Managing opt-ins

 Optimizely lets you display multi-channel advertising consents, which can also be synchronized with different fields in the CRM system provided it has this feature. This lets a contact or a lead issue multiple different advertising consents for different newsletters, to get an overview of consents for channels in your CRM.

How it works

You can connect multiple clients in Optimizely Campaign from your CRM. The advertising consents in CRM are already saved or you already performed the necessary adjustments for them. In either case, the CRM provides a full view of recipients, and changes to the advertising consents from third-party systems carry over.

For example, the advertising consents can be represented by Boolean fields or a check box at the contact, lead, or account entities. They can refer to a channel (email, print, SMS) and/or a certain newsletter. The CRM does not have to make any content-related distinctions, and can immediately handle the consents. The types of consents (contact, lead, account) must be the same for relevant entities (Boolean value check box or tick box). The types of consents required depend on your campaign plans and data structure. You are responsible for depicting it in your CRM.

Events such as unsubscriptions or bounces relate to a specific advertising consent. For the systems involved to be consistently aware of the consent and related medium, you must save the appropriate information in CRM. The easiest way is using a table with the advertising consents you are using. In this table, each row represents an advertising consent where you can assign the consent using a unique identification. If you need to process an unsubscription from Optimizely Campaign, the transferred identification is used to determine the affected advertising consent. You can also delete advertising consents for the appropriate marketing channel for a contact or lead in case of a hard bounce. An email address bouncing has nothing to do with a specific advertising consent.

Data structure

This list shows a data structure for advertising consents:

• opt-in-ID. Generic field for a unique ID issued by CRM (not visible, quasi an AUTO-INCREMENT field, sequence or GUID).
• description. Unique name displayed to the user and used for identification (visible).
• media-type. Marketing channel. The user can select email, print, email and SMS in this drop-down list (visible).
• broadmail-client-id. Reference to a client-ID in Optimizely Campaign configured in CRM (visible).
• reference-bounce. Reference to a bounce field (visible). If empty, then no bounce is managed for the channel. Mandatory for email channel.
• reference-opt-in. Reference to an advertising consent in the contact, lead, or account entity. You can save the contact or lead field that needs to be administrated.

Instead of saving tables and references, you can archive the logic in code or XML files for simple applications. The data model in this example shows what advertising consents may look like when linking advertising consent to a client in Optimizely Campaign.

Controlling campaigns and transferring data

If a campaign needs to be sent from CRM, select the advertising consent and the message template. You can determine the client to use in Optimizely Campaign by using the data model for advertising consents.

The technical connection of the closed-loop services must be expanded by additional fields in this scenario. The following additional parameters are transferred to Optimizely Campaign, in addition to the data of the determined recipient list: consent description, opt-in ID and media type (marketing channel). The opt-in ID and the media type are sent back to CRM as a component of the closed-loop circle for bounces, unsubscriptions, and so on. When an unsubscription or bounce occurs, CRM enters the cancellation of the advertising consent or the bounce into the appropriate entity (i. e. lead, contact) accordingly. Using the transferred parameters, you can tell which contacts/leads/accounts and which advertising consent are affected. You also can carry out additional actions through the media-type field, as described above.

Changing bounce or subscription status

Optimizely Campaign blocks an email address from sending more messages when there are too many bounces. You can change the bounce status of a recipient in CRM, for example when the recipient has ensured that the error would be resolved after a temporary problem. The usual design patterns for implementing this functionality as part of CRM are save interceptors or observers with which you can respond to data changes. This is only an example, if required the CRM will use its own design pattern for this case.

The bounce counter is set per client in Optimizely Campaign. Therefore, unlock clients in which the bounce counter was exceeded. You must save the appropriate information to CRM or, alternatively, reset the bounce counter in configured clients. To do this, use the resetBounceCounter method from the responseWebservice, carefully following the instructions in the documentation on changing the media type (marketing channel).

To set the subscription status, use the advertising consent to determine the correct client, then trigger a new DOI process for the subscription in question. Unless the unsubscriptions are also processed in Optimizely Campaign, you should manage the DOI process using Optimizely Campaign also. In this case, an unsubscription is re-delivered after a successful DOI.