Dialog activities

Create Dialog activities when you want to automate marketing actions based on the specific behavior of your customers. Think of a Dialog activity as an interactive dialog with a customer: you wait for the customer to do something, and then you respond with an e-mail or a coupon, or some other planned marketing action. This dialog can be ongoing as the customer's behavior on your site changes over time.

Dialog activities are triggered by an event, for example, a customer places an order or abandons a shopping cart. You can then respond by reaching out to that customer with a relevant and timely marketing action.

Here are a few simple examples of Dialog activities you can set up using Management Center:

When a customer registers, send the customer a thank-you e-mail message containing some promotional advertisements.
When a customer places an order, if the customer has spent over $1000 at your store, add the customer to the "Big Spenders" customer segment.
When a customer has abandoned a shopping cart for 3 days, send the customer an e-mail message as a reminder of their recent shopping visit. Issue the customer a coupon for 20% off their order.
When a customer places an order, check whether the customer's purchase history contains catalog entries from the Boys or Girls categories. If so, add the customer to the Customers who buy children's clothing customer segment.
On a customer's birthday, send the customer a text message with a birthday wish and a link to your store.

Build Dialog activities using the Activity Builder in the Marketing tool. The third Dialog activity example from the previous list looks like this in the Activity Builder:
Example Dialog activity

Multi-phase and multi-channel Dialog activities

A Dialog activity can have multiple phases, allowing you to track and react to a customer's behavior over time. Here is an example:

When a customer registers on the site, wait for a week. If the customer has not placed an order, then e-mail the customer a coupon for 10% off. Wait for another week. If the customer still has not placed an order, then e-mail the customer a coupon for 20% off.

A Dialog activity can involve multiple channels, including e-mail messages and text messages. Here is an example:

When a customer's birthday is one week away, send the customer a special birthday e-mail message containing a promotion code for 10% off their next order. On the customer's birthday, send the customer a text message (SMS) with a happy birthday wish.

Repeatable Dialog activities

When you create a Dialog activity, you can select or clear a Repeatable check box on the General Properties tab. This check box controls whether a customer can enter and complete the Dialog activity multiple times. Consider what your activity is trying to accomplish to decide whether to make the activity repeatable.


Example Dialog activity	If Repeatable check box is selected	If Repeatable check box is cleared
When a customer places an order, issue the customer a coupon for 20% off the next order. To inform the customer of the coupon, send a thank-you e-mail message.	If a customer places multiple orders while the activity is active, that customer will receive an e-mail and coupon with each order.	If a customer places multiple orders while the activity is active, that customer will receive an e-mail and coupon with the first order only.
When a customer checks out and the Web sale event promotion is applied to the order, send the customer an e-mail that contains a printable coupon to use in-store to get a discount.	If a customer checks out multiple times with the Web sale event promotion applied to the order while the activity is active, that customer will receive the e-mail each time.	If a customer checks out multiple times with the Web sale event promotion applied to the order while the activity is active, that customer will receive the e-mail only one time.
When a customer participates in social commerce on your site at least one time, send the customer a thank-you e-mail that encourages the customer to continue participating.	If a customer participates in social commerce multiple times while the activity is active, that customer will receive the e-mail each time he or she participates.	If a customer participates in social commerce multiple times while the activity is active, that customer will receive the e-mail only the first time he or she participates.

To avoid sending customers duplicate e-mail messages and giving away multiple coupons, you could set all of the example activities as not repeatable by clearing the Repeatable check box. For the first example, however, you might want to set the activity as repeatable so the customer is rewarded for each order.