InsightIQ Blog

The Top Five Affinium Campaign Features: Optimize Marketing Campaigns

May 24 2010

As I just returned from this year’s Unica MIS, I have been thinking about my favorite features in Affinium Campaign. Picking my top 5 was not an easy task, as there are so many features you can take advantage of. I could literally list out 20 different features that can optimize your marketing campaigns.

In addition, I am not even scratching the surface on advanced customization that can be put in place in Campaign, and on the Campaign Server. Below I am listing out my top 5 features that you can take advantage of in Affinium Campaign to efficiently run your marketing campaigns. I plan on doing a separate blog entry for each one listed below, and will expand appropriately.

Here is a sneak peak at what I will be blogging on during the weeks to come:

1. Triggers – Are triggers the greatest feature ever? This will be the first blog entry, and I will let you be the judge after we review all of the great things you can do with triggers. It is hard to argue with a feature that allows you to essentially execute any program or script based on a) Campaign Failure b) Campaign Success or c) Process box completing.

2. Raw SQL – Not only can you write raw SQL to get back desired results when the point and click just isn’t giving you what you need, you can execute stored procedures directly in Campaign. The possibilities are endless, and I will give some specific examples of how you can use this feature to enhance your marketing campaigns.

3. Campaign History – There are many advantages to using the out of the box Campaign logging. The biggest? If you use any other methods you run the risk of users truncating and reloading your Campaign History table. One downside: if you are using the out of the box solution, the table you log to has to be on the Affinium System Table Database. Did you know you can create a view on the Affinium System Table Database and point it to your underlying Marketing Database? I plan to expand upon this and show how you can customize Contact History to track relevant campaign information.

4. Email Notifications – You could say this falls under Triggers, but it is worth making it a separate topic as getting email notifications can simplify the task of managing a large number of campaigns. Without email notifications, the only way to effectively manage campaigns is through the manual process of checking them each time they run.

5. Derived Fields – Everyone has been in the situation where they need a field, either for output or selection, that doesn’t currently exist on the database. A quick solution can be a derived field. You can quickly and efficiently create a field to use on the fly when you don’t have the time to make an underlying database change.

What are some of your favorite features? Any advanced customization that you have implemented? Please leave a comment and let me know.

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Jun 3 2010

# Gokul Kumar Gopal said:

One of the most annoying things I have faced with Campaign is not gathering statistics on system tables. This is causing many heavy loads to run a lot slower. I would really like to see Campaign built to take into account basic db things compulsorily gathering statistics..

Oct 12 2010

# Saravanan said:

I would agree with Gokul.. Unica Campaign creates a lot of temp tables which would be used by some other processes. I have seen scenarios where in the queries, using the temp tables created by Campaign, crashing the database. It took just a few minutes to complete the execution of the same queries when I ran them manually after collecting statistics. It would be really helpful if Unica Campaign collects statistics on those tables where any DML operation is done.

Oct 29 2010

# Paul said:

Good point. I have run into this issue during development, but fortunately have been able to resolve before moving to production. Are you running into these issues during development, or with production flowcharts? .