TARGET helps you manage the marketing pressure applied to your contacts by regulating the number of messages that are received, opened and clicked, depending on the types of campaigns that are used.
You can use filters to exclude contacts who have received too many messages, either globally or within a specific category of campaigns.
Here are the various segmentation options available to manage the marketing pressure:
- Number of messages received, opened, clicked
- Emails opened within last 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 12 months
- Length of time present within the database (db entry age)
- Number of clicks
- Clicks within 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 12 months
Mixing all these criteria allows to categorize your contacts by reactivity.
Inactive email contacts
An inactive contact is a contact that has not reacted to your communications for a while.
The danger of continuing sending regular campaigns to inactive contacts is that they might get annoyed and send your communication to the bin or simply click on their "Send to spam" button.
Apart from reducing the number of communications, here are some usage of inactive filters:
- Reducing the number of messages sent to inactives
- Sending reactivation campaigns
- Sending a request for feedback
These alternative messages for inactive contacts discourage them from hitting the spam button as well as encourage them to react when they receive a message of a different type than usual.
Let's go through a few examples.
Basic filtering – Inactive 30 days
The contacts that were inactive for 30 days did not open an email in the last month.
Because openings can be counted only when images are downloaded, it is possible that clicks happen when images are not loaded.
To double check the inactivity, we should input both criteria:
Now the recommended way to exclude the inactive contacts is when selecting the initial population for a campaign.
Click the minus sign button to the right of the filter containing inactives you want to exclude (marked with a circle in the image below). The button turns red, and the excluded count is updated.
Number of messages sent
When combining ad-hoc campaigns with periodic or trigger campaigns, you might not control the number of messages a single contact receives.
You can exclude from your campaigns the contacts that have received too many messages.
More than 3 emails from the "Promotions" category in the last 7 days:
(See below for an explanation of categories.)
10 or more messages in 30 days:
Inactive by campaign type
Let us assume we are sending campaigns with 2 categories: Transactional and Promotions.
We want to make sure that inactive contacts receive transactional messages, such as account related information or order confirmation. We will then only verify the activity on the promotions category to send them a message asking if we are sending too many messages, and request to update their subscription preferences.
We will filter contacts that did not open or clicked in the "Promotions" category exclusively, in the last 30 days.
In addition to verifying the openings and the clicks, this example limits the selection to contacts to whom we sent at least one promotional message in the last month.
Campaign categories – Explanation
With categories you can group campaigns for filtering and reporting.
To assign a scenario to a category, type the name of the category before scenario creation (you cannot currently add a category to an existing campaign although this will soon be possible).
