Campaign initiatives

Campaign initiatives serve to generate your targeted marketing content. Campaign initiatives are typically created by a Marketing Manager. They can be associated with a campaign that contains a collection of initiatives. As an example of this relationship, if an office supply store had a "Back to School" campaign, the initiatives would be responsible for lower-level actions, such as advertising a discount on pens, or suggesting lined paper to any customer who has registered and listed their occupation as a student.

Campaign initiatives are capable of displaying three types of dynamic content. The first content type is a suggestive selling initiative, the second is a collaborative filtering-based recommendation, and the third is an awareness advertisement. Suggestive selling content is designed to provide rule-based product recommendations, targeted at a specific customer audience, based on a customer's profile, and other customers' behavior. Initiatives displaying this type of content are intended to create cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. In contrast, collaborative filtering-based recommendations are also intended to create product recommendations, but they use a different recommendation algorithm, which targets items based on customers' overall behavior, rather than predefined rules. Finally, awareness advertisements are designed to provide advertising content targeted at a specific customer audience, based on the same criteria as those used for suggestive selling, but they are intended to increase a customer's awareness about activities at the online store, highlight special offers, and to increase brand awareness.

Initiatives can be incorporated into any page on the site. When the site is designed, special placeholders, called e-Marketing Spots, are placed on the site. When displayed to a customer, these placeholders are replaced by the specific targeted content. Target locations are assigned by scheduling initiatives to display in e-Marketing Spots in the desired locations.

Campaign initiatives contain a condition that determines when and to whom they are displayed. This condition is defined when the initiative is created and can be changed during the lifetime of the initiative to adjust the initiative's visibility and the displayed content.

Campaign initiatives generate statistics about their use. These statistics can be viewed using the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator by users assigned to the Seller or Marketing Manager roles. The statistics illustrate an initiative's clickthrough rate for each e-Marketing Spot where it is implemented. These statistics provide feedback on the effectiveness of the initiative, as well as comparative success rates among the various locations in which it displays.

Campaign initiatives are created using the Campaign Initiative wizard in the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator.