Configuring and managing subscription services

Welcome to Adobe Campaign! In this module, we will learn how to configure and manage subscription services. By the end of this module, you should be able to explain services and subscriptions, manage subscriptions, and target subscribers. Adobe Campaign enables you to create and administer information services such as newsletters, and to manage the subscriptions to these services. The subscription services will allow you to maintain subscriber lists of people who agree to be contacted. Their incentive to subscribe is to get special offers, information that is of interest to them or invitations to special events. Several services can be defined in parallel, for example, newsletters for certain product categories, subscriptions to various types of alert messages, and real-time notifications. Subscribers are a self-selected audience. This is a good thing because they are less likely to mark your emails as spam or complain about them because they opted in. In other words, they have asked to be targeted. Adobe Campaign keeps track of the current subscribers as well as their history. Adobe Campaign will keep track of those who have subscribed and unsubscribed and when. There are built-in loyalty reports and there are predefined filters in Adobe Campaign that help you target subscribers to a particular service. You can also enable your delivery recipients to share them with members of their social or professional network. An information service comprises registration and subscription opt-in, the registration voluntary unsubscription opt-out, or automatic unsubscription limited time service for example as a trial offer, subscription and unsubscription, confirmation mechanisms, and tracking of subscriber history. As a standard feature, these services include specific statistical reports, subscriber tracking, loyalty level, unsubscription trends, etc. For emails, the mandatory unsubscription links are generated automatically and the entire opt-in opt-out process is fully automated and history tracking to fully guarantee compliance with the regulations in force. In Adobe Campaign, a subscription service is similar to a list but it also includes historical information. The subscriber has the ability to add or remove themselves from the subscription through a web form accessible through a link. There are three service subscription and unsubscription modes, manual by importing subscription only and via a web form. Note that unsubscribing is different from opting out. When recipients unsubscribe from a service, they can still get other marketing communications. On the other hand, when they opt-out globally, it won’t matter that they are subscribed to the service. The global opt-out flag overrides subscriptions and ensures that they will not receive any communications. Now let’s open Adobe Campaign and create an information service. In your Adobe Campaign instance, navigate to Profiles and Targets. And you should be able to see here a list of all the services and subscriptions created so far. If you want to edit one, you can just click on the name and you will be redirected to the dashboard of the service. If you want to create a new one, just click on the Create button, add a name for your service, you can also send confirmation messages for a subscription or unsubscription. To do this, select the delivery templates to be used to create the corresponding deliveries. These templates must be configured with a subscription type target mapping without a defined target. You can deselect the unlimited option to define a validity duration for the service. The duration can be specified in days or months. Once the service has been saved, it is added to the services and subscriptions list. Let’s now open it. You can see that I have several tabs available. Dashboard, Edit and Subscriptions. Let’s navigate to the Subscriptions tab. The Subscriptions tab lets you look at the list of subscribers to the information service. Active Subscription tab or the Subscription Unsubscription History or History tab. You can also add and delete subscribers from this tab. Click Add to add subscribers. Here, you can select the folder where your recipients are stored and then select one or more recipients from the list. To select more recipients, press the shift key and make your selection. I will select only one recipient for now. Another way to add recipients is to right click the list and select add. To delete subscribers, select them and click delete. You can also right click the subscriber list and select delete. The detail button lets you look and modify the subscription properties for the selected recipient. Now the question is how can you track your subscriptions? From the dashboard, select reports. Here you can track the changes in the subscriptions to the information services. When targeting subscribers, you would expect a better response, higher open rate than if you just send out a mass mailing because the subscribers have asked to be part of your deliveries and receive your communications. Keep the content personal, relevant and manage contact pressure. If you want to be even more sophisticated as your subscribers how often they would like to receive communications from you. This is not part of the default data model but it might be something you would want to do with your implementation. We can then target subscribers in your campaign workflow by filtering on subscribers to a service. This is a predefined filter. I will now show you how you can target subscribers using a query activity. In your Adobe campaign instance, open your workflow and drag and drop the query activity. Double click to edit it. Now let’s select edit query, then subscribers of an information service. Select the newsletter that you just created. You can also preview and see that you have a recipient. And then let’s click finish. And this is how you can target your subscribers. I could now make use of the email delivery activity and send my subscribers the new travel offers we created for the next month. Or I could create a new delivery from the delivery dashboard and target the subscribers in a similar manner. Now you should be able to explain services and subscriptions, manage subscriptions and target subscribers. Thank you for listening and I will see you next time.