Filtering a Custom Business Object for personalized Emails

[mmangels85]

Dear experts,

I have an interesting problem. So here is the scenario:

We extended the Marketing Cloud with a Custom Business Object to handle data coming from in integrated data source. Our customer sells products that have to be brought in for regular maintenance and all the relevant data is put into this CBO. The key field for the CBO is the DB_KEY and the contacts have a 1:N relationship with the CBO, every line inside the CBO representing one sold product.

The goal is to send automated notifications to the customer that a maintenance is due soon and we want to personalize the e-mail with the serial number of the product so they know which one needs attention.

Here's the problem: when you create a Target Group it's basically a list of contact keys and while sending out the emails the personalization engine pulls all of the CBO entries with the contacts key, no matter if just one is up for maintenance or all of them.

My first idea would be to create a Segmentation Object based on the CBO to reverse this relationship: segmenting based on the CBO because one customer can have multiple products but every product can only have one owner.

Would a new Segmentation Object be the way to go here and if yes, do you know any good ressources on the matter? The SMC documentation is very thin in this regard and I haven't really understood the topic of Segmentation Objects.

[sebastian_schipplick]

Hi all,

Creating a segmentation object just with the CBO key is possible, BUT such a segmentation object cannot be used for campaign execution.

For campaign execution you always need at least one key representing the contact to whom the campaign is sending emails to. You can have additional keys (e.g. the key of your CBO) in your segmentation object. However this has the implication that also your target groups will have a combined member key (contact + CBO key) and if your target group has two entries for one contact (with two different CBO keys) than this contact will get two emails. If that is what you want, then it makes sense to create such a custom segmentation object with contact key + CBO key(s).

The problem statement above "Here's the problem: when you create a Target Group it's basically a list of contact keys and while sending out the emails the personalization engine pulls all of the CBO entries with the contacts key, no matter if just one is up for maintenance or all of them." is not necessarily correct. See "Content and Export" in the documentation here https://help.sap.com/docs/SAP_MARKETING_CLOUD/ac1eab4c66bc490da7ac2c378c46b0e7/4d971583c530468d8c7d7...
Baseline: if you make use of the segmentation filters, you can restrict the CBO entries used for your emails.

Thanks & regards,
Sebastian