrastructure: High volume campaigns consume RAM, Computing Power and system resources putting stress on the native infrastructure. In these days of co-hosting and SAAS based platforms, campaign performance can impact other concurrent processes like data loads, event data exports, and in cases even other clients, who share the same ecosystem.

Support: Human Bandwidth required in terms of support and maintenance activities can potentially increase by as much as 15-20% purely for monitoring, Live performance management and Customer L1 Support.

Maintenance: Infrastructure Hygiene & housekeeping activities become complex and windows become unpredictable, challenging the Platform provider’s capability to maintain downtime SLAs.

Solution: 

The campaign build process merges contacts, segmentation criteria, personalization, global exclusions and static / dynamic content essentially doing a “MERGE” operation of multiple datasets with content. The process output is queued up at the Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) or “Factory” as it is commonly termed and the email blasting process commences. There are multiple facets to enhancing campaign performance using a combination of analytical, technological and operational preventive measures.  We will look at these options in subsequent Blogs.