Marketing database

Acoustic Exchange requires that products that integrate with Acoustic Exchange provide a description of the types of audience data that they intend to share through Acoustic Exchange. Acoustic Exchange refers to this description as the marketing database. The marketing database properties describe identifiers and attributes that audience source or destination endpoint supports.

Identifiers

Acoustic Exchange requires that audience source and destination endpoints specify at least one attribute that uniquely identifies each member of the audience. Acoustic Exchange refers to this type of data as an identifier. An email address is an example of a common identifier because it is unique to a specific person.

Different endpoints can use different names for the same identifier. To help ensure that every individual is correctly identified when you share an audience, you can map one or more identifiers in the source audience to an identifier of the same type that is available in the destination endpoint.

For example, if the source database stores email addresses in a field that is named Email and the destination stores the address as CustEmail, you can map Email to CustEmail to ensure that the identifier is correctly added to the destination.

You can also add identity records for all members of the source audience to the Acoustic Exchange Identity Store as a way to rapidly make identity information available to Acoustic Exchange for identity matching. You can perform the upload at the same time as you share the audience with a destination, or perform the identifier upload separately.

Attributes

Audience data often contains various attributes that describe specific characteristics of the members of the audience. Different endpoints can use different names for the same data.

To help ensure sharing between the source and destination audiences, you can map an attribute in the source audience to one or more attributes that are available in the destination endpoint. For example, the source database might store values for family names in fields called Last_name and Addr_Lname. The destination might store values for all family names in a field called Surname. In this example, to ensure attribute matches, you would map Last_name and Addr_Lname to Surname.

Scheduling

You can schedule audience sharing to happen immediately or at a later date. You can also schedule audience sharing to happen on a recurring basis, according to a frequency that you specify.

For example, sharing and audience that provides email addresses immediately before a scheduled email campaign can help ensure that you have up to date address list. Scheduling the audience share in advance is one less thing to worry about during the last minute preparations.

Scheduling audience sharing on a recurring basis accommodates market activity that happens continuously. For example, you can schedule weekly sharing of audiences that capture email opt-out requests.

Destination options

In some cases, the destination endpoint for sharing an audience might require you to take action in the endpoint to ensure that the shared audience data is stored properly. Depending on how the audience destination endpoint allows records to be added to its data store, you might be able to use options available in Acoustic Exchange to specify how the source audience records are added to the destination database.

Depending on the destination’s database security permissions, in addition to adding records to the database, you might also be able to remove or replace existing records.