Oracle Responsys is an award-winning email marketing platform, and one of many standout solutions that integrates seamlessly with stensul. While Stensul offers plenty of time-saving solutions, Responsys users can get a leg up by employing these expert tips and tricks to make their lives even easier.
Leave Notes for Fellow Users
As Jesse Cook, an email developer at maurices who codes emails that his team works on in Responsys told stensul:
“From my experience in Responsys, the following would be helpful when building: [Build a] checklist for things that need to be done before deploying. Leave notes on the campaign for other users (we have two people regularly working on the campaigns together, [this device is] helpful for them to communicate. It’s also a good idea for jumping into campaigns that were set up a long time ago).”
Ensuring that any campaign needs and functions are clearly explained for other users in the platform will make the communication process even more seamless. Cook added that it would be wise for creators to provide a quick view of key campaign details in a document or workflow platform easily accessible by anyone who might need to view the campaign and make edits.
Which Digital Signal Should You Be Using?
Nicole Hartman advised on an Oracle Responsys user forum:
“Determine the digital signal or trigger that works best for your communication. An automation within the program can be triggered using several different methods ([for example,] Timed filtering or grabbing a predefined audience at a recurring time, Web Services API Calls, Form Posts,SMS keywords, [and more]).
When building out your program, its best to first ask, ‘How immediate should this communication be?’ or ‘Should this trigger be based on an action rather than a defined audience segment?’
From there, it should be easy to start narrowing down your method of kicking off a program. (For example, a customer making a POS or ‘Point of Sale’ transaction may benefit from a near real-time message based on their product category – which may warrant an API call from POS to Oracle Responsys Marketing Cloud Platform).”
“Always consider the customer experience,” Hartman went on to recommend. “Above all, you will want to put yourself in the seat of the customer receiving your email. Is your communication timely enough for them to take an action, and also relevant to their buyer profile? This is a general rule of thumb for all marketing communications, but is also highly applicable to automation. Often, we tend to ‘set it and forget it’ when it comes to an automation, but it’s important to constantly evaluate your engagement to determine if your audience is responding as expected. If not achieving the desired results, your Program and related assets can be easily modified.”
Set the Tables
As Melissa Santos told Relationship One:
“Within the platform, you can create profile extension tables (PET) and supplemental tables. A PET is a table used to store additional attributes that define behavioral, demographic or profile preference characteristics of your contacts. They allow you to utilize information for specific queries and data transfers. PETs are aggregated and only allow for a 1:1 relationship with your contact list. Supplemental table data is used for personalization of your campaign message or form content. They allow for a 1:many relationship with your profile list.”
Personalization is as important as ever in email, as your audience members want to feel like their individual needs and concerns are taken into consideration by the organizations they form relationships with.
Observe field naming requirements
And finally, for some easily forgotten tips that Oracle reminded users of in their help center:
“When naming fields in the Profile Lists, Profile Extension Tables, and Supplemental Tables, observe the following guidelines:
- Must be 30 or fewer characters in length.
- Permitted characters: A-Z a-z 0-9 , $, # and _ (underscore). Name must start with A-Z a-z.
- All system-defined field names are reserved and end with an underscore character. Example: EMAIL_ADDRESS_. To avoid duplication, imported custom field names should not end with an underscore.
- Field names cannot contain the single letters A, E, G, K, M P, T and U. These are reserved by the application.
- Field names containing at least two characters are recommended.
- Field names are not case-sensitive, for example: FirstName is the same as firstname.
Becoming proficient in Responsys will take time and experience. To make things easier, and increase the speed and efficiency of your email creation while you’re at it, we recommend using an email creation platform in addition to Responsys. To learn more about how you can create emails more easily in a platform that recognizes all of your brand guidelines, request a demo of the Stensul Email Creation Platform. We’ll be happy to show you how other marketing organizations in your industry leverage Stensul + Responsys for maximum impact.
