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Email Lists Filtering with Business Catalyst (beta)

Adobe Employee ,
Oct 22, 2012 Oct 22, 2012

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What is email filtering?

A while ago while talking to various online marketers and BC partners, we realized that the current email marketing solution inside Business Catalyst lacks a simple functionality that can empower everybody to better use email marketing. We call this feature "Filtering" and it will enable partners or business owners to better target subscribers of their mailing lists based on concrete business criteria.

This way you can make sure that you send relevant content, discounts, offers to your recipients. Today we are launching the beta version of this feature. 

On a broader level, you can generally filter mailing lists based on categories such:

  • demographics
  • geography
  • activity on the website
  • economics - product purchases
  • subscriber validity in the mailing list

And when it comes to filtering, the possibilities are endless, as you can always get more and more granular with your filtering criteria.  Research shows that filtering lists prior sending increases email deliverability, open rates, click rates inside a newsletter and even campaign purchases.

Example - business case

You or your customer may want to send a 50% discount for a romantic trip in Caribbean Islands this Christmas only to young couples with high spending behavior.

This way you will make sure that you don't send this offer to low spenders, who never travel anywhere during Christmas. Therefore you will have more accurate conversion rates and the messaging can

be more appealing for your target audience.

So, how can you do this with Business Catalyst? See the video below -

For a higher quality of the video, access this link. You will need to have the Windows Media Player plugin for the browser enabled.

Which are the current released filters?

In order to enable this feature, go to Site Settings>Beta Features and check the "Enable" box.

This feature is in Beta because it doesn't have all the filters that we planned for it. Right now you can apply the following criteria to your mailing lists:

  • Demographics: City, Country or Zip Code
  • Date of birth
  • Purchased value (with period of time) based on the currency of the site
  • Age of the subscriber (when the subscriber was added to the list)
  • The relationship between the filters can be OR ('Any') or AND ('All'). this relationship is applied to all filters; you can't have different relationships between different filters - (e.g. - between Filter 1 and Filter 2 you will have "AND" and between Filter 2 and Filter 3 you will have "OR".

What next?

We plan to add the following filters:

  • Added to cart but did not purchase (with period of time)
  • Sex of the subscriber (female, male)
  • Received a certain campaign in the past - usually used for follow-up campaigns
  • Opened a certain campaign in the past- usually used for follow-up campaigns
  • Clicked a link inside a previous campaign - usually used for follow-up campaigns

Other improvements

  • Refresh for the calculation of the number of subscribers after applying the filter will be automatic (right now you need to press the "refresh" button).
  • You will be able to launch a follow-up campaign after a current campaign is sent. 

Known issues

  • Filtering can't be applied to loyalty campaigns yet.
  • You can't save a filtered list.
  • You can't save a set of filters to apply it to a different campaign.
  • For the filter "Purchased more than", the amount is considered automatically in the default currency of the domain. We will make it more obvious and add the possibility for the user to choose different currencies at next release of this feature.

So, in order to successfully improve this feature and launch it officially, I would like to invite you to test it, play with it, apply it to new campaigns and give us feedback here, in this thread.

UPDATE: we're taking this feature out of "Beta". Hence it will be available for all sites without activation. We've fixed some of the visual glitches and added product specific filters ("Purchased product", "Did not purchase product", "Added to cart but did not buy"). Further we'll be implementing some more filters.

Thanks,

Dragos MANESCU

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New Here ,
Oct 29, 2012 Oct 29, 2012

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Our clients generally do not use the Ecommerce functionality so our requirements for filtering are a bit different. Generally we need to filter based on Custom Field values e.g. Business Structure = Trust. So for this purpose we use Custom Reports, which we then use as the list in the Email Campaigns.

I will have a talk to our Ecommerce clients to get their feedback.

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Adobe Employee ,
Oct 30, 2012 Oct 30, 2012

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Hi Matt,

this sounds like a good idea (custom fields). We'll think about it when we launch the next filters.

I assume that you clients have B2B businesses, hence a longer sales cycle, hence different targeting needs.

Dragos M.

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New Here ,
Oct 30, 2012 Oct 30, 2012

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Yes our clients are generally B2B with longer sales cycles. However the email marketing is often more about building relationships with existing clients i.e. an accountant may have 500 - 4000 repeat clients that they need to stay in touch with by sending them regular updates via email marketing.

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New Here ,
Oct 30, 2012 Oct 30, 2012

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Unfortunately, we don't capture a lot of information about the people on the lists. About all we can trust is their name and email. However, I do have a few clients that capture membership information and might find it useful to filter based on custom fields, as mentioned in the thread.

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Explorer ,
Oct 30, 2012 Oct 30, 2012

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I love the UI so far. It is clean and easy to understand for customers. I like the direction it is going but I have to add a vote for allowing it to also filter off of Extended CRM data. Being able to extend the CRM allows us to adapt the CRM to sites that are not strictly ecommerce. Being able to folter off that data is essential as well.

Say I have a Church website and part of the extended CRM is if they have children. I want to target only those with kids about an event at the Church - for the kids..

The list of additions you have shown are also really good. The cart thign especially. So keep on with the great work. Just please consider Extended CRM as filters as well.

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New Here ,
Oct 30, 2012 Oct 30, 2012

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And BTW - if you can allow us to insert Custom Fields into email content, then you would have a killer solution. Then we wouldn't need to use MailChimp for our clients with more advanced email marketing req's.

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Adobe Employee ,
Oct 31, 2012 Oct 31, 2012

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Hi Matt, thanks for the feedback. Could you give an example of this usage - inserting Custom Fields?

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New Here ,
Oct 31, 2012 Oct 31, 2012

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Hi Dragos,

Inserting CRM Custom Fields and other fields into email campaigns would let us do things like:

-----

Hi {firstname},

Your tax return for {CompanyName} is due on 20th October. The amount you need to pay is {TaxAmount}.

Please make this payment by the due date.

Kind regards

{AccountManager}

----- OR

Hi {firstname},

We're reaching out to people in the {industry} industry in {city}. Can you take a moment to complete this short questionnaire.

Thanks

----- OR

Hi {firstname},

Your {subscription plan name} subscription expires on {expirydate}. We'll give you a 10% discount on your renewal if you re-sign by 20th November.

-----

As previously mentioned our customers are primary B2B. So the CRM data is very valuable to help maintain build customer relationships. We have written an integration that pushes data from other CRM's into BC CRM via API including Custom Fields so we can send highly targeted email campaigns.

Also the fact that we can now use Custom Reports as Mailing Lists in BC is a huge benefit because we no longer need to maintain the email marketing lists, as the reports are always up to date because they're reporting on live data.

As a side, we also use the Custom Fields in the Secure Client Zone to display information.

Thanks

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Adobe Employee ,
Nov 01, 2012 Nov 01, 2012

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Hi Matt,

great examples. Thanks. Let us reprioritize the filters and the raised issues and we'll get back with updates.

Dragos M.

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Guest
Oct 30, 2012 Oct 30, 2012

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Looking great Drago, much better than the old method of creating hundreds of different lists and trying to keep them updated.

other filters would be great to send to bookings, followup campaigns of people to attended vs. people who registered, but didn't attend. (would obviously require some way of confirming attendance...)

As you mentioned, saving a filter is an obvious feature that will be useful.

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Adobe Employee ,
Oct 31, 2012 Oct 31, 2012

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Hi Brendan, yes the follow-up campaigns functionality is on the roadmap. Also the events filtering.

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Guest
Oct 31, 2012 Oct 31, 2012

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This sounds quite useful but I am going to stray from the topic at hand for a minute. I built a site on BC that I contribute to and earn a portion of the revenue so I am more involved in user-level BC than people who just build on BC. I came across this because while trying to update secure zones, the CRM database, comments etc. I couldn't believe how difficult many things were so I started looking into the beta features etc.

Without a doubt, this sounds useful but I hope in addition to expanded filtering you can work on making it easier to manage everything: bulk deletes of fictious customers, the intutuive ability to see who took what action when and from where, I get all these customers it is laborious just trying to figure out what form they filled out, what they wanted/said etc. if it was legitimate or spam...I cant believe how slow it is to mamage these very simple things.

For instance, if a cutomer hasn't opted-in, it'd be nice not to have to delete them one at a time, or perhaps even something as sophisticated as flagging for personal review any record that uses the same email or IP address but a different name. Or maybe hasn't opted-in within 90 days.

I was looking through my account and noticed my disk space is getting pretty full so I know I need to clean out all the BS but it is such a pain in the but to do so...

How about requesting that when we filter we can then take actions on the results in bulk, this one at a time stuff is for the birds!

No offense intended to you Dragos, you have been very helpful to me in the past and I thank you for notifying us...I guess I am just venting but it seems relevant to the topic at hand also.

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Adobe Employee ,
Oct 31, 2012 Oct 31, 2012

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Hi,

these usability gllitches related to CRM/and newsletter are in the plan to be prioritized and fixed. We'll probably start with the bulk actions. I'll keep you informed. I know that this is very painful.

thanks,

Dragos M.

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Guest
Oct 31, 2012 Oct 31, 2012

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Thanks Dragos, I appreciate it.

Adam Powell

Adam Infinitum <http://adaminfinitum.com> - Web Design, SEO, and more.

Blog <http://www.businessforphotographers.com/contributors/adam> |

Google+ <https://plus.google.com/112020362931300420447> |

Pinterest<http://pinterest.com/adaminfinitum/>

| Twitter <http://twitter.com/adaminfinitum

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Participant ,
Nov 11, 2012 Nov 11, 2012

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This is valuable to our clients and us too, thanks for developing these features, our usage at this stage is primarily focused on ecommerce related and will be a big help THANK YOU!

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Engaged ,
Nov 14, 2012 Nov 14, 2012

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How about a filter that can look back over the most recent ___ campaigns, and just send to those who had opened at least one of those?

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Community Beginner ,
Nov 18, 2012 Nov 18, 2012

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This all sounds absolutely brilliant! And I just wanted to add my vote for CRM custom fields as filters AND to use in the body of the email (and in secure zones) - as soon as possible - it would be a huge benefit!!

Looking forward to sending my first FILTERED campaign!

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Participant ,
Dec 09, 2012 Dec 09, 2012

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Additional tweaks that would help this feature be more useful:

-Zip code RADIUS instead of just zip code

-Added to cart but abandoned it (you mentioned this might be coming next)

-Purchased from a specific catalog in a date range

-Purchased a specific product in a date range

-Used a discount code in a date range

All of these would open doors to marketing campaigns that would not be possible using Mailchimp, or Campaign monitor due to their lack of integration with our store. 

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Adobe Employee ,
Dec 10, 2012 Dec 10, 2012

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Hi Dreehl,

thanks for your input. For now we'll add some filters related to products (purchased a specific product, added to cart but abandoned it and some other filters related to ecommerce), some filters related to events and some filters related to secure zones. Depending on the demand, we'll add some more later on.

Thanks,

Dragos M.

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Participant ,
Dec 10, 2012 Dec 10, 2012

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Sounds great Dragos! Thanks for listening. 

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Adobe Employee ,
Dec 13, 2012 Dec 13, 2012

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Hi all,

we are trying to figure out the best way on how to implement the following cases. I hope that you can help.

Suppose that you are managing a site with many products (books, games, etc). Let's say 2000 products.

One of the filters that we are currently looking into is " Purchased / Did not purchase Product X within period a-b".

Since you have 2000 of products on that site, you will have to select that product from a list of 2000 products (at filtering). How would you do this?

We have a solution for this, but I would like to hear some fresh thoughts from you guys.

Also, could you share one of the use cases when you would use a filter like "Purchased from a specific Catalogue".

Thanks,

Dragos M.

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Adobe Employee ,
Dec 13, 2012 Dec 13, 2012

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Adding the comment to the entire document:

Hi all,

we are trying to figure out the best way on how to implement the following cases. I hope that you can help.

Suppose that you are managing a site with many products (books, games, etc). Let's say 2000 products.

One of the filters that we are currently looking into is " Purchased / Did not purchase Product X within period a-b".

Since you have 2000 of products on that site, you will have to select that product from a list of 2000 products (at filtering). How would you do this?

We have a solution for this, but I would like to hear some fresh thoughts from you guys.

Also, could you share one of the use cases when you would use a filter like "Purchased from a specific Catalogue".

Thanks,

Dragos M.

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New Here ,
Dec 13, 2012 Dec 13, 2012

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When creating the filter I would expect search results to appear as you type when typing into the product name field. You may also need to show the product code next to the product name in the search results if you have lots of products with a same or similar name.

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Participant ,
Dec 13, 2012 Dec 13, 2012

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I agree with Matt-e360 regarding the best interface for searching products. 

Here's the scenario for "Purchased from a specific catalogue":

I want to send an email to all my customers who like buying shoes (I'm running a promotion on it).  I sell 30 different models of shoes, so I have 30 products inside a catalogue called "Shoes", but I also have other catalogues for  hats, coats etc. 

Rather than having to enter all 30 products that are in my "Shoes" catalog, I would like to be able to just filter by the catalog itself.  So I would be sending this email to all customers who have spent $50+ on products continued in the "Shoes" catalog.  Then I send them a discount code that only applies to that catalogue, so they can purchase shoes with the discount (that's what I'm promoting) but not hats or coats. 

Devon

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