B2B contacts from c4c - how to best trigger mail to validate Permissions

[vervinckt_joyca]

Hi all,

We have a connection between the C4C and the SMC system (using SOAP-based interfaces and using n-m relations).

C4C sends business partner data of accounts & contacts over to marketing. Those can be both current customers, who currently buy our products, or potential prospects, e.g. through a business card received at a trade fair. However, marketing permission data is not interfaced between C4C and SMC (only an initial transfer is possible).

When prospect data is entered into the c4c system, we'd want that Marketing sends an email to the contact to request that they confirm their permissions explicitly on a form (mostly a general permission on the EMAIL communication medium, but on the form we could add subscription categories as well in the future).

Also in case the email address of the contact is changed in c4c, this mail should be sent again.

As C4C is not sending an interaction to SMC upon contact creation, we can't use trigger-based campaigns.

And on a periodic target-group based campaign, I am especially struggling with the rule for "when the email address of the contact changes, the mail should be sent again".

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Has anyone set up a process like this who has some advice or tips?

Is there a SAP Best Practice flow for onboarding new prospects that are entered in C4C via Marketing for consent management?

[isathore]

Hi Joyca,

Depending if you are using the all contacts segmentation profile, you have access to communication medium opt-in attributes that could maybe help with what you want to do.

For the 2nd use case, I was asking if you have a flag in C4C that indicates a change, so that if could be transferred to SMC to know that there is a change. At this point, I am not sure which options could be used. I will check with some of my contacts.

Best Regards

Isabelle

[vervinckt_joyca]

Hi Isabelle,

In the "all contacts" profile the opt-in attributes are indeed available (in all relations they are not), but that does not suffice to determine the correct group.

In case I'd select all contacts with permission = blank to send them the mail,

tomorrow some new contacts are created. If then I again select all with permission = blank, then I'm sending the same mail again to the previous group too.

the "creation date" field is also not 100% correct. (also on the "all relations" profile, the creation date of a contact is not an available field even...). A contact can be created today without an email address, and then a week later an email address gets added. So I cannot just select everyone with creation date = today...

The "changed on" field is also updated too frequently by other sources, or if simply a first name field is changed then the "changed on" field also updates, and again I'd send a duplicate email.

PS, c4c also has a "changed on" field, but it cannot be enabled for the bupa integration flow. c4c would need to make a custom field in which the standard "chaged on" field data is copied with SDK, and this custom field can then be activated for the interface.

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Isn't there a "normal" / best practice flow in such a scenario where c4c collects prospect data from e.g. business cards and marketing should ask for an explicit opt-in?

[isathore]

Hi Joyca,

Are you using contact relationships profile or the all contacts one? Are the data imported from C4C containing already permissions, implicit or explicit and you want a double-opt in? What is the permission about exactly? Is this for sending emails OR is it for newsletter?

For the email change use case, does C4C has the information that the email changed on their side or it is not known at all?

Best Regards

Isabelle

[vervinckt_joyca]

Hi isabelle.thore

Yes, we are using the relationships / SOAP-based interface. (the all contacts model still exists though, so in case that one is better suited for our case than the all relationships model, that would be fine too).

Data imported from C4C does not contain any permission. Afaik this is also not possible in the standard integration package, only an initial transfer of permissions from C4C to Mkt is possible?

Anyway, from C4C to mkt, we just get contact data, no permission, and our marketing system is configured that a blank permission = an implicit opt-out.

So, we need to requests those contacts for an explicit statement, being it an opt-in (what we hope for) or an opt-out.

For example: a sales rep gets a business card at a fair. He enters the business card data into the sales system. This is replicated to the marketing system. We want to send out an email with a message like "Welcome! Please indicate whether or not we are allowed to send you emails. [link to landing page where permission can be indicated explicitly]".

So this is about a general email permission. We currently don't use the subscriptions/newsletters yet.

For the email change use case: I don't understand what you mean by "does C4C has the information"... it's within C4C that someone would go and edit the email address. This would trigger the bupa interface and this change is sent over to marketing.

Thanks,

Joyca