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.

Marketing tool at a glance

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
  • 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
Managing 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.

Managing 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 HCL Commerce promotions and deliver promotion codes that are exported from Management Center to the customers.

Managing email activities

Managing 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. Managing 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. Managing marketing experiments

Managing 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 a Marketing Director can download the customer segment export file to a local file system.

Managing 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 HCL Commerce promotions and deliver promotion codes that are exported from Management Center to the customers.

Working with campaigns

Browsing for activities using lists and calendars

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. Managing 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 HCL 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. Managing custom activity templates
Search Search for your campaigns, activities, templates, e-Marketing Spots, marketing content, and customer segments. Finding objects in Management Center

Limitations

Marketing web activities and dialog activities that rely on personalization ID driven user behaviour based triggers, actions, and targets will not work properly in clustered HCL Commerce Version 9.0 environments. These include all user behaviour based triggers, actions, and targets that leverage the DM_UserCache or the DMUSERBHVR table.

These include:
  • Catalog Browsing Behavior targets
  • Online Behavior targets
  • Display Recently Viewed products or category actions
  • Dialog activity triggers (For example, Customer Searches, Customer Check In, etc.)

This limitation is a result of session affinity not being supported in HCL Commerce Version 9.0.

This is resolved in HCL Commerce Version 9.1 with the 9.1.3.0 release, as long as HCL Cache with Redis is enabled. If you want to retain this functionality, ensure that you upgrade to this version or greater, and implement HCL Cache with Redis.