Marketing tool

Use the Marketing tool in Management Center to create and manage marketing campaigns and other store content (excluding catalog content). You can use the extensive precision marketing features in the tool to deliver targeted marketing messages to customers.

The following screen capture provides a quick look at some of the Marketing tool capabilities:

1 The left pane, called the explorer view, lists the types of marketing objects you can create and manage by using the Marketing tool.
2 The right pane shows an example of how you can set up a web activity to display a targeted ad on a store page by using a graphical editor that is called the Activity Builder.

What you can do with the Marketing tool

Here is a summary of tasks you can perform in the marketing tool:


Tasks	Details	For more information
Display marketing information and other store content on your store pages	Manage e-Marketing Spots, which are the spaces on your store pages that are reserved for marketing information and other store content. Create web activities to display information in e-Marketing Spots. web activities can display: Marketing images Recommendations for categories and products, including cross-sells and up-sells A list of a customer's recently viewed products or categories Lists of best-selling or top-browsed products IBM Product Recommendations, formerly known as Coremetrics Intelligent Offer Personalize the marketing information that is displayed in e-Marketing Spots by adding targets to web activities. You can target specific customers that are based on factors such as: The customer segment to which they belong Their shopping cart contents or purchase history Their behavior while shopping on your site, for example, their catalog browsing or searching behavior	Working with e-Marketing Spots Creating a web activity Targets in marketing activities
Manage the support material that is created for your campaigns	Create marketing content to contain your marketing images, mobile text messages, and other images and text for display in e-Marketing Spots. You can specify click actions for marketing content, if required. You can create marketing image content that contains an image map. An image map can be associated with image content to provide multiple click actions within a single image. If Management Center is integrated with an external content management system such as IBM Web Content Manager, you can retrieve content from this external system for use as marketing content. If IT configures file size limits for marketing content associated assets, you can ignore the size limit for individual pieces of content. By using file size limits, you can control whether large files that might affect site performance can be associated with marketing content for display on store pages.	Working with marketing content Manage content externally for use in Management Center Creating marketing content to display on store pages
Create email marketing campaigns	Create email activities to send targeted emails to specific customer segments. Create email templates with dynamic content that changes according to who receives the email message. If Management Center is integrated with IBM Marketing Center, you can use IBM Marketing Center to create marketing campaigns and send personalized (email) communications to target specific customers. You can send customers information about WebSphere Commerce promotions and deliver promotion codes that are exported from Management Center to the customers.	Working with email activities Working with email templates Creating campaigns in IBM Marketing Center for promotions
Create marketing activities that are triggered by specific customer behavior or events	Create dialog activities to wait for a specific customer behavior or event, and then respond to the customer with timely and relevant marketing messages. For example: When a customer registers, send the customer a thank you email message that contains some promotional advertisements. When a customer abandons a shopping cart for 3 days, send the customer an email message as a reminder of their recent shopping visit. Issue the customer a coupon for 20% off their order. Target specific customers that are based on factors such as: The customer segment to which they belong Their shopping cart contents or purchase history Their behavior while shopping on your site, for example, their catalog browsing or searching behavior	Creating a dialog activity Targets in marketing activities
Create search rules	Create search rules to control how search results are displayed to customers in the storefront. For example, you can change the order of the search results, add or replace search criteria, or specify the top search results.	Working with search rules
Experiment with your web activities and search rules	Perform A/B and multivariate testing to maximize the effectiveness of your web activities and search rules. For example, for web activities, you can experiment with different content, different locations on store pages, different customer segments, or different targets. Then, choose the best option to use going forward.	Working with marketing experiments Working with search rule experiments
Create customer segments	Define customer segments by selecting a group of customer attributes that are relevant to your marketing strategy. The Marketing tool supports various attributes that cover demographic data, registration status, purchase history, and so on. You also can build customer segments that are based on specific customer behavior, such as catalog browsing or search behavior. You can then use these customer segments as targets for advertising, promotions, and suggestive selling. As a Marketing Manager, Seller, or Marketing Director, you can export customer segment information into a file, such as the email addresses of all customers in a segment. Only as Marketing Director can download the customer segment export file to a local file system.	Working with customer segments Action: Add To or Remove From Customer Segment Exporting customer segment information
Organize and manage marketing campaigns	Create campaigns to organize related marketing activities. Manage the scheduling of marketing activities in a calendar tool. If Management Center is integrated with IBM Marketing Center, you can use IBM Marketing Center to create marketing campaigns and send personalized communications to target specific customers. You can send customers information about WebSphere Commerce promotions and deliver promotion codes that are exported from Management Center to the customers.	Working with campaigns Finding marketing activities Creating campaigns in IBM Marketing Center for promotions
Organize marketing objects into folders	Create and use marketing folders to group references to e-Marketing Spots, marketing activities, marketing content, and customer segments. With marketing folders, you can improve browsing for, and managing your marketing objects.	Organizing marketing objects with folders
View statistics that are related to marketing activities	Analyze the progress and results of your marketing activities by viewing statistical data, such as impressions and click-through rates.	Working with activity statistics
Preview marketing information about store pages	View your marketing changes on your storefront before you publish the changes to your live store. Options include previewing your store: At a virtual date and time As a specific customer, for example, a customer who belongs to a specific customer segment or who exhibits a target online behavior You can also use the store preview to see the names and locations of e-Marketing Spots on each store page. When WebSphere Commerce search is enabled for the current store, you can obtain more information about search rule evaluation and relevancy scores for each search result when you are previewing the storefront.	Previewing a store Testing web activities
Create templates for marketing activities and search rules that you use repeatedly	To save time, create templates of your marketing activities, and search rules. Then, you can use the templates as starting points.	Working with custom activity templates
Search	Search for your campaigns, activities, templates, e-Marketing Spots, marketing content, and customer segments.	Finding objects in Management Center