The Simplicity campaign engine is referred to as the “Customer Interaction Studio” or CIS.

This is the Simplicity campaign management tool.

The campaign hierarchy consists of the following core entities.

At the top level both from a setup and reporting perspective.

Campaigns

The “Campaign” entity in Simplicity refers to the topmost component for both the campaign setup but also for any campaign reporting requirements.

The “Campaign Segment” entity in Simplicity is how all the recipients that have been included within this campaign are segmented.

Although a segment is an easy way to picture a group of segments when you are looking at reporting it certainly makes sense where it can create some confusion is where you may have recipients that are included in more than one segment. A good way to picture a segment is to think of it as the name of a list.

Source lists are the data sources that we have available to pull recipient information from.

These are typically setup at time of implementation and slowly change as campaign requirements and understandings move.

Some of these data sources will come from production data, analytical databases, data warehouses, excel spreadsheets even.

Simplicity caters for multiple data channels in and multiple media channels out.

So moving back to our birthday party example what sort of lists we expect to be using.

Campaign selections are the instructions to select recipients from the specified “Source List” and add them to the appropriate list. The list name as mentioned earlier is the “Campaign Segment”.
So again back to our example so for our birthday party invitation list we would be creating three selections to add people to our “Invitees” list.

• Selection 1: Select all people from the “Family Members” source list adding them to the “Invitees” list (Campaign Segment)
• Selection 2: Select all people from the “Friends” source list adding them to the “Invitees” list
• Selection 3: Select all people from the “Work colleges” source list adding them to the “Invitees” list

Ok so that looks fine but what do we do if I don’t want to invite everyone from each source list to the party?

Simple, this is where we add a selection filter.

Selection filters are exactly as they sound. They provide a means of creating a subset of recipients from the “Source List” being used.

This is great news so let’s alter our three selections so we can be more specific about who we invite.

• Selection 1: Select all people from the “Family Members” source list adding them to the “Invitees” list
  • Selection 1 - Filter 1:
    • Exclude family members overseas.
• Selection 2: Select all people from the “Friends” source list adding them to the “Invitees” list
  • Selection 2 - Filter 1
    • Include friends that I see on a regular basis.
  • Selection 2 - Filter 2
    • Include friends that sent me a birthday card last year.
  • Selection 2 - Filter 3
    • Include friends that facebook or tweet me on a regular basis.
• Selection 3: Select all people from the “Work colleges” source list adding them to the “Invitees” list
  • Selection 3 – Filter 1
    • Include work colleges that I talk to regularly
  • Selection 3 – Filter2
    • Include work colleges that are just great fun to have at a party.

Using “Selections” and “Selection Filters” in conjunction with Simplicity’s preview recipients and preview waterfall will provide some great insights and visibility into your counts and data.

The waterfall feature shows you the counts at each point the effect each selection and selection filter has had on the end resulting numbers.

Great when you suddenly get 3 people instead of the 12,000 you were expecting. Where did the drop off occur? What happens if I also include… and so on.

So segmentation defined, filters in place, selections run… where does it all go ?

The easiest way to picture these worksheets is to imaging the lists you are building working conceptually like a spreadsheet with all the recipients for each list appearing on separate sheets.

Each dedupe rules can be defined against 1-10 individual matching fields.

Each dedupe rule can also be applied to either one, many or all segments.

Dedupe rules are processed after all the selections have been processed. At this stage no more data will be added to the worksheet.

It is important to note that deduping recipients actually physically removes them from the worksheet. These removed rows of data will not be available to any later steps in the campaign processing workflow.
Where duplicate records are identified the last entries added to the list are first entries to be removed from the list.

Eg. If the following list existed and was deduped then the following would occur.

Each media items can be applied to either one, many or all segments.

The setup of our email media in this example becomes very simple.

Further recipient filters can be applied to email and other media within Simplicity which will allow for a further subset of recipients to be used.

Filters differ from dedupe rules where they do not remove the rows of data from the worksheet but create a narrowing view of the recipients list.

Campaign recipient filters allow you to present further filtering choices to users of the “Desktop Execution Wizard” or “Web Execution Wizard” to make audience choices in a friendly and humanised manner during the campaign execution process.

You could for example have a simple choice present to the user the following options: