Manage marketing externally with IBM Marketing Center

If your site is integrated with IBM Marketing Center, Commerce Lab users can open IBM Marketing Center from Commerce Lab to upload promotion codes and to create and manage marketing campaigns.

IBM Marketing Center is a cloud-based solution that provides users with precision marketing capabilities to create, personalize, and manage marketing campaigns and send digital communications to customers with promotion offers. This solution also provides users with the capabilities to track marketing information and generate marketing analytics.

For more information about IBM Marketing Center, which is available as a module within the IBM Enterprise Marketing Management suite, see IBM Marketing Center.

When a site administrator or store developer integrates Commerce Lab with IBM Marketing Center, the Commerce Lab user interface includes multiple new access points to IBM Marketing Center. Commerce Lab users can use the access points to open IBM Marketing Center directly from the Promotions tool or Marketing tool. The access points available to launch IBM Marketing Center includes new context menu options, toolbar icons, and a new file menu option.

The following image identifies the new toolbar icon, Launch IBM Marketing Center, which opens IBM Marketing Center to display the general IBM Marketing Center dashboard, which is also shown in the image. The toolbar in this image also includes the new Create Campaign in IBM Marketing Center toolbar icon.

Launch IBM Marketing Center

Commerce Lab users can use this integration to easily move between working in Commerce Lab to working in IBM Marketing Center. Users can more easily use the precision marketing benefits and capabilities available within both applications to create and manage marketing campaigns for an Commerce+ store.

Benefits and capabilities

By integrating Commerce Lab with IBM Marketing Center, Commerce Lab users can gain the following benefits:

Open IBM Marketing Center from the Promotions tool to create and manage a campaign for a selected Commerce+ promotion. Users can open IBM Marketing Center to directly create a campaign by right-clicking a promotion and selecting the context menu option, or by selecting a promotion and clicking the Create Campaign in IBM Marketing Center toolbar icon
Open IBM Marketing Center from the Promotions tool to upload promotion codes that are exported from Commerce+. Both public and unique promotion codes can be exported from Commerce Lab and uploaded into IBM Marketing Center. Users can include the promotion codes in a IBM Marketing Center campaign for a Commerce+ promotion. Users can open IBM Marketing Center to upload exported promotion codes by right-clicking the Promotion Code Exports folder and selecting the context menu option, or by selecting the Promotion Code Exports folder and clicking the Manage Promotion Codes in IBM Marketing Center toolbar icon.
Open IBM Marketing Center from both the Promotions tool and Marketing tool to view and use the general IBM Marketing Center dashboard. Users can open this dashboard from Commerce Lab by selecting a new file menu option, or by clicking the Launch IBM Marketing Center toolbar icon.
Use the precision marketing capabilities available within IBM Marketing Center to complement the promotion and marketing capabilities available within Commerce Lab. For instance, users can use IBM Marketing Center to compose and send personalized digital communications to customers as part of a campaign. The communications can include information about Commerce+ promotions and promotion codes that are exported from Commerce+.
If an administrator or developer configures single sign-on between the applications, users can open IBM Marketing Center from Commerce Lab to begin working in IBM Marketing Center without needing to log on to IBM Marketing Center separately.

Considerations

While this integration provides users with more options for marketing Commerce+ promotions to customers, there are some limitations and behavior to consider before using IBM Marketing Center with Commerce+:

If you use IBM Marketing Center to create and manage campaigns for a promotion, avoid using the Marketing tool to also create and manage campaigns for the promotions. By using both applications for creating and managing campaigns, you can potentially create duplicate campaigns for a promotion. If the promotion uses single use unique promotion codes, the duplicate campaigns increase the chances that multiple customers might receive the same promotion code, which only one customer can redeem.

For more information about exporting promotion codes to IBM Marketing Center and creating campaigns within IBM Marketing Center, see