Setting Up a Direct Mail Campaign

The Business Desk Campaign Manager module provides an interface for creating direct mail. You can manage Direct Mailer jobs for each direct mail campaign through the Campaign Manager. You can create new direct mail campaigns, personalize messages, and modify properties. Attachments can be added to your direct mail, and you can schedule when the Direct Mailer jobs will run. You can also test your direct mail using a test mailing list before sending it to production.

The following is an overview of the steps you perform to set up and run a direct mail campaign:

Note

The Direct Mailer service must be running before you can run the Direct Mail Campaign.

1. Configure the Direct Mailer properties:
   • To control the way your Direct Mailer jobs are run, you use Commerce Server Manager.
2. Develop the message body to be delivered to the recipients. For example, if you are delivering personalized message bodies, develop a personalized Active Server Page (ASP) that will provide the message body to Direct Mailer.
3. Identify and set up the data source that contains data about the recipients:
   • To generate a list of recipients from data in the Data Warehouse, use the Reports module in Commerce Server Business Desk. To view the static reports you want to use, select the reports, and then export the resulting list to the List Manager. For more information about importing and exporting lists in List Manager, see Importing and Exporting Lists.
   • To generate a list of recipients from a file, you need the path of the file.
   • To generate a list of recipients from a SQL Server database, you need the connection string and the SQL Server query string.
4. Create and schedule the direct mail campaign. Use the Campaign Manager module to specify the following information:

   • Name of campaign and customer

   • Name of the list of recipients

   • Start time and date of the direct mail campaign

   • Uniform Resource Locator (URL) or static file where Direct Mailer should get the personalized message body

     Note

   • The URL of the personalized message body must have a valid HTML content type extension, such as .htm or .asp. Invalid extensions such as .xml result in a Collaboration Data Objects (CDO) error and the message will not be sent.

The direct mail campaign runs at the scheduled time. For information about testing your direct mail lists before sending them to production, see Testing Direct Mail.

See Also

About Campaigns

Creating a Marketing Campaign

Creating Direct Mail

Managing Lists of User Records

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