Adventures in Mobile Marketing

A continuation of a post I wrote last week, “Getting Beyond Your Data Set” I describe the additional data you can use to juice up your campaigns. Now, let’s talk about how this happens.

1) Export from source
2) Transfer to local system
3) Load to email database
4) Use data to segment

Most platforms have schedulers (Unix/Linux: chronjob, Windows: windows scheduler) that can trigger a script (written in a combination of either SQL batch exporter, or Perl, or even Windows MS/SQL packages) to export the data. Then, once the export file has been created, transfer the file to the email marketing platform- internally, or hosted at your ESP. They will then have either a triggered job to load the export, or a timed operation that loads the data. Once it is in your campaign database, you can use the data for segmenting.

Woah!

OK I went over that kind of fast.

Identify new data–> export file (flat, simple) –> timed scheduler to export –> transfer via FTP to local system –> timed job to pick up file –> import script to load data

- Use encryption for transferring files. Losing personal information on your customer is probably the worst thing that can happen in email marketing. Zip with encryption (password) is the lowest security, PGP is one of the more secure methods. In organizing the transfer of files with your vendor, don’t send the password in an email.
- For that reason above, I don’t recommend ever transferring email addresses, via excel spreadsheets, data files, or really any method. Create a customer key and use that to represent the unique user. You can do this in Excel, and of course in all database flavors.
- Having worked with a lot of ESPs to add data to their systems, they’re more than willing to help out and will mostly do all of the work once given an export file.
- Data files come in a few variations, commonly CSV (comma separated values) and fixed format. Data files also have a definition file that outlines the columns and data formats for each element.