Marketing tool
- 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 |
|
Managing e-Marketing Spots |
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 |
Create email marketing campaigns |
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 |
Create marketing activities that are triggered by specific customer behavior or events |
|
Creating a dialog activity |
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 |
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 |
Organize and manage marketing campaigns |
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 |
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. |
|
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:
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 |
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.
- 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.