Best practice remarketing feeds allow you to run campaign logic directly within Digital Analytics. You can use these feeds if you are not working with one of the certified partners for LIVEmail, or if your partner or in-house tool does not have robust capabilities for storing visitor site activity data over extended periods of time or cannot apply cross-session visitor logic to such imported data.

Configuration

Step 1

After selecting this option, you will see a dropdown menu with all available campaigns:

• Product browser program
• Cart abandoner program
• Post-purchase program
• Dormant customer program

A selection is required to proceed with creating a feed.

Step 2

The campaign window will allow you to specify rules for your selected best practice campaign. For more details and examples, take a look at the descriptions for each best practice campaign at the end of this article. Depending on the type of campaign selected in step 1, your campaign window options are as follows:

Product Browser Program:

The trigger event window cannot exceed 30 days and must be greater than or equal to the suppression event window.

Cart Abandoner Program:

The trigger event window cannot exceed 30 days and must be greater than or equal to the suppression event window.

Post-purchase program

The purchase window cannot exceed 30 days.

Dormant Customer Program:

The window since the activity occurred cannot exceed 90 days.

Step 3

If you’d like to further refine the audience in your best practice campaign, you can apply a filter. This step is optional. Only one filter can be applied at a time. The following filter criteria are available for each type of best practice campaign:

Product Browser Program: Product Category(s) Viewed – Full, Product Category ID(s) Viewed, Product Category(s) Viewed – Top, Product ID(s) Viewed, Product Name(s) Viewed, and any product viewed attributes defined for your site.

Cart Abandoner Program: Product Category(s) Abandoned (Full), Product Category(s) Abandoned (Top), Product Category ID(s) Abandoned, Product ID(s) Abandoned, Product Name(s) Abandoned, and any product carted attributes defined for your site.

Post-purchase Program: Product Category(s) Purchased (Full), Product Category ID(s) Purchased, Product Category(s) Purchased (Top), Product ID(s) Purchased, Product Name(s) Purchased, and any product purchased attributes defined for your site.

Dormant Customer Program (available for all trigger events except “Visit”): Product Category(s) Viewed – Full, Product Category ID(s) Viewed, Product Category(s) Viewed – Top, Product ID(s) Viewed, Product Name(s) Viewed, and any product viewed attributes defined for your site.

Step 4

The final step is to provide additional information:

Feed name (required)

A user-friendly name for your LIVEmail export.

Description (optional)

A brief description of your LIVEmail export.

E-mail notification list (required)

An email address(es) corresponding to individuals that should receive system notifications about the status of the export's daily processing.

SFTP target (required)

The file server to which Digital Analytics will deliver the LIVEmail feed. The SFTP target drop-down menu will display any targets that the users in your organization have already created. If you want to send your export to a location not yet specified, click Create to enter the required SFTP information to send your export. If your organization does not have an SFTP location, you can use the Digital Analytics default export location. Contact Acoustic support if you need help with server credentials.

Frequency (required)

Best Practice Program feeds are daily recurring exports. However, we provide you with the option to run a one-time test export based on visitor activity from one day prior, if you want to review your LIVEmail feed before you schedule it for daily processing.

Inter-field delimiter (required)

A comma is the recommended file delimiter but you can configure your export file to use tab or pipe (vertical bar |) characters instead.

File extension (required)

CSV is the default extension that you can use for exports irrespective of the inter-field delimiter that you specified. You can also change the extension of your LIVEmail export to TXT instead of CSV.

Note: The file extension applied to your export is not dictated by the inter-field delimiter selection you specified. For example, you may elect to use comma characters as your delimiter but have your export use a file extension of .TXT. If you are reviewing LIVEmail export files in Microsoft Excel, note that Excel formatting assumptions are tied to file type as identified by the extension (for example, .CSV are assumed to use commas as the field delimiter).

Output fields (required)

By default, LIVEmail sends an export that includes only the email addresses for the site visitors that meet the best practice program criteria that you specified. However, you can include meta-data that corresponds to the browsing-activity (for example, product ID, product category, session start date, or time) in addition to email address.

Include header (optional)

If you want your LIVEmail export to include a record that contains names for each field in the export, select Include Header.

When you have provided all the required configuration information for your Browse best practice program, click Submit to activate the daily processing of your LIVEmail feed. You will receive the first instance of the export the day after you activated it. When you have submitted the Browse best practice program, you will see the new LIVEmail feed docked in the footer. You can edit your feed at any time by double-clicking.

Once successfully saving a feed, you will see it in the right panel under Current feeds > LIVEmail best practice feeds with the feed name and creator. You will have the option to open this feed and edit it via the pencil icon.

When in edit mode, you can edit all steps mentioned above, and see the following additional information in the right panel:

• Option to start/stop depending on whether the feed is active or inactive
• Feed name and feed type
• Last run date
• Last run status
• Email notification list
• Option to delete the feed

Product browser program

Marketers create browser-based email programs to tailor messages and offers to recipients' needs. They do it by observing their browsing behaviors during past site visits, including product and content affinities.

Browse campaigns can take many forms but the underlying goal is to get site browsers back to your site to complete a conversion event by providing vivid, relevant content that resonates with each individual.

For the campaign window, you need to specify both a trigger event delay for the browsing activity and a suppression event window for the corresponding conversion activity. Browse best practice program feeds recur daily, so you have the most up-to-date targets for your email program. For example, assume that you set both your delay for trigger event and suppression event windows to five days. In this configuration, when the export feed is compiled every morning, LIVEmail looks for all site visitors that have browsed a product detail page five days prior but who also have not since returned to complete the conversion event. If the visitor cookie maps to a registration profile that includes an email address, then that visitor is included in the export for that day. The trigger delay and suppression event windows can be set up to 30 days in the past. The timeframe that you select for each of these options depends on the nature of the browser-based campaign that you are planning to deliver.

Cart abandoner program

One of the fundamental email campaigns is identifying visitors that fail to complete onsite conversion activity. It could be completing an application for a credit card, ordering a product, or making a booking reservation at a hotel. Abandonment programs can yield a significant amount of incremental revenue and improve the customer experience. The Abandoner best practice program helps you define daily LIVEmail exports, that consist of site visitors that have abandoned the conversion process on your site, with targeted email content and offers to drive them back to the site to complete the conversion.

For the campaign window, you need to specify both a trigger event delay for the abandonment activity and a suppression event window for the corresponding conversion activity (for example, a sale event for cart abandonment in the retail vertical). Abandonment best practice program feeds recur daily so you have the most up-to-date targets for your email program. For example, assume you will set both your delay for trigger event and suppression event windows to 2 days.

In this configuration, when the export feed is compiled every morning, LIVEmail looks for all site visitors that have abandoned two days prior but also have not returned to complete the conversion event since then. If the visitor's cookie maps to a registration profile that includes an email address, then that visitor will be included in export for that day. The trigger-delay and suppression-event windows can be set up as far as 30 days in the past. The timeframe that you select for each of these options depends on the nature of the abandonment communication you are planning to deliver. For example, if you are planning to provide a reminder message about an incomplete conversion without any incentive, industry best practices suggest a shorter time frame from 1 to 2 days. You should use delays of up to a week when you are offering an incentive to the visitor to return to the site to complete the conversion activity as it is sub-optimal to offer conversion incentives to site visitors that are likely to return to convert on their own.

Post-purchase program

Although most sites have automated email programs set up to thank customers for their purchases, post-conversion completion programs are becoming more popular. For example, the explosion of user-generated content like ratings and reviews to help fuel visitor conversion has spurred best-practice email communications that follow conversion completion activity.

Asking for product reviews is critical for any site's social or word-of-mouth marketing strategies. However, different sites might need different criteria on the timing of these requests. You want to give your customers adequate time to receive an order and experience the product before you ask for a review or give them up-sell / cross-sell recommendations. Post conversion best practice programs will help optimize the success of these types of email marketing efforts.

For the campaign window, you need to specify a trigger event delay for the post-conversion activity. Depending on your organization's business needs, you can specify the event trigger for up to 30 days in the past. Again, if you are using this best practice program for thank you email communications and/or to cross-sell extra products, then we recommend shorter event trigger delays. If you are using a post-purchase program to ask for a review, a longer trigger delay is helpful. This will ensure they have had adequate time to use and experience the item and could provide thoughtful and helpful user-generated content.

LIVEmail offers an optional ability to filter your export target list based on the type of conversion activity that applies to your current initiatives. For example, you may have only deployed product ratings and reviews to select categories on your site. The filter option would allow you to pull only customers that have purchased items out of specified categories for a “write a review” email campaign.

Dormant customer program

Email campaigns are very cost-effective ways to re-engage site visitors that you have not seen in a while and to bring them back to your website. The dormant customer best practice program provides a mechanism to stay in communication with registered customers and visitors that you have not seen on your site recently. The type of trigger event you might wish to base dormancy on can vary and for that reason, LIVEmail offers many mechanisms for you to define a dormant customer.

For the campaign window, you are asked to choose what type of dormant customer you wish to target. You can target individuals that have not visited your site, have not browsed products on your site, have not shopped, or have not purchased from your site in some specified number of days in the past. Simply select the event definition for dormancy you want to use by clicking the corresponding radio button option. Next, specify how far back in time you want to define a dormant customer. For this best practice program, you might target customers who engaged in a specific site activity for up to 90 days in the past and have not had a site session since. Depending on your site and the nature of the email communication you want to deliver to try to entice a customer back to your site, the optimal trigger delay setting will vary.

Note: As previously mentioned, LIVEmail offers an optional ability to filter your export target list. If you selected Visit as your dormancy definition, the option to apply a filter will be disabled, because it is not applicable for this type of trigger event.