SAP Community - SAP Marketing Cloud

New! eLearning Offering for SAP Marketing Cloud on Learning.SAP.com

2022-12-29T09:36:03+01:00

Hello,

On behalf of the SAP CRM & CX Product Learning CoE team, I am pleased to announce the official release of a new eLearning course for SAP Marketing Cloud, titled: Uncover Key Features and Benefits of SAP Marketing Cloud. This new eLearning is hosted on our new learning platform, Free SAP Online Courses | SAP Learning

With SAP Marketing Cloud you can optimize marketing to drive performance and revenue. This eLearning course will provide you with the fundamental information to get started with this solution.

How to access the new eLearning course offering:

eLearning Course Link: Uncover Key Features and Benefits of SAP Marketing Cloud

Course Objective: After completing this learning journey, consultants, administrators, and business users will be able to describe the structure and benefits of SAP Marketing Cloud and the underlying data model, including extensibility, segmentation, and scoring capabilities. You will understand how to then use these key marketing features to target customers and build account relationships.

Course Units: There are 4 units in Part 1 of this elearning

Introducing SAP Marketing Cloud

Capturing and Enriching Customer Information with Dynamic Customer Profiling

Using Scores in SAP Marketing Cloud

Segmenting Customer Data

Duration: It takes approximately 2 hours to complete all four units

Content Proficiency Level: This is intended for new to intermediate users

Prerequisites: None

We hope that you gain a solid foundation for SAP Marketing cloud by taking this eLearning. Part 2 of the SAP Marketing cloud eLearning will be published in late Jan of 2023

If you have any feedback or suggestions, please feel free to add a comment.

Thanks!

Cheryl

Solution Architect for Customer Experience - SAP Certification

2023-01-05T10:56:49+01:00

It is well known that smooth Customer Experience plays a major role in organization’s success. Integration and Extensibility are the most enhancing factors behind the scenes.

Combined, these contribute to an Intelligent Enterprise.

If you are looking forward to becoming a Solution Architect in SAP Customer Experience, the first recommended step would be to go through the below SAP Certification.

SAP Certification ID & Ref. URL: C_C4HCX_24 (SAP Certified Application Associate – Solution Architect for Customer Experience)

Badge Preview

This blog post will guide you to prepare yourself for the same.

The table depicts the breakdown of topics and the weightage percent respectively for the certification exam.

Topic Area	Weightage
The Intelligent Enterprise	8-12%
SAP Extension Suite	>12%
SAP Integration Suite	>12%
SAP Sales and Service Cloud	>12%
SAP Customer Data Cloud	8-12%
SAP Commerce Cloud	8-12%
SAP Marketing Cloud and Emarsys	8-12%

It is better to first have a high-level overview of SAP Customer Experience (SAP CX) before starting with the deep dive learning for the certification. Below are few references for this:

https://learning.sap-press.com/sap-customer-experience

https://www.sap.com/india/products/crm.html

If you already have a know how of SAP Customer Experience, it is better to directly start with the below Learning Journey.

SAP Customer Experience Solutions – Integration and Extensibility

My approach to the Learning Journey:

First complete the “Start with an overview” section which covers the following topics:

- Intelligent Enterprise and it’s Integrations: Open SAP Course
- Intelligent Enterprise Processes: Lead to Cash, Recruit to Retire, Source to Pay, Design to OperateFor these processes, visit the reference links provided in the learning journey and take the self-assessment quizzes.

You can also refer to the SAP Help on Intelligent Enterprise and its processes.

Once you’re done with the Intelligent Enterprise, move to the “SAP Integration Suite and SAP Extension Suite” section in the learning journey.

- Read CP100 thoroughly and take the assessment in each unit
- SAP One Domain Model
- Master Data Management
- SAP Cloud Platform Extension for Customer Experience

Then, you can start learning the various solutions/products in SAP CX.

- SAP Commerce: The Learning Journey has a good set of references for this module.
  It’s best to cover the Overview, Architecture, Commerce Cloud Portal, Accelerators, Deployment and Monitoring.
  Get an overview of Spartacus and UpScale offerings of SAP Commerce.
  Also, cover the Integration and Extension options available for SAP Commerce.
- SAP Sales and Service Cloud: For the introduction and deep dive, you can watch the SAP Microlearning videos(SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Service Cloud) provided in the learning journey.
  You can refer to the SAP Help for the system setup, configurations and scoping guidelines.
- SAP Customer Data Cloud: The SAP Help is a one stop go for SAP CDC. Apart from the introduction, few very important topics are Customer Identity, CIAM for B2B, Customer Consent and Identity Exchange for partner integrations.
- SAP Marketing Cloud and Emarsys: The SAP Microlearning is a good start for SAP Marketing Cloud. For it’s extensibility options, you can refer to the CX Works article.For Emarsys, you can refer to the SAP Microlearning for overview and Emarsys Help Page for deeper knowledge.

Now that you’d have good knowledge of the SAP CX products, it’s time to learn the end-to-end intelligent Lead to Cash Process offered by CX. Refer to the SAP Help for learning more about this pre-packaged integration.

Lastly, you need to know how the Project Delivery Framework is designed for SAP CX solutions. SAP Activate Methodology is used for this. The following CX Works articles provides detailed design and analysis of this.
1. SAP Activate Fundamentals
2. Project Delivery Framework by Solution : Select each framework to know more.

Key Take Away: Make sure you take all the Self-Assessment Quiz provided in the Learning Journey.

Additional references (beyond certification for upskilling):

SAP CX API Hub : Check out to know the API and Integration capabilities of SAP CX.

Enterprise Architect’s view on SAP BTP : This course will help you to gain the perspective of applying architecture development method to SAP Business Technology Platform in the context of Business Requirements.

Introduction to SAP Enterprise Architecture Design : Here you can learn the architecture designer approach of a single solution to create, document and integrate the organization’s business, data, landscape and requirements.

Apart from all these learning materials and courses, getting your hands on the system would really strengthen knowledge and provide clearer understanding of the various SAP CX solutions.

You can join the SAP CX Learning Room to stay updated on the CX solutions.

This approach helped me to complete the learning journey in just couple of weeks considering prior hands-on experience on few of the topics.

However, with no experience also it would take 4-6 weeks of effort to finish the learning and then you’re all set for the certification exam.

If you recently took the certification exam, please share your thoughts and how you prepared for it in the comments box below.

Extending the In-App Help Content of SAP Marketing Cloud with SAP Enable Now

2023-01-25T19:05:28+01:00

Do you want to improve end-user, in-application assistance by focusing on customer-specific content?

Consume SAP Marketing Cloud's In-App Help Standard Content

SAP Marketing Cloud already provides embedded default content!

It uses the SAP Companion, the digital adoption framework for SAP Cloud applications.

Contextual Help, as descriptive explanations of screen elements directly in-app.

Learning and Videos

What's New, with pro-active notifications on new or improved elements.

Watch this video to learn how to access and utilize the In-App Help in SAP Marketing Cloud.

What are our customers asking for?

Our SAP Marketing Cloud customers want to create customer specific help content and provide localized help. For example:

A guided tour for an email campaign from start to send, or

A broadcast message to inform customer's users about planned maintenance or internal releases.

What can it look like?

Click on the video below to get a short demonstration of a step-by-step process guidance directly in-app.

How to set up the Extended Content Scenario for SAP Companion

SAP Companion is set up by default for SAP Marketing Cloud. To use the extended content scenario of SAP Companion, with a separate license, you can add an SAP Enable Now Manager to your configuration, as described in the SAP Companion Integration Guide Setup of SAP Companion for SAP S/4HANA Cloud and Similar Systems.

Where to find further information

Find the latest documentation on the SAP Enable Now Help Portal.

Select a Use Case Tutorial and learn how SAP Companion makes your users happy.

Go to the SAP Enable Now Community for expert information and contacts.

Join in on the conversation in our SAP Marketing Cloud Community.

Ask questions, read blog posts, and find further information.

SAP Marketing Cloud: Email Bounce Monitoring Best Practices

2023-02-03T13:27:15+01:00

Overview

In the current world, emails are used by multiple fraudulent organizations to send SPAM, ransomware, or fishing email messages. Due to several reasons, an email account can be flagged as suspicious and blocked by multiple email recipient servers. As a result, there could be a sudden increase in the number of email bounces in the system. Therefore, it is crucial to regularly monitor the email bounce ratio to detect such issues and act upon it to maintain a high delivery rate.

This blog post provides a best practice on how to monitor the bounce rate in SAP Marketing Cloud and how to remove a domain that has been listed as sending SPAM emails.

Monitor bounce rate regularly

Having some bounces is normal. There are many reasons why an email can bounce. For example:

A non-existing email address would generate a Hard Bounce (permanent issue).

An exceeded inbox storage quota.

For more general information about bounce management, refer to this blog post SAP Marketing Cloud Bounces Management using Sinch E-mail 365 | SAP Blogs.

However, some bounces are generated because of the following reasons:

A restrictive record is not maintained for a sending domain

Email content is flagged as having bad or missing elements

The sender reputation is poor

If bounces are falling in those categories listed above, a sudden increase bounce rate will be observed. In these cases, there are some actions you can take to improve your email delivery. You can monitor the overall bounce rate using the operational report “Campaign Success for Messages” in the "Analytics and Report Gallery” application can be used to display the following information:

Dimensions:

UTC Date

Measures:

Delivered Messages

Hard Bounces

Soft Bounces

Sent Messages

Bounce Rate

The data in the screen shot is blacked out to respect data privacy

Note: To simplify the monitoring, it is recommended to build a “variant” and to expose it via a tile. This can be performed by following the steps described the blog post Use Bounce Reporting in SAP Marketing Cloud to Improve the Quality of Communication with your Contacts | SAP Blogs.

This report should be monitored regularly, between daily to weekly. If an abnormal bounce rate is observed, you need to perform a deeper investigation to understand the root cause.

A detailed analysis of the issue can be done using the operational report Mktg: Cmpgn Succss for Msgs of Last 3 Mnths – Qry in the Analytics and Report Gallery application. In this report, specify a recent Campaign ID (which is facing the issue) and use the following dimension: Interaction Type and Bus. Doc. Stat. Des.

Example of the result of the report:

The data in the screen shot is blacked out to respect data privacy

Maintain restrictive DMARC record for a sending domain

In the case of a restrictive DMARC record, you need to contact the domain administrator to add or update the DMARC record. For more information on DMARC, see https://dmarc.org/.

Fix email content

Adhering to the best practices of marketing email design is important. You can find many resources on the Internet about it. One of many reasons for which emails can be blocked are:

Bad URLs: Some emails are blocked due to the URLs that are used in their content. It is possible to analyze this specific issue by using tools such as “surbl”(https://www.surbl.org/). Check if any of the links contained in an email are pointing to URLs/domains which are listed as SPAM. In this case, you would need to follow the instructions given by “surbl” to be removed from the list.

No “unsubscribe” link: Emails can also be blocked if there is no “unsubscribe” link. Marketing emails must have an “unsubscribe” link and you must ensure to get permission of the contact to send emails.

Keep a good email reputation

Note that you are responsible for your reputation related to the emails that you are sending. Internet Service Providers (ISP) and email servers are continuously adjusting their rules to protect users. Keep yourself informed and monitor your bounce rate regularly.

See the More information section below for additional resources on this topic.

Remove domains from SPAM lists

In the example shown in section Monitor Bounce Rate Regularly, we can see that the sending email account server has been flagged as SPAM by Spamhaus. Here is an example of a bounce that was received when an email server got listed as a SPAM:

"BADR - 550 5.7.1 Service unavailable, Client host [IP address] blocked using Spamhaus. To request removal from this list, see https://www.spamhaus.org/query/ip/[IP address] (AS3130)."

"BOUNCED-FINISHED-HARD_BOUNCE:delivery attempt failed bounced (host [destination.email.host.name] / IP address] said: 553 5.3.0 flpd576 DNSBL:RBL 521< [IP address]>_is_blocked.”

There are multiple SPAM detection tools and lists such as Spamhaus and “Spam and Open Relay Blocking System (SORBS)”. A server could be listed in multiple lists. It is important to verify that your server is not listed in any of the SPAM lists. There are some tools such as https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx to identify in which SPAM list provider your server is listed. Here is an example of an email server which got listed by Spamhaus.

To get removed from a SPAM list, you must go into the individual SPAM list provider and perform the following:

Analyze the requirement to be delisted. For example, to be removed from the SPAM list of spamhaus.org, perform the following steps:

Extract from spamhaus.org

Problem description

============================

Spammers signed up for the bulk email service using the victim's email address. As a result, the victim is being "listbombed" with transactional messages and bulk email campaigns.

Problem resolution

============================

To resolve this spam problem (and have this SBL listing removed), the affected sender must take the following actions:

a) Implementing CAPTCHA to prevent automated subscriptions

b) Implementing Confirmed Opt In (COI) if not already done so

c) Clean up their email address list (for example sending out a permission pass / COI)

Contact the SPAM List provider with all the documentation to prove that you are not sending SPAM.

Check soft bounce retry limits

A soft bounce related to retry limit looks like the following:

BOUNCED-FINISHED-SOFT_BOUNCE:retries exceeded deferred (host [host name][ISP name] [IP Address] said: 451 too many messages, slow down

There can be several reasons why this occurs, for example:

Sender Reputation whereby the ISP has decided to slow down the rate of receipted messages from a Sending Domain / Sending IP

There is simply an infrastructure limitation put in place by the ISP

Under normal circumstances the ESP will throttle the rate in an attempt to overcome this restriction but this ultimately cannot resolve such an issue due to re-try limitations and differing ISP policies on throttling logic.

It is recommended to review the target group used in the campaigns and spread the number of target group member associated with the ISP over several campaigns and schedules.

Add your domain to the Yahoo Complaint Feedback Loop (CFL)

If you are sending email to the following domains @aol.com, @yahoo.com, and/or @verizon.com, some recipients may complain about your email, which can result in soft bounces with the following message:

“BOUNCED-FINISHED-SOFT_BOUNCE:retries exceeded deferred (host YAHOO_HOST[ip_address] said: 421 4.7.0 [TSS04] Messages from [IP address] temporarily deferred due to unexpected volume or user complaints - 4.16.55.1"*

In this case, fill in the “Yahoo Complaint Feedback Loop (CFL)” to receive information on which customers have reported complaints so that you can exclude them in future email communication.

For the Yahoo Complaint Feedback Look Form, see Contact, Mail | Yahoo Developer Network (yahooinc.com).

For the Yahoo Complaint Feedback Look FAQ, see FAQs, Mail | Yahoo Developer Network (yahooinc.com).

Conclusion

All Email Service Providers across the industry are required to establish their domain and IP reputations with Internet Service Providers (ISPs), for example, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL. ISPs require proper IP warming to prevent SPAM and other low quality emails entering into their customers’ email accounts.

Even when the IP warming is "done", it is crucial to monitor the bounce rate when doing email marketing. An email reputation can decrease quickly and monitoring it should be an ongoing task – it is in fact never done! The quality of the email addresses maintained for each of your contacts is key, as well as having a proper email design that always includes “unsubscribe” links, for example.

More information

Refer to the following additional resources on bounces and best practices around email marketing.

Deliverability Best Practices Guide for E-mail 365 API and Service

E-mail 365 - Bounce Classification

E-mail Marketing - Trust with a Solid Warm-up Plan

Setup of an Initial Email Campaign | SAP Help Portal

Bounces and Unsubscribe for Text Messages | SAP Help Portal

SAP Marketing Cloud Bounces Management using Sinch E-mail 365 | SAP Blogs

https://blogs.sap.com/2018/07/20/use-bounce-reporting-in-sap-marketing-cloud-to-improve-the-quality-of-communication-with-your-contacts/

https://blogs.sap.com/2017/08/10/sap-hybris-marketing-campaign-success-and-bounce-handling/

SAP Marketing Cloud Release February 2023 is here!

2023-02-06T14:51:01+01:00

SAP Marketing Cloud Release 2302

The SAP Marketing Cloud 2023 February* release is ready with many features!

A comprehensive list can be found on the What’s New in SAP Marketing Cloud release page. In this blog let us deep dive into some highlights of the release:

* The release short name is SAP Marketing Cloud 2302, where 23 is referring to the 2023 year and 02 referring to the month of February.

Data Acquisition: Contact-to-Account Matching for B2B Contacts from landing pages

In the area of business-to-business (B2B) contact data, we enhanced the capabilities to automatically assign a contact to a corporate account when registering on a landing page. This option can be set when designing the form.

Form Settings for Contact-to-Account Matching

When a contact registers and the shown option is set, the SAP Marketing Cloud checks against the corporate accounts whether there is a match on a combination of data including the name of the account, the email domain and the country. If a match is found, SAP Marketing Cloud automatically assigns the contact to the account. If the feature Contact-To-Account Relationships is active, it creates a relationship.

Matched Contact to Corporate Account

For more information, see Contact to Account Matching | SAP Help Portal and Contact-to-Account Relationships | SAP Help Portal.

Email Lite Editor gets a fresh look

We introduced several user experience improvements in the Email Lite editor to make design even simpler. You will discover immediately that we moved the design elements from the canvas on the left and included them into the properties bar on the right. With this layout, we are gaining more design space and reducing the number of clicks to design an email. For example, when you drop a block, a layout is created automatically. Or you can pin the design bar if you want to add multiple items first before you do the properties.

For more information, see Design a Personalized Email Lite or Email Template Lite | SAP Help Portal.

Listen to this video for a quick tour of the enhancements in the Email Lite Editor:

Thanks to your feedback, we also improved the visibility of the conditions. Conditions are now next to blocks and reusable blocks , on top of the menu bar, which allows an instant overview on which conditions are used in the design.

For more information on conditions, see Creating and Using Conditions in an Email Lite | SAP Help Portal.

This video shows it in action.

Email Lite Editor: Product Recommendations

We added a new layout element that allows to include Product Recommendations to emails created with the Email Lite Editor. It supports all features of product recommendations, that are already available in the Classic Email Editor. There is also the option to not send the email if the recommendations do not return a product proposal.

Product Recommendations in Email Lite Editor

For more information, see Create Product Recommendation Blocks in an Email Lite | SAP Help Portal.

To get more detailed information on the new features in the Email Lite Editor, register to the webcast here: https://gateway.on24.com/wcc/eh/2983783/lp/4080319/sap-marketing-cloud-email-lite-editor-ux-improvements. A replay is available.

Integration with Google Analytics 4

As Google is deprecating their Google Universal Analytics on July 1^st, 2023 and moving to Google Analytics 4, we now offer an integration allowing to fetch clickstream and contact data with Google Analytics 4.

(360 Universal Analytics properties will receive a one-time processing extension ending on July 1, 2024. The 360 Universal Analytics integration in SAP Marketing Cloud will continue to work without any issues.)

Google Query Configuration

The functionality supports the same use cases that we offered in previous versions of our integration with Google Universal Analytics. For more information, see also Integration with Google Analytics | SAP Help Portal.

To get more detailed information on this integration, register to the webcast here: https://gateway.on24.com/wcc/eh/2983783/lp/4048651/sap-marketing-cloud-integration-with-google-analytics-4-webcast . A replay is available.

Additional fields in segmentation objects

To make the segmentation simpler and quicker to adopt we added fields of the marketing permissions and subscriptions to all segmentation objects, including contact relations. For more information on Marketing Permission and Newsletter Subscription fields in segmentation see here: Marketing Permission and Newsletter Subscription Attributes | SAP Help Portal

In segmentation it is now possible to segment on the interaction product status as filter attribute or as condition for amount fields. This is important and useful for sales orders transferred from external systems. If these orders contain canceled or rejected items their values should not count for creating the segment.

Provide more transparency on system health: Check your marketing solution

In the 2302 release, we are continuing to deliver more visibility on your system health through checks in the Check Your Marketing Solution ap, helping the administrator gain transparency on the system health. These checks also give proposals where marketeers could revisit their campaign setup.

Check Your Marketing Solution with new health checks

New system health checks in Campaign, Content, and Data Management are:

Checking for Campaigns with Few Members

Checking for Campaigns in Preparation for Longer Than a Year

Checking for Expired Offers

Checking the Usage of Deprecated Sinch Email Service

Checking for Single API Calls for Interactions

Additionally, we made the information of the sanity checks in the segmentation available in the Check your Marketing Solution app.

For more information, see System Health Checks | SAP Help Portal.

Customer specific guided tours with the SAP Companion

Since the 2208 release, you can use the SAP Enable Now to build custom specified guided tours to support the users to use SAP Marketing Cloud, or even other SAP solutions.

SAP Enable Now allows you to enhance the documentation and guide users directly in the UI. For example, provide guidance on where to click or perform some actions and also provide information on your specific business processes.

Watch this video to see it in action and discover how easily such a tour can be defined.

Note that this integration also allows to show your company announcements or any other news to the users when they log on to the SAP Marketing Cloud system.

Customer s Own Announcements

For more information, see Learning Journey: SAP Enable Now .

Conclusion

There are more capabilities in the 2302 release, like:

Additional input validation of forms and landing pages.

Send parameter for initial email actions in trigger-based campaigns. For more information, see Send Email and Trigger-Based Campaigns.

Action ID in the campaign designer. For more information, see Creating Campaigns | SAP Help Portal.

New Fiori Theme Horizon

For more information on this release:

Watch the SAP Marketing Cloud | What’s New 2302 webcast to learn more about new product updates with insight from SAP Marketing Cloud experts.

Go in-depth on every feature update on the What’s New in SAP Marketing Cloud release page.

Get all product details on the SAP Marketing Cloud 2302 product page which is generally available now.

Join in on the conversation in our SAP Marketing Cloud Community.

Do you have ideas for product improvements? Post them in the SAP Customer Influence, or vote for existing ideas so we can help maximize your impact with SAP Marketing Cloud.

Business and Digital Trends in the Chemicals Industry: Sales, Service, and Marketing

2023-02-08T09:03:58+01:00

Business and Digital Trends in the Chemical Industry: Sales, Service and Marketing by hui-xiong and nchoi00

1. Introduction

In this blog, we discuss specific topics in sales, service, and marketing that are associated with and derived from major business trends affecting the value chain in chemicals. For details, we refer you to the initial blog where we introduced the overall value chain. We concentrate on the following areas in which we address challenges associated with these trends from the perspective of both business considerations and SAP solutions:

Digital customer experience

Operational efficiencies

Sustainability

2. Business trends and their impacts

2.1 Digital Customer Experience

The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced a new level of challenge for many companies with regard to customer experience. It has completely reshaped customer behaviour and forced companies to strengthen their customer experience. This challenge – together with increasing global competition and continuously high demands from customers for their products, operations, and services – makes it necessary for chemical companies to develop a next-generation customer experience. Companies that have a digital customer strategy are more resilient to continuously changing market demands and disruption. The chief marketing and sales officers of chemical companies focus on improving and digitalizing customer experience with the goal of providing excellent customer experience to improve customer retention, attract new customers, and grow business.

Typical customer experience trends that we are seeing in the chemicals industry are the increased use of customer data analytics and rising levels of collaboration and co-innovation, as discussed below.

Customer data analytics

In an era of digital transformation, customers expect companies to fully understand their preferences and needs. They expect a personalized approach across different physical and digital customer experience channels throughout the enterprise. Using the “segment of one” approach, companies track each individual customer’s activity across the entire customer value chain. They use available customer data to gain full transparency into each individual customer profile to provide a customer-centric approach. Customer data management and analytics play a key role in driving revenue for the company. The personalized insights drive better business outcomes and business agility in areas such as sales, service, and marketing. Companies can then make better decisions based on real-time customer data across the entire company.

SAP Customer Data Platform offers companies an enterprise-wide customer data platform to provide comprehensive customer insights by connecting customer data with operational data and real-time personalised engagements. The solution provides marketing officers with flexible tools to build an analytics dashboard capability that establishes personalised customer experience, activities, and events. The customers dashboard functionality offers 360-degree customer insights based on customer activities and events. It provides flexible, dynamic customer segmentation with real-time data at various points in time from different source applications. This, together with the SAP Commerce Cloud solution, offers companies real-time customer experience personalisation through the use of contextual and behavioural data analysis across the customer journey.

Collaboration and co-innovation

With the ongoing commoditization in today’s business environment, it has become increasingly important to use the available abundance of data to collaborate and co-innovate. In this “social era,” executive-level managers are aware that for companies to be successful, it’s all about connecting things, people, and ideas. On the internal level, teams across departments are working more closely together to create a consistent customer experience across all business processes and channels. In addition, departments need to work together intensively to improve the overall process and fix issues and challenges in a collaborative way to increase customer loyalty for the company. On the external level, chemical companies collaborate with third parties and customers to improve communication, innovation, and business outcomes.

Chemical companies focus on innovative products and services that meet customer needs. With machine learning and predictive capabilities, they can perform sentiment analysis based on customer-data analytics and aim to proactively identify opportunities for new products and trends. The direct involvement of customers in companies’ resource and development processes is pivotal for the success of the products while simultaneously allowing a faster cycle time to bring new products to market. Companies are looking for easy and flexible ways to collaborate with their customer in a secure environment that combines in-context data with co-innovation work through direct access to shared files and customer-specific workflows for preferences and needs.

The trends that we are seeing in chemical companies are aligned with customer experience strategies that are supported by SAP solutions, including SAP Customer Data Platform, SAP Commerce Cloud, and the SAP Service Cloud solution. With customer data solutions, you can connect and collaborate internally and externally while ensuring customers’ data privacy and compliance. The integration with the back-end ERP solution, SAP S/4HANA, provides customer insight across the value chain to enable extensive collaboration and co-innovation between chemical companies and their customers. These customer insights and technologies help companies provide superior customer experience and achieve revenue growth in the long term.

2.2 Operational Efficiency

Chemical companies are in critical need of efficiency to cope with increasing costs and margin pressure, and this is motivating them to embrace intelligent technologies to automate their processes as well as improve sales and marketing planning and delivery performance. In the meantime, the fast-developing technologies have offered new opportunities for chemical producers to automate processes and achieve operational efficiency by using intelligent technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and predictive capabilities across their sales, service, and marketing processes.

Typical trends that we are seeing in the chemicals industry are as follows.

Process automation

In sales, service, and marketing areas, there is great potential to automate processes through the use of intelligent technologies – such as robotics, artificial intelligence, and so on – that aim to replace tedious actions or repetitive tasks. For example, sales personnel often have to handle prices changes for a large number of products and services and manually maintain these changes in a highly precise way. This requires extensive time and effort despite the lack of any added value. However, with the current digital technologies driving process automation, companies can manage and monitor prices automatically in mass volumes and validate results efficiently, giving sales personnel valuable time to focus on higher-value tasks such as building relationships with customers, improving customer satisfaction, and so on. Another example can be seen at service centers, where companies can use chatbots to deal with customer requests and deliver the information instantly with 24x7 availability to the customers, especially when the requests involve repetitive simple questions or pertain to orders status, product properties, and so on. In this way, companies can not only overcome the shortage and limited availability of human resources but also improve customer satisfaction.

SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation (SAP Intelligent RPA) services offer customers a complete automation suite, tightly integrated into the digital core of SAP solutions. These services provide plenty of options to automate your processes in sales, service, and marketing areas. Use cases include the automatic creation of sales orders, invoice process automation, mass maintenance of sales prices, intelligent dispute management, and so on. The SAP Conversational AI service provides companies with automatic service experience.

Predictive and machine learning capabilities

The overall performance, profitability, and market growth of chemical companies will be based on enhanced speed and agility to adjust their strategy to the changes of customer needs and market trends. In light of this, there is a need for insights into the internal and external operational and market data that drives decision-making for better sales and market planning. This will allow companies to best accommodate customer and market needs. Chemical companies nowadays tend to use predictive tools to anticipate sales and market trends based on multiple criteria such as region, product, customer, and so on. These predictive analytics tools are embedded with machine learning capabilities that are trained to learn from large volume of historical data and then predict future outcomes based on new data. With these predictive capabilities, forecasts and reports can be generated to predict sales accurately, for example, so that sales personnel can set realistic goals for planning with greater flexibility. They can also help anticipate market changes and trends that can be used to develop better market strategies to grow business with collaboration planning and increased responsiveness. Overall, predictive analytics provide companies with opportunities to boost profitability and improve customer satisfaction by increasing flexibility and responsiveness.

SAP S/4HANA provides various SAP Fiori apps with predictive functionalities, such as Sales Performance – Plan/Actual for better sales planning and Incoming Sales Orders – Flexible Analysis, which provides reliable predictions for achievable sales volume and for market trends supporting management decisions.

Real-time alerting and monitoring

During the COVID-19 pandemic, chemical companies experienced major issues with market and supply chain disruptions that have had a significant impact on sales, service, and marketing areas. They have seen loss of sales and market opportunities due to delayed order fulfillment, lack of flexibility regarding unplanned orders, and unresponsiveness to customer needs. Digitalization benefits chemical companies by providing visualized reports and real-time data-sharing tools that help them gain full transparency of order fulfillment status. This allows sales personnel to proactively identify critical issues and collaborate with others to help ensure sales orders are fulfilled as quickly as possible. These real-time data-sharing tools can also generate real-time alerts with optional actions that sales personnel can take to prioritize tasks, helping avoid delivery delays and making sure corrective actions are taken in time. With such capabilities, companies can deal with market and supply chain disruptions more responsively and cost efficiently.

We consider these trends in providing solutions such as the SAP Fiori apps. For example, Predicted Delivery Delay provides insights on delivery performance and helps prevent possible delays, and Sales Order Fulfillment identifies any issues for order fulfillment.

Most reporting has traditionally focused on operational data (O-data) to provide insights to companies related to their performance and the effectiveness and efficiency of their processes. However, with the shift toward a more customer-centric approach, experience data (X-data) can provide companies with insights in terms of customer sentiment – feelings toward their brands and services. The combination of X-data and O-data together with the integration of advanced technologies is what gives companies full insight, allowing them to anticipate upcoming challenges, predict new trends, and respond as necessary, as shown in the figure.

How X-Data, O-Data, and Advanced Technology Provide Insight for Companies

2.3 Sustainability

Sustainability has become an increasingly high priority and a core value for many companies. This is particularly true of the chemicals industry, which is the starting point of sustainability for many other industries such as pharmaceuticals and agriculture. Customers and consumers know that sustainability is the right way forward and are supporting companies and brands that share similar values. They are looking for companies that empower sustainability and offer eco-friendly products and order fulfillment processes. This emphasis on sustainability can help transform communities to create a better, sustainable world and future.

There are two aspects of sustainability, as discussed below.

Transformational sustainability – Companies drive sustainability while expending long-term economic opportunities, using the latest technology and strong engagement and collaboration with their stakeholders to provide sustainable products and services. Sustainability is the new expectation of the customer and will also drive how companies operate their customer experience processes. Some examples include the co-innovation of green products. The marketing of these products and transparency with regards to the sustainability throughout the entire customer journey shows the commitment of companies to inspire their customers to a sustainable environment. You can read here about SAP’s goal to create a green customer experience.

Operational sustainability – This calls for transparency and optimization across end-to-end processes. Digital transformation and the growing number of advanced technologies have completely transformed the level of visibility across the order fulfillment process. This, together with available real-time, embedded analytics, enables companies to have full transparency throughout the order fulfillment process and optimize their monitoring processes significantly.

3. Conclusion and Outlook

In this blog, we discussed specific impacts of major business trends in sales, service, and marketing in the chemicals industry. We presented proposals and ideas that can help chemical companies manage challenges regarding improving customer experience to generate new business models. We discussed how chemical companies increase operational efficiency by using intelligent technologies. Finally, we discussed how companies can achieve sustainability as part of their digital transformation process. In the next blog, we plan to show the impacts of those major business and digital trends in relation to the supply chain.

SAP Marketing Cloud Release 2308 is here!

2023-07-28T12:15:50+02:00

The summer release of SAP Marketing Cloud is here with many new features!

A comprehensive list of all features can be found on the What’s New in SAP Marketing Cloud release page. The release has the code 2308 with 23 referring to the year 2023 and 08 referring to the month of August.

In this blog we want to highlight some of the features but be sure to have a look at the comprehensive list as well.

Products or events can be mapped to interactions in forms

The Forms and Landing Pages are now able to map events to interactions. With this, you can realize scenarios like event registration and participation without the need of an additional event management tool.

Also, you can map products to interactions in forms. This will support scenarios like product registrations via landing pages.

Map events to interactions in forms

Watch this short video to get more insights on mapping events to interactions on landing pages.

Edit Events and upload participants

The Events App allows you to edit events and upload participants with the 2308 release. With these capabilities, we address events that participants attend in person that can be realized within the SAP Marketing Cloud.

Upload participants for events

Advanced send on behalf for email campaigns

In the 2308 release of SAP Marketing Cloud, it is now possible to send an email on behalf of an account team member assigned to an account. All roles that are configured are available, allowing greater personalization flexibility.

Advanced send on behalf

Watch this short video to get a first impression.

To learn more about how you can use SAP Marketing Cloud’s 2308 new B2B capabilities, we will host a dedicated webcast on B2B Enhancements on Sept. 13th, 4 PM CEST, which is already open for registration! Afterwards a replay will be made available.

Target Group for Data File Loads

When you load contacts or corporate accounts with a file, the data file load app offers as a last optional step to add the loaded data to a target group.

Add Contacts to Target Group in Data File Load App

Additional capabilities in standard segmentation objects

In this release we extended again several segmentation objects to allow for a faster adoption of performance optimized models:

Account team members are now available as segmentation attributes in all segmentation objects.

Attributes related to surveys are now available in the segmentation object Contact Relationships.

Attributes related to coupons and offers are now available in all segmentation objects. Previously, they only existed in the segmentation object Consumers.

Find more information on the Standard Segmentation Content | SAP Help Portal.

Additionally, custom fields of marketing permissions, of subscriptions, and of cancelled subscriptions are now available for all segmentation profiles:

Custom fields available

Multiple items of interests in the Email Lite Editor

Multiple items of interests can be added now for links in emails designed in the Email Lite editor.

See more details on the multiple items of interests | SAP Help Portal.

BIMI Support for Emails

Bimi stands for Brand Indicators for Message Identification, which is an email specification enabling the use of brand-controlled logos within supporting email clients. It brings the brand logos to the customer's inbox. For more information see BIMI Group .

Customers can work with their ESP provider, for example with Sinch: BIMI Support - Sinch Community - 12138. There is no change on SAP Marketing Cloud side – it is seamless.

Scheduling of Trigger Based Campaigns

Use the new scheduling feature of a trigger-based campaign to define when the campaign shall start processing interactions.

Scheduling of Trigger Based Campaigns

Find more details on Trigger based campaigns | SAP Help Portal

Mass Deactivation of Sender Profiles

Over time our customers have collected some historic profiles which now can be cleaned up by deactivating in a consistent and convenient way. The new application job for administrators allows to deactivate sender profiles centrally. Deactivated profiles do not show up any longer when editing an email.

Application job to deactivate sender profiles

Find more details on Deactivation of sender profiles | SAP Help Portal.

Provide more transparency on system health: Check your marketing solution

Also in release 2308, we are adding more checks to offer more visibility on your system health.

Health checks in Check Your Marketing Solution

New health checks are:

Checking Email Content That is Not Aligned With Advanced on Behalf

Checking for a High Number of Email Bounces

Checking Campaign Execution Schedule

Checking the Usage of Content Delivery Network

Checking the Usage of Recommendation Cache

Checking Licensed Contacts

Checking High Number of Change Log Entries

Checking the Usage of Deprecated Google Universal Analytics Application Jobs

For more information, see System Health Checks | SAP Help Portal.

Also, we introduced System Alerts which will include individual alerts that require actions from the administrator, created by our engineers individually based on our proactive monitoring.

System Alerts in Check Your Marketing Solution

For more information see our System Alerts | SAP Help Portal .

You can take advantage of the new features immediately:

Watch the SAP Marketing Cloud | What’s New 2308 webcast to learn more about new product updates with insight from SAP Marketing Cloud experts.

Go in-depth on every feature on the What’s New in SAP Marketing Cloud release page.

Get all product details on the SAP Marketing Cloud 2308 product page which is generally available now.

Learn more about SAP Marketing Cloud https://community.sap.com/topics/marketing-cloud , and connect with other customers and product experts to get your questions answered

A new E-Learning is available: Find more information on Key Features and Benefits of SAP Marketing Cloud:

Project Delivery Framework for SAP Marketing Cloud

2023-08-01T16:02:56+02:00

Overview

Project delivery framework for SAP Marketing Cloud

The space of digital marketing is a fast paced and constantly evolving environment and so are the people working within it. Digital marketing projects need to live up to high time-to-value, value realization, and agility standards. Our framework and principles are derived from dozens of projects across regions and industries to help you to meet these high standards.

Table of Contents

Project Delivery Framework Fundamentals

Delivering SAP Marketing Cloud with SAP Activate

SAP Activate project example: SAP Model Company

Conclusion

Project Delivery Framework Fundamentals

Before going into details on how each release and phase works, there is a set of fundamental principles and practices that need to be understood for an SAP Marketing Cloud project. These principles are important across all releases and phases.

SAP Marketing Cloud can be implemented by applying different project methodologies. However, SAP Activate is a proven methodology that can help you to move fast.

The project approach for the SAP Marketing Cloud is not strict about agile nor waterfall methodologies. Nevertheless, it is important to follow the principles of agile mindsets.

The project approach is based on multiple releases and phases within a release.

Delivering SAP Marketing Cloud with SAP Activate

Project Releases & Phases

The project delivery framework for SAP Marketing Cloud as described in this article is aligned with SAP Activate. The image below will provide you with a quick reference of SAP Activate phases for the first release of your digital marketing transformation journey.

Prepare

Provisioning

- Technical availability check
- Initial steps: Connections & Admin Users

Kick-Off workshop

- Corporate & Marketing Objectives introduction
- Project plan introduction
- Identification of business owners, key users, operation owners, technical key resources from customer side
- Articulation of mandates and responsibilities of all involved parties
- Introduction of the steering committee members, cadence, decision process and meeting structure

Explore

Business workshop

- Business scenario identification
- Communication outbound channels definition
- Organizational unit nomination
- Country or regional selection

Technical & functional workshop

- Data source definition
- Feature minimal set definition
- Architecture translation
- Data model & API enhancements

Business foundation activation workshop

- Profiling Match & Merge generic tactic
- Marketing Area common denominator identification
- Permission Marketing configuration in compliance with internal policies
- Authorization granularity

Project Setup

- Fine tuning of the timeline and team member assignments
- Re-validation of scope item backlog based on scenario priorities
- Documentation of all workshop results including the decision criteria per functional and technical item

Realize

The realization activities highly depend on the workshop results from the Explore phase. Based on the multi-release and phased approach we highly recommend you work with a minimal functional and technical set in the first release.

Functional

- Profiling configuration for connected data sources
- Permission configuration
- Segmentation configuration
- Outbound channel configuration
- Content Studio configuration
- Campaign configuration
- Fact sheet configuration
- Business role setup and creation
- Connect SAP Analytics Cloud
- Activate standard analytical stories

Technical

- Connect data sources
- Apply enhancements to the data model and APIs
- Enhance integration packages to comply with enhanced data models or custom Extract-Transform-Load logic
- Create custom integration package to connect to a non-SAP data source via a push method (the source system is pushing data against a custom integration package)
- Apply minor enhancements of views for the Segmentation for custom filters and key figures

Deploy

Technical

- Run integration tests (single and volume) and document the results
- Apply corrections and re-run tests until the minimum quality level threshold is reached
- Migrate the configuration to the production tenant
- Run the initial data migration from the connected sources and start the delta load
- Create a technical operation hand-book and do a hand-over workshop

Business

- Run a production smoke test by applying a seed list and simple campaign
- Build the campaigns identified in the business scenario workshop together with the key business users
- Create a campaign warm-up plan and execute it together with the business and operation team
- Document the created campaigns and warm-up plan campaigns step-by-step as follow-up documentation for the business team

Run

- Hyper-care the campaign warm-up for at least four weeks
- Scope and design the next project wave.

Keep in mind that the organizational and geographical dimension of your second wave will be become more important. You will most likely need to split the second wave into two streams: one to re-iterate the steps above and another one to execute the organizational and geographical roll-out.

Releases and Iteration

SAP Marketing Cloud projects should be broken down into slices or increments called a release following a crawl, walk, run approach. The size of a release can vary depending on the context. When possible, we recommend you schedule releases with relatively equal duration. Smaller releases can help reduce the project's risk, improve time-to-market, and give more immediate visibility to the business and end-users. If you follow the Minimal Viable Product approach paired with the described phases above, your project duration should be between eight to twelve weeks.

SAP Activate project example: SAP Model Company

To learn more about how SAP has configured their own MVP’s for organizations kick-starting their digital transformations, review the SAP Model Company for SAP Customer Experience. SAP’s Model Company offerings are preconfigured MVPs designed for the purpose of meeting MVP timeframes and setting up for the next wave of implementation. As per SAP's implementation process for SAP Marketing Cloud, there are marketing related MVPs serving specific business scenarios, addressing the “The Six Dimensions of Success and Failure”, which are delivered based on a bill of materials purchased by our customers.

Conclusion

This project framework is applicable as a standalone implementation or part of the overall SAP Customer Experience program. You can refer to Overall SAP Customer Experience Project Framework to learn more about the project setup with multiple solutions across the portfolio.

Disclaimer: Original version of this article was published in SAP CX Works.

Account Team Member Integration - SAP Sales Cloud (C4C) to SAP Marketing Cloud (SMC)

2023-08-18T01:48:20+02:00

Introduction

The SAP standard package "SAP Cloud for Customer Integration with SAP Marketing" (Integration Flow | SAP Cloud for Customer Integration with SAP Marketing | SAP Business Accelerator Hub) for the integration between SAP Sales Cloud (C4C) and SAP Marketing Cloud (SMC) provides several iFlows for the replication of account/contact and transactional (lead, activity, etc.) data.

With release 2308, the feature "Segmentation Attributes for Account Team Members" (Interaction Contact Attributes | SAP Help Portal) will be available in SMC. To make use of the new segmentation attributes, the Account Team Member entity needs to be filled properly by C4C.

However, in the above mentioned SAP standard package, there is no iFlow for the Account Team Member replication included. Therefore, a custom approach needs to be implemented in SAP Cloud Integration (CI) to fulfil the usage in segmentation and also in the email personalization scenario.

Architecture

To replicate the Account Team Members from C4C to SMC, an iFlow needs to be created in CI. The iFlow needs to pull the data on a frequent base (e.g. scheduling: each hour) from C4C.

The OData Adapter in CI can be used to access the C4C OData Service "CorporateAccountCollection" for replication of the "Account Team Members - Account Relationship".

Then the mapping (see section "CI Configuration - Mapping") to the OData service "API_MKT_CORPORATE_ACCOUNT_SRV;v=0003/AccountTeamMembers" needs to be done, to send the data to SMC.

Please notice:

In the above illustration, also the "Account Team Members", so the Employee master data, is included. The C4C OData service "EmployeeBasicDataCollection" can be used in addition, to load further employee data (needs to be stored in custom fields or customer business objects in SMC).

However, within SMC, the employee master data is already provided in the app "Maintain Employees". The attributes "First Name", "Last Name" and "Email Address" are provided in the standard. The replication of further employee data is in most customer scenarios not needed.

Therefore, this blog focuses on the integration of the "Account Team Members Account Relationship" only.

C4C Configuration

Create Communication System for OData communication

A communication system needs to be created, to fetch the Account Team Members from C4C.

ID	e.g. SMC_AEI (Account Employee Integration)
SAP Business Suite	No
Host Name	AEI
System Access Type	Internet

In the technical information under system instances the following entry needs to be created:

System Instance ID	SMC_AEI
Preferred Application Protocol	6 - Http

Create Communication Arrangement for OData communication

A communication arrangement with communication scenario "OData Services for Business Objects" needs to created.

In the communication arrangement the following OData services have to be assigned:

businessuser

customer

employeeanduser

employeebasicdata

C4C Payload example

When fetching the "CorporateAccountTeamCollection" from C4C, the JSON payload looks like below.

GET: https://<host>/sap/c4c/odata/v1/c4codataapi/CorporateAccountTeamCollection

{

    "d": {

        "results": [

            {

                "__metadata": {

                    "uri": "https://<host>:443/sap/c4c/odata/v1/c4codataapi

                            /CorporateAccountTeamCollection('00163E04B6021ED2B7C1BAE7533304F2')",

                    "type": "c4codata.CorporateAccountTeam",

                    "etag": "W/\"datetimeoffset'2015-07-06T08%3A45%3A26.6721490Z'\""

                },

                "ObjectID": "00163E04B6021ED2B7C1BAE7533304F2",

                "ParentObjectID": "00163E04B6021ED2B7C1B5AF23E884C7",

                "AccountID": "1000001",

                "EmployeeUUID": "00163E03-A070-1EE2-88BA-37FB8F5F50A9",

                "EmployeeID": "E1000",

                "PartyRoleCode": "142",

                "PartyRoleCodeText": "Account Owner",

                "StartDate": "/Date(-62135769600000)/",

                "EndDate": "/Date(253402214400000)/",

                "MainIndicator": true,

                "SalesOrganisationID": "",

                "DistributionChannelCode": "",

                "DistributionChannelCodeText": "",

                "DivisionCode": "",

                "DivisionCodeText": "",

                "ETag": "/Date(1436172326672)/"

                }

            }

        ]

    }

}

CI Configuration

The iFlow is executed periodically to fetch the Account Team Members from C4C.
Then the mapping to the OData service is done and the data needs to be replicated to SMC.

Mapping

In the iFlow, the mapping of the C4C OData service to the SMC service needs to be maintained. Following fields need to be mapped.

All fields of the mapping are mandatory.

C4C OData	SMC OData	Comment
	CorporateAccountOrigin	Default value: "SAP_C4C_BUPA"
AccountID	CorporateAccountID
EmployeeID	TeamMemberID
PartyRoleCode	Role

Please notice:

The "Employee ID" that is replicated from C4C, needs to have the same value as in the field "Employee ID" in the "Maintain Employees" app in SMC.
If you don't use the same Employee ID (e.g. usage of automatic generated P-Numbers in SMC / different IDP in both systems / etc.), then you need to perform an additional mapping in the iFlow. This mapping needs to be adopted if you create/change the employee data in one of the systems.

The "Sales Area Data" that can be maintained in C4C standard on the Account Employee Relationship, are not considered in SMC standard. If you need to have sales area specific relationships, e.g. mapped to the marketing area, then you need to store the data in a custom business object.

SMC Configuration

OData "Account Team Members"

To replicate the "Account Team Members Account Relationships" to SMC, the below mentioned OData service needs to be used. Please have a look at the SAP-Help documentation of the OData service for more information:
Payload Examples for Corporate Accounts | SAP Help Portal

POST: https://<host>-api.s4hana.ondemand.com/sap/opu/odata/sap/API_MKT_CORPORATE_ACCOUNT_SRV;v=0003;v=/$batch

Please notice:

The function import "CorpAcctDeleteAllAccountTeamMembers" needs to be included in the payload for the correspondent account. This ensures that just the actual employee relationships are available in SMC.

The attribute "Sap-Cuan-Request-Timestamp" of "CorpAcctDeleteAllAccountTeamMembers" needs to be set to an earlier timestamp as for "AccountTeamMembers". Else the sequence of the changesets will be in the wrong order.

--batch

Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=changeset_761e49b6-3146-4a57-8d10-15816fb9c75a



--changeset_761e49b6-3146-4a57-8d10-15816fb9c75a

content-type: application/http

content-transfer-encoding: binary



POST CorpAcctDeleteAllAccountTeamMembers?CorporateAccountID='<CorporateAccountID>'&CorporateAccountOrigin='<CorporateAccountOrigin>' HTTP/1.1

Content-Length: 1035

Accept: application/json

Sap-Cuan-RequestTimestamp: '2017-10-02T12:13:10'

Sap-Cuan-SourceSystemType: EXT

Sap-Cuan-SourceSystemId: HYBRIS

Content-Type: application/json



{

}



--changeset_761e49b6-3146-4a57-8d10-15816fb9c75a

content-type: application/http

content-transfer-encoding: binary



PUT AccountTeamMembers(CorporateAccountID='<CorporateAccountID>', CorporateAccountOrigin='<CorporateAccountOrigin>',TeamMemberID='<TeamMemberID>',Role='<Role>') HTTP/1.1

Content-Length: 1035

Accept: application/json

Sap-Cuan-RequestTimestamp: '2017-10-02T12:13:20'

Sap-Cuan-SourceSystemType: EXT

Sap-Cuan-SourceSystemId: HYBRIS

Content-Type: application/json



{

}



--changeset_761e49b6-3146-4a57-8d10-15816fb9c75a--

--batch--

Team Member Data in Segmentation

With release 2308 the below segmentation attributes will be provided by the standard for the segmentation profiles "All Accounts" and "All Accounts and Contacts".

The below mentioned attributes are provided by the data load from C4C:

Employee ID of Account Team Member

Role of Account Team Member

All other attributes are determined from the employee data within SMC (app "Maintain Employees"):

Email Address of Account Team Member

First Name of Account Team Member

Last Name of Account Team Member

Team Member Data in Content Personalization

The employee attributes, like email, first name and last name, can be also used in the email content, e.g. to provide a personalized footer.

New eLearning Offering for SAP Marketing Cloud

2023-08-31T09:51:09+02:00

Hello everyone,

On behalf of the team, I am pleased to announce the release of our SAP Marketing Cloud e-learning course - Part 2 Configuring SAP Marketing Cloud.

If you haven't checked our e-learning course yet, visit our new learning platform on learning.sap.com and explore our course. This course is available to everyone for free.

Please make sure to scroll down until the end of Part 1, the first four units of this course, and you'll see the new release of Part 2, Configuring SAP Marketing Cloud.

The Part 2 - Configuring SAP Marketing Cloud consists of 4 units:

Creating and Managing Campaigns

Using Marketing Analytics in SAP Marketing Cloud

Commerce Marketing

Working with Integration in SAP Marketing Cloud

We hope you enjoy our e-learning course. Feel free to like, share, and leave a comment 🙂

Thank you!

How to make your blog posts and questions visible on SAP Customer Experience community pages?

2023-09-29T12:57:56+02:00

The SAP Customer Experience ecosystem is growing and so are the experts, like yourself, sharing their knowledge (or asking questions) within the SAP Customer Experience Community. So, how can you make sure your contributions are seen by the widest audience? To make sure your content reaches the right audience, you should use SAP Managed Tags. These tags will display your blog posts or asked questions on the right SAP Customer Experience Community pages.

What are SAP Customer Experience Community Pages?

The SAP Customer Experience Community pages will guide you along your way to a deeper understanding of your SAP Customer Experience solution and a more streamlined enablement experience. It has two tabs.

Topic Resources - offering curated product content from SAP Experts

Community Content - searchable community-generated knowledge like blog posts and Q&A related to the CX Solution

There is a dedicated Community Topic Resource Page for each CX solution. You can find these solution-specific links directly on the main SAP Customer Experience Community page.

Topic Resources

Topic ResourceTab

Community Content

Community Content Tab

How can my CX blog Q&A post appear on the SAP Customer Experience Community page and also on the respective CX product pages?

Use one or more of the following SAP Managed Tags to make your content visible on the following CX Community pages.

For https://community.sap.com/topics/customer-experience use:

Customer Experience

SAP Commerce Cloud

SAP Commerce

SAP Marketing Cloud

SAP Customer Data Cloud

SAP Customer Data Platform

SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement

SAP Sales Cloud

SAP Service Cloud

C4C Sales

C4C Service

https://community.sap.com/topics/commerce-cloud

SAP Commerce Cloud

SAP Commerce

https://community.sap.com/topics/customer-data-solutions

SAP Customer Data Cloud

SAP Customer Data Platform

https://community.sap.com/topics/cloud-for-customer

SAP Sales Cloud

SAP Service Cloud

C4C Sales

C4C Service

https://community.sap.com/topics/emarsys

SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement

https://community.sap.com/topics/marketing-cloud

SAP Marketing Cloud

How to add SAP Managed Tags?

When you create your blog post or post your question, you will find the SAP Managed Tags section below the text editor.

Sample SAP Managed Tags in a blog post

Hope this blog post help you reach more readers and more Likes. If you have any further questions, please feel free to add your comments.

You can find some additional information about writing blog posts and asking questions on the SAP Community links below:

https://community.sap.com/resources/blogging

https://developers.sap.com/tutorials/community-qa.html

Enjoy the SAP Customer Experience Community!

AI capabilities in SAP CX

2023-11-13T11:11:17+01:00

There is lot of buzz around Artificial Intelligence these days and AI adaption is on fast track across industries. It is estimated to add 2.6 trillion 4.4 trillion USD to the global economy. Organizations are forced to increase their investment in AI and targeting to use the Generative AI at least in one of their business functions.

In this blog, I want to highlight different categories of AIs and associated capabilities that can be leveraged in SAP CX portfolio of products.

SAP Business AI Approach

AI enabled processes enables organizations to anticipate customer behavior, automate certain tasks and personalize each step of the customer journey.

Using business technology platform SAP Business AI connects the Customer Data solutions (Sales, Service, Marketing and Commerce data) with Operational data solutions (ERP, SCM, HCM, FM etc.,)

There are 3 categories of Artificial Intelligence capabilities and they are

Predictive AI

Generative AI

Conversational AI

Let us look at the use cases and general availability of each one of these capabilities.

Predictive AI:

It uses statistical algorithms and Machine Learning to forecast trends, behavior, patterns, and predictions from large data sources. SAP harnesses AI & ML technology to analyze CX and ERP data to score key metrics and make personalized recommendations.

Below are some of the Predictive AI capabilities in SAP CX space.

SAP CX Solution	Predictive Capability	Description	AI Category	GA / Roadmap
Emarsys Customer Engagement	Predictive Customer Segments	Launch e-mail campaigns to the right target customers	Predictive	GA
	Send Time Optimization	Launch e-mail campaigns at the optimal time when customers are most likely to engage with the campaigns	Predictive	GA
	Predictive Recommendations	Provide personalized product and content recommendations across email, web and mobile based on online and offline data	Predictive	GA
	Channel Personalization	Connect with customers who are most likely to engage on specific channels	Predictive	GA
Sales Cloud	Lead Scoring	The lead score indicates the likelihood of conversion of lead to opportunity.	Predictive	GA
	Opportunity Scoring	Opportunity scoring uses the machine learning model trained on past sales data to predict the winning probabilities of a deal.	Predictive	GA
	Relationship Intelligence	Provides insights on previous and current contact strength	Predictive	GA
	Customer Insights	Provides growth opportunities and interactions from each customer	Predictive	GA
Service Cloud	Case Categorization	Categorizes the case automatically and route to the right agent	Predictive	GA
Service Cloud	Similar Cases	Identifies similar cases based on the subject and description and to help the agent to find the right solution quickly.	Predictive	GA
Commerce Cloud	Product Recommendations	Recommends products based on purchasing patterns, trends and related products	Predictive	GA
CDP – CIAM	Security Monitoring	Provides real time alerts for suspicious behaviors	Predictive	GA
	Account AI Take Over Protection	Enhances data security with risk based authentication	Predictive	GA
	Dynamic Identity Flows	Enhances the customer journey with AI/ML data capture optimization	Predictive	Coming soon

Generative AI:

Generative AI refers to refers to models or algorithms that generates brand new output such as text, image or other media based on the input training data.

Below are some of the Generative AI capabilities within SAP CX.

SAP CX Solution	Predictive Capability	Description	AI Category	GA / Roadmap
Emarsys Customer Engagement	Subject line Generator	Craft/edit subject lines based on the email campaign content	Generative	Q1 ‘24
Emarsys Customer Engagement	Block Content Generation	Creates content and audience input fields for each email block. Generates targeted, compelling email content that delivers right message to the right audience.	Generative	Q1 ‘24
Sales Cloud	Account Summarization	Generates summaries based on account business transactions	Generative	Q4 ‘23
	Contact Summarization	Generates summaries based on account business transactions	Generative	Q4 ‘23
	Talking Points	Provides insights that will be used to personalize the interactions with the customer	Generative	Q4 ‘23
Service Cloud	Case Summarization	Display case summary and simplify agent experience	Generative	Q4 ‘23
Service Cloud	Email Generation	Generates e-mail drafts to respond to customer inquiries	Generative	Q4 ‘23

Conversational AI :

Conversational AI enables computes to understand, process human language. It refers to technologies such as chatbot, digital assistant that performs certain tasks and can simulate human conversation using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques.

SAP Joule is generative AI Copilot that acts as a digital assistant and is embedded in SAP CX and other SAP solutions. Employees can simply ask a question in a plain language and receive intelligent answers drawn from the business data across the SAP CX portfolio and third-party sources.

Hope this blog provides an high level understanding of AI capabilities that are currently available and planned in near future for SAP CX portfolio of products.

Check Out our Latest SAP Marketing Cloud Email Videos

2024-01-09T16:48:05+01:00

We are excited to announce the release of our latest videos:

Creating a Personalized Email in Content Studio in SAP Marketing Cloud

Using Previews for Your Email in SAP Marketing Cloud

Access the short, self-contained enablement videos to help you expand your knowledge of SAP Marketing Cloud's Content Studio, available on openSAP Microlearning and YouTube.

As of Release 1911, the Content Studio app contains a new editor, which you can use to create and design emails and email templates. As a marketing expert, this editor enables you to easily design emails without having any HTML experience. The flexible modern content editor is a very intuitive tool for creating powerful marketing emails. With its drag& drop functions, you can easily create layouts. For the layout design also use reusable blocks and conditions through to sending test mails.
Up to Release 2308, the content types were called Email Lite and Email Template Lite. Now, they are called Email and Email Template, in distinction to the legacy content types Email (Legacy Editor) and Email Template (Legacy Editor).

Video - Creating a Personalized Email in Content Studio

This video shows you:

The basic functions of the Toolbox in Content Studio.

The column-based responsive layout.

How to insert reusable blocks to your content.

How to add personalization attributes, images, and hyperlinks.

How to change colors and size in emails.

Video - Using Previews for Your Email

Wouldn't you like to see how your email is displayed to your customers and how it looks on various devices before you send it out?

In this video, we’ll walk you through how to ensure that your email is displayed correctly using Previews.

Coming soon Video - Using Conditions for Emails in Content Studio

For further info, see our Application Help

Create a Personalized Email Lite or Email Template Lite

Messages for Campaigns

Don’t miss out! Check out our new videos today.

Your feedback would be greatly appreciated.

SAP Marketing Cloud Release 2402 is Here!

2024-02-05T19:36:16.672000+01:00

The winter release of SAP Marketing Cloud is here with many new features!

A comprehensive list of all features can be found on the What’s New in SAP Marketing Cloud release page. The release has the code 2402 with 24 referring to the year 2024 and 02 referring to the month of February.

In this blog we want to highlight some of the features but be sure to have a look at the comprehensive list as well.

Release Navigator for SAP Marketing Cloud

Many products already use the Release Navigator to provide easy access to the most important information about a product, so does the SAP Marketing Cloud:

For more information, use this link to the Release Navigator.

Dropdown Boxes for Products in Forms and Landing Pages

With the 2402 release we are extending what we started with assignment of products or marketing events to interactions in forms with the 2308 release: Now with 2402 we also allow to configure a set of products available to select in a dropdown box in a landing page.

The selected products then can be written into the mapped interaction.

For more information, see Interactions | SAP Help Portal.

Landing Pages fetch UTM Parameters and Hand Over into Interactions

Now the UTM parameters of landing pages can be fetched and handed over into interactions. By using custom coding in the BAdI you can then attribute the visitors and their actions to campaign success.

For more information, see Landing Pages | SAP Help Portal.

Prefilled Templates for Participants of Marketing Events

This feature simplifies the process of manually running an event by downloading a prepopulated list of participants. Just download a list of registered participants. Afterwards upload participants using a prefilled Microsoft Excel template with a new status. The template allows a simple update of participants just by changing the status in the MS Excel template.

Subdivided Child Attributes for the Segmentation

The subdivided child attributes are new segmentation attributes, which are based on existing attributes that have a dependency (parent-child-relationship).

IDs depend on ID Origins, e.g. a CRM Business Partner ID is identified as such by the ID Origin SAP_CRM_BuPa
Regions of USA depend on Country = US

This will simplify the segmentation models and dedicated personalization attributes, often mentioned use cases are in a simpler segmentation, simpler export definitions and easier personalization in emails.

Have a look at this short video that gives an overview on use cases and how to create the attributes.

For more information, see Subdivided Child Attributes | SAP Help Portal.

New Attributes in Segmentation Objects

For some segmentation objects we have extended the available attributes to allow faster adoption and reduce the need for custom fields.

For more information see Marketing Permission and Newsletter Subscription Attributes | SAP Help Portal
Additional fields (Contact ID, Contact Origin, Account ID, Account Origin, Creation Date Time, Last Change Date Time for the contact relationships: Influence request.

Assign Custom Business Objects to Marketing Areas in Segmentation

Starting with the 2402 release Custom Business Objects can be assigned to Marketing Areas and used in the segmentation. This allows for example to define attributes that are common for all contacts belonging to the same marketing area and use them in segmentation.

For more information, see Custom Business Objects for Marketing Areas | Sap Help Portal.

Easier Handling of Reusable Blocks in the Email Editor

The area for reusable block gained more space, preview, filtering, and sorting were added to improve the usability. Watch this video to get a better understanding what changed.

For more information, see Creating Reusable Content from an Email | SAP Help Portal.

Also Check Out our Latest SAP Marketing Cloud Email Videos.

Report who Executed a Campaign

We see that marketing experts may change jobs and to allow quicker handover of their campaigns we deliver this new report that shows who executed a campaign.

This video shows where to find and how to use the report.

For more information, see Executed Campaign By User | SAP Help Portal.

Provide more Transparency on System Health: Check Your Marketing Solution

Also in release 2402, we are adding more checks to offer more visibility on your system health.

New health checks are:

Checking the Number of Target Group Members: This table grows when you are using dynamic target groups and it has the basis for joiner/ leaver analysis. However, the larger it gets (e.g. sizes above 1.6b records), the longer access may take and thus increase creation time for target groups. Hence, we advise to manage this table and reduce the size.
Checking High Number of Security Log Entries.

For more information, see System Health Checks | SAP Help Portal.

Yahoo and Google Change of Policies for Mass Emailing

The email provider Google and Yahoo are introducing some new protections to avoid spammy inboxes, for example as announced here:

https://blog.google/products/gmail/gmail-security-authentication-spam-protection/ and here: Postmaster @ Yahoo & AOL — More Secure, Less Spam: Enforcing Email Standards... (yahooinc.com)

This is to ensure that users are receiving emails from a reliable recognized source they have subscribed to.

With the SAP Marketing Cloud:

Ensure that you have SPF, DKIM and DMARC in place. When you request for provisioning of an email account from an email provider, these parameters are usually demanded.

Adopting BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) can also help with reputation.
Sinch provides information on best practices for maintaining a good reputation with email marketing:

Email Authentication in 2024 Guide

Bulk Sender Checklist

Even if you are using another provider, those guidelines apply.

Contact your email provider (ESP) if you need support.

Additionally we strongly recommend to use the Automatic Unsubscribe ( List unsubscribe) | Help documentation and also the Easy Unsubscribe | Help Documentation

For the SAP Marketing Cloud we have summarized our recommendations here: 3426234 - Yahoo and Google Mail Privacy changes effect on SAP Marketing

You can take advantage of the new features immediately:

Watch the SAP Marketing Cloud | What’s New 2402 webcast to learn more about new product updates with insight from SAP Marketing Cloud experts.
Go in-depth on every feature update on the What’s New in SAP Marketing Cloud release page.
Get all product details on the SAP Marketing Cloud 2402 product page which is generally available now.

Heads Up - Deactivation of Groups in the SAP Fiori Launchpad in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition, and SAP Marketing Cloud! Switching to Spaces and Pages is mandatory. See

Connect with other customers and product experts in the https://community.sap.com/topics/marketing-cloud to get your questions answered.

Release Navigator for SAP Customer Experience What’s New in Q1 2024

2024-02-13T15:46:07.606000+01:00

The Readiness@Scale team is excited to share that the Q1 updates to the release navigator for SAP Customer Experience will be implemented on February 16, 2024. This update will include the most recent content available and incorporate enhanced user-experience (UX) elements based on your valuable recommendations.

As a team, we spent a significant amount of time aligning the overall user experience across each release navigator and focused on creating an even more unified look starting with a more modern approach to the My Home page.

Welcome: Important messages from the Readiness@Scale team will be found within this tile.
NEW! Release Calendar: Stay informed of the latest release dates that may impact your systems.
Re-designed! Product Enablement: Register for online enablement sessions, onside events, learnings & value maps brought to you by SAP Experts.
Product Release Resources: Utilize the available release resources from your products to maximize your time efficiency during the release.
About the Release Navigator: Enable yourself on the latest updates, access the Translation Feature, and explore the release navigators for SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, SAP Supply Chain Management solutions, and Spend Management & Business Network by SAP Enterprise Support.
Help Us Improve: Have any suggestions or feedback? Use the survey tile to submit any new ideas.

Major enhancements to the release navigator for SAP Customer Experience include a back arrow in SAP Commerce Cloud Documentation pages, a consolidated Customer Data Cloud Solutions product page for easier access, a Release Calendar that was highly requested, and a footer added to some of the tiles. On top of these UX improvements, you will notice content changes within some of the product pages.

Let's have a closer look at the newly added functionalities that have been developed exclusively for the release navigator for SAP CX as part of the upcoming Q1 update.

A navigation back arrow was added for SAP Commerce Cloud Documentation pages that allows users to return to the main SAP Commerce Cloud product page. To go back directly to the Home page, you can simply click the Home button on the Shell Bar.

Figure 3: Back Arrow on SAP Commerce Cloud Documentation pageThe next change you will notice is the consolidation of the SAP Customer Data Cloud and Data Platform pages. From now on, you can find release content for both products on a single product page called SAP Customer Data Solutions.

Figure 3: SAP Customer Data Solutions pageAnother highly requested feature that has been mentioned above is the Release Calendar on My Home page, which includes all announced release dates across SAP Customer Experience solutions. The dates will be updated.

Figure 4: Release Calendar tile on My Home pageWe added a footer to some of the tiles on product pages. This enhancement helps you quickly identify the source of the content at first glance.

Figure 5: An example of tiles with a footerExplore the refreshed release navigator soon (February 16, 2024) by clicking on the button below:

With this update, we have incorporated several enhancements to improve the user experience of the release navigator. Starting after Q1, the release navigator for SAP Customer Experience will be integrating UX innovations once per year, in August along with the release content, as opposed to every quarter. For each release in February, May, and November only release content will be updated. Here you can find the innovation & content update plans for 2024.

Disclaimer: These are only informational dates that could change. The Readiness@Scale team has the final decision over any UX modifications.

The release navigator for SAP Customer Experience is now only two clicks away from Support.SAP.com!

1. Go to the new Release Ready page
2. Click on the SAP Customer Experience link

You can also access the release navigator for SAP Customer Experience via the SAP Enterprise Support Value Maps like before.

Follow the Readiness@Scale community tag, and Malgorzata Konopelska to stay up to date with the latest blog posts. If you have any feedback or specific requests regarding the release navigator, we would be more than happy to hear from you. We appreciate all feedback and value your input. In order to collect both positive reactions and constructive feedback, we have created a survey.

Readiness@Scale
SAP Enterprise Support

Introduction to Permission Marketing

2024-02-15T08:21:46.077000+01:00

When was the last time you were positively surprised by a brand which kept you informed with relevant content at the right time? And in contrast, when was the last time you hit the unsubscribe button in a marketing e-mail because the content was irrelevant to you? Or were you even annoyed by a communication for which you did not opt-in in the first place? Hopefully, the positive brand experience is the last one you remember, but chances are high it was the negative one. This is also the situation your customers are in.

In this article, we discuss Permission Marketing. As a marketer, this can help you avoid negative consumer experiences and instead create positive surprises. Permission Marketing also helps you staying compliant while increasing your marketing effectiveness.

Disclaimer

This article is business-focused, non-technical and solution-agnostic. The article includes remarks on legal regulations, like the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This is not to be seen as any form of legal advice or legal consulting. Please involve and consult your legal department and/or data protection officer for any legal aspects related to Permission Marketing.

Definition and Motivation

Permission Marketing is a targeted marketing technique in which only contacts are addressed "who have shown interest and who have given permission to be contacted. In contrast, the classical marketing addresses a large amount of contacts regardless of permission ." (ref-1)

The term Permission Marketing has been around for more than two decades. In other words, the concept is not a new one. It got introduced in 1999 by the American author and marketing expert Seth Godin (ref-2). Despite the long existence of the concept, it is even more relevant today than it was 25 years ago.

Godin based his recommendation for Permission Marketing mainly on business outcomes, observing that permission-based campaigns perform more successful than traditional methods. While business outcomes are still a valid and important consideration, the past years have surfaced additional aspects which make the usage of Permission Marketing obligatory. These aspects are the increased sensitivity of customers on usage of their data, as well as the progression of stricter data protection regulations in various regions. A prominent example of such regulation is the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which came into force in May 2018. We will come back to GDPR in several places in this article.

Permission Types

Before looking at how to design a Permission Marketing concept, let us clarify in detail what permissions are. For this, we introduce some relevant terms which are being used within this article, taking definitions from GDPR as a reference:

Term(s)	GDPR - Article 4 - Definitions (excerpt)	Remarks
Personal Data & Data Subject	"Personal data" means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person ("data subject"). An identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person.
Data Processing	"Processing" means any operation or set of operations which is performed on personal data or on sets of personal data, whether or not by automated means, such as collection, recording, organization, structuring, storage, adaptation or alteration, retrieval, consultation, use, disclosure by transmission, dissemination or otherwise making available, alignment or combination, restriction, erasure or destruction.	In regards to Permission Marketing, most relevant data processing is profiling and the data usage for marketing communication.
Profiling	"Profiling" means any form of automated processing of personal data consisting of the use of personal data to evaluate certain personal aspects relating to a natural person, in particular to analyze or predict aspects concerning that natural person's performance at work, economic situation, health, personal preferences, interests, reliability, behavior, location or movements.	The consent for profiling is closely related to the "inbound permission" which is explained below.
Consent or Permission	"Consent" of the data subject means any freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the data subject's wishes by which he or she, by a statement or by a clear affirmative action, signifies agreement to the processing of personal data relating to him or her.	In this article, we use the terms "consent" and "permission" as having the same meaning and being interchangeable.

In summary, a permission is an agreement to the processing of personal data. The purpose of processing needs to be clearly stated. Permissions, therefore, are tied to a certain kind of processing.

To structure these purpose specific permissions, we differentiate between "inbound permissions" and "outbound permissions" (as shown in illustration-1 below and explained in the following two sections).

Illustration-1: Inbound vs. Outbound Permission

Inbound Permissions

In many regions, especially if you have to follow GDPR, you need to enforce an essential step before loading any personal data into your marketing system. You need to collect the contact's permission for storing and profiling the personal data for marketing purposes. This is what we call "inbound permission" (see also illustration-1 above). The process of collecting inbound permission is typically handled through a consent management system, like for example SAP Customer Data Cloud, before the data is sent to the marketing system.

Outbound Permissions

As shown in illustration-1, outbound permissions reflect the contact's agreement to receive marketing communication, therefore they are related to the usage of the personal data.

When asking contacts for marketing permission, you should be specific and transparent in your inquiry. The following table helps you to understand the most important elements of outbound permissions.

Permission Element	Leading Question	Remarks
Communication Medium	Which communication medium do you want to use (for example, e-mail, call, or direct push message)?	You should clearly state through which communication medium you want to reach your contacts. Ideally, you give them the option to choose between multiple ways to be contacted.
Address / Identifier	On which specific address does your contact want to receive the communication (for example, jane.doe@example.com, +44-20-7946-0930, or @twitterusername)?	The address allows you to identify the contact who gave you permission and to know where to send the communication to. For example, a contact provides consent for marketing messages to his/her private e-mail-address, but not to his/her work-related e-mail-address. Another important aspect is also the combination of communication medium and address. A contact might, for example, give you consent to use the e-mail-address for communication to the e-mail-inbox, but not to use the same e-mail address for personalized advertising on Facebook (by the usage of custom audiences).
Generic or topic-specific communication	Should your contacts give you permission for general marketing communication, or do you want to give them the option to select topic-specific communication based on their interest?	When asking your contacts for marketing permission, you should keep them informed for which exact purpose you want to send them communication. Is it for general marketing and promotion purposes, or do you want to keep them up-to-date about specific topic areas like events, product launches, or whitepaper articles? Communication which is based on opt-in to specific topics (and not just on general marketing permission) has a great advantage: You provide your contacts' freedom of choice and show them that you try to target your messages according to their interests. By doing so, you send more relevant content and can expect higher engagement rates and fewer opt-outs. In addition, you can also reach contacts which may not be willing to provide their consent for general marketing messages, but only for certain topics.
Organizational entity	Does your company have separate brands or market units for which you collect permission?	In case you have a multi-brand or multi-org business, you might need to collect permissions which are specific to the communication of the individual organizational entities. Usually this is done by having separate permission request forms per organizational entity and clearly tying this reference to the permission when it is transferred into the marketing system.

The outbound permissions are typically collected through a landing page or preference center on which the contact can grant or revoke permission to receive the communication. It is often also necessary to perform an initial migration of outbound permissions from a legacy marketing or customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Now that we have a better understanding on what permissions are, let us look at what to consider during the design of a Permission Marketing concept.

Building a Permission Marketing Concept

Illustration-2: Influence factors on Permission Marketing

In order to understand the relevant aspects of a Permission Marketing concept, we look at three main influence factors: legal regulation, internal policy, and individual preference. As illustrated in illustration-2 above, think of these factors as a funnel which specifies the addressable audience for your marketing campaigns.

We will explain each of these three factors individually in the following section. Let us start at the top of the funnel and go into detail on legal regulation.

Legal Regulation

When designing your Permission Marketing concept, the first aspect which you must consider is existing legal regulation. In many geographic regions, it is the most important influence factor with respect to Permission Marketing. Legal regulation forces companies to establish compliant processes for processing customer data and conducting marketing communication. Which specific regulations take effect for your business depends on the geographic regions your company is established in, as well as the region your consumers are based in. To make this more tangible, let us take a closer look at GDPR as an example.

Permission Marketing in the Context of GDPR

Note:
GDPR is relevant for all kinds of processing of personal data, not only marketing. For all the aspects of GDPR described in the following, we are focusing only on those which we consider as most relevant for Permission Marketing.

Topic	Leading Question	Most relevant aspects for Permission Marketing
Territorial Scope	Which companies are affected by GDPR?	The territorial scope of GDPR applies to: "a company or entity which processes personal data as part of the activities of one of its branches established in the EU, regardless of where the data is processed; or a company established outside the EU and is offering goods/services (paid or for free) or is monitoring the behavior of individuals in the EU." (ref-3)
Principles for Data Processing	What needs to be considered when processing personal data for marketing purposes?	Relevant aspects in GDPR for processing personal data in the context of Permission Marketing are: Lawfulness, Fairness and Transparency Personal data shall be processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner in relation to the data subject. (ref-4) Purpose Limitation Personal data shall be collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes. (ref-4) Data Minimization Personal data shall be adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which they are processed. (ref-4)
Lawfulness of Data Processing	When is it lawful to process personal data for marketing purposes?	At least one of the following requirements must be met: Consent The data subject has given consent to the processing of his or her personal data for one or more specific purposes. (ref-5) Legitimate Interest Processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the controller or by a third party, except where such interests are overridden by the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject which require protection of personal data, in particular where the data subject is a child. (ref-5)
Possible Fines for Violations	What are possible fines a corporation might face when violating against GDPR regulation?	"Serious infringements (which) go against the very principles of the right to privacy (...) could result in a fine of up to €20 million, or 4% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher." (ref-6)

As shown in the table above, the fines which may be imposed when violating against GDPR can be drastic for companies of all sizes. It is therefore a must that you know whether your marketing activities are affected by the regulation and if so, you need to follow the principles for data processing in a lawful way. A good source to find information about already imposed GDPR fines is the GDPR enforcement tracker.

Here are a few additional thoughts on the lawfulness of processing personal data for marketing purposes. While consent-based data processing puts the individual's data protection rights at the center, we believe that the data processing based on legitimate interest is to be treated with great caution. Digital marketing based on legitimate interest is an approach which requires a risk-assessment. Here you need to balance between a potential legitimate interest of your company and the individual's data protection rights. This is especially true in the context of B2C marketing where data processing that is not based on consent may be hard to justify. In case you want to find more information on marketing based on legitimate interest, the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has published a detailed guidance on legitimate interest under GDPR.

General Approach to Legal Regulation

No matter if you are affected by GDPR or any other legal regulation on data protection and marketing communication, you should always conduct an assessment of the legal situation, answering leading questions like:

Which legal regulation is currently or in the near future impacting the company's marketing activities?
Due to the legal regulation (especially for data collection and sending marketing communication), which processes need to be implemented to stay compliant?
What is the risk of being punished for non-compliance and what would be the expected results?
What needs to be considered in terms of collecting permissions (both inbound and outbound)?

You should address these questions with your Data Protection Officer and/or legal department. This will provide you with a must-have list of processes which need to be established in your marketing system in order to comply with legal regulations.

A brief example for such a must-have list might look like this (again, this is depending on which legal regulation applies to your company):

List item	Actions to Perform in Order to Comply with the Legal Regulation
Inbound Permissions	"We have to establish mechanisms which ensure that only contacts who gave their consent for data storage and profiling are loaded into the marketing system."
Outbound Permissions	"We have to make sure that we have a clear and consistent process for collecting and updating marketing permissions in place."
Ability to Demonstrate Compliance	"We have to be able to demonstrate to the authorities that our contacts have consented to the processing of their personal data. Therefore we require a clear log of all permissions, including change history."
Send-out of Marketing Communication	"We must have reliable checks in place that no marketing communication is sent to contacts who did not give their consent for it."

To summarize, introducing processes which help you stay compliant with legal regulations are essential and minimize the risk for high penalties. It is the first step of narrowing down your addressable audience (by not looking at the contacts which you may technically be able to reach, but only at those who you are legally allowed to communicate to).

Internal Policy

Let us move one level further in the funnel (see illustration-2) and look at internal policy.

While legal regulations force companies to establish a certain set of processes in order to stay compliant, many companies go one step further. They establish additional internal policies for their Permission Marketing which go beyond legal compliance. Typical goals of those internal policies are global process standardization, focusing on engaged contacts, and avoiding over-communication. Let us look at these three objectives to better understand how they may translate into processing rules.

Global Process Standardization:
- Some global companies which are affected by a strict data protection regulation (like GDPR) choose to roll-out processes to comply with this regulation on a global scale, even in regions for which it would not be legally necessary. This includes asking for explicit permission for marketing communication even in regions where an opt-out based approach would be sufficient. The rationale for such a policy is that a globally unified process for permission handling decreases complexity and allows for re-usability. A landing page or preference center which is designed in a GDPR-compliant way can as well be leveraged in countries with more lax legal requirements.
Focus on Engaged Customers:
- Many companies choose to remove contacts from the marketing database after a certain period of inactivity, or if they cannot be reached due to an opt-out to marketing communication (even if consent for data storage is still given). This approach allows companies to concentrate their communication, and the cost involved with it, on the contacts which actively engage with the company.
Avoiding Over-Communication
- Companies which send marketing communication on a high frequency face the risk to annoy their contacts with too much and maybe even irrelevant messages. This quickly results in high opt-out rates and ultimately inefficient marketing. To prevent this from happening, we recommend to closely monitor and manage communication frequency to individual contacts. Introducing rules on communication frequency can be seen as one part of the internal policy. A clear set of rules on when to limit communication can also be seen as a component of internal policies for Permission Marketing.

The examples above illustrate how decisions beyond pure legal compliance manifest in internal policies for processing of personal data. The agreement on such internal policies should happen in close collaboration with the marketing business and should be clearly documented.

Individual Preference

Now, we have reached the last element of the funnel (see illustration-2), individual preference. While legal regulation and internal policies are all about staying compliant and establishing efficient processes, individual preference really puts the individual contacts first. It means giving the receivers greater flexibility of choice on the way you communicate to them. The main benefits of this approach have already been called out before such as higher relevance in your communication, increased engagement of the contacts, and lower opt-out rates.

The tool of choice to provide this flexibility is a preference center in which contacts can subscribe and unsubscribe to communication based on topic, select their preferred communication channel(s), and decide in which frequency they want to hear from you.

Building up and maintaining this individualized, preference-based communication comes with challenges: You need to have dedicated teams to create topic-specific content with a certain regularity, and you need to establish additional communication channels beyond simple e-mail marketing. In addition, you should consider conducting surveys in which your customers can provide feedback on your communication approach. This way you can learn from their feedback and adjust your communication to better serve their needs.

Conclusion

This article introduced you to Permission Marketing, why it is important, and how to build a structured concept for it. The three main aspects (legal regulation, internal policy, and individual preference) should be followed in sequence when you define your concept.

Keeping your marketing activities legally compliant by following relevant regulations can be seen as a "must-have" and should be addressed together with your legal department.
Establishing internal policies to increase efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing activities is a "should-have" and requires close involvement of your marketing business.
Allowing for individual preference is certainly also a "should-have". However, it involves a lot of complexity and should be tackled after you have addressed legal regulation and internal policy.

Closing Remarks

Thank you for reading this article. I hope you found it helpful for diving into the topic of Permission Marketing. Please leave a like or a comment, in case you want to.

Should you need further support with your Permission Marketing concept or other Marketing Operations aspects, we from SAP CX Services are happy to help you with expert guidance.

References

(ref-1) SAP Help Portal, Permission Marketing

(ref-2) Seth Godin, Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends, and Friends into Customers , 1999

(ref-3) European Commission, Who does the data protection law apply to?

(ref-4) General Data Protection Regulation, Article 5 - Principles relating to processing of personal data

(ref-5) General Data Protection Regulation, Article 6 - Lawfulness of processing

(ref-6) GDPR.eu, What are the GDPR fines?

Campaign Build - Segmentation Best Practice

2024-02-16T08:28:18.744000+01:00

Disclaimer

This article has previously been published on the SAP CX Works platform, which is no longer accessible. The content is still relevant for SAP Marketing Cloud users, so the article is now republished as a blog on SAP Community.

Do you have a new digital marketing campaign which you want to realize? Together with your colleagues you have already worked out a campaign brief, describing your planned campaign in detail. You have conceptually defined the target audience, campaign flow, channels and content and now you are ready to put your campaign into action?

We are here to help you with best practices on how to turn your campaign definition into a running campaign in your SAP Marketing Cloud system.

In this article we are going to focus on the Segmentation within the campaign build process. You will learn about a versatile step-by-step segmentation approach, along with tips to build performant segmentation models and avoid common pitfalls.

Introduction

Before we dive into the details, let us get an orientation where Segmentation is positioned when looking at the campaign operation process (illustration-1).

Illustration-1: Simplified campaign operation process

Segmentation is part of the Build phase within the campaign operation process. As with the other actions during campaign build, Segmentation requires a clear conceptual definition of the campaign to start with.

Segmentation is the element in the campaign build process (see illustration-2) which leads to the setup of the target group to be included in the campaign.

Illustration-2: Campaign Build process

The Segmentation is performed on the available contact profiles you have gathered via Profiling in the Marketing system. In most cases, Profiling happens in an automated, ongoing way by integrating contact data from external systems via API calls. Let's assume Profiling is taking care of and we can get to the next step which is Segmentation. The result of this segmentation step is a target group which can be used in a campaign, together with the marketing content that you want to send.

We will not go into more detail on Profiling, Campaign Flow and Content in this article, but rather concentrate on Segmentation best practices. For this we also assume that you are already familiar with the general usage of the Segmentation app within SAP Marketing Cloud. A general introduction on how to use the app and all its features would go beyond the constraints of this article and there is already respective content available. In case you want to learn more about the functions and features of Segmentation we recommend the Segmentation section in the Application Help.

In the following, we are focusing on the main segmentation challenges we have seen at multiple customers. For this we first set the stage by looking at the conceptual definition of target groups.

Defining the Target Group

Based on our experience, marketers sometimes struggle with the precise definition of target groups. Obviously, these unclear definitions are a challenge when it comes to building campaigns in a marketing system. This is especially true for an operational setup in which marketers are responsible for specifying the campaign tactics and an agency or service center is performing the campaign build. To facilitate the clear definition of campaigns and target groups, we recommend the usage of campaign briefings.

As part of working with campaign briefings, we recommend the differentiation between inclusive and exclusive attributes for defining target groups. It also makes sense to further differentiate between master data and interaction data in this step.

Let us look at an exemplary target group definition to make this approach more tangible:

A global fashion company wants to run a promotion campaign in North America. In this campaign, the company wants to address female consumers who recently purchased a product and opened marketing emails. The company is running a parallel campaign in New York for opening a new flagship store which they do not want to interfere with. Also, they want to make sure customers who recently raised a complaint or sent an inbound email are not being targeted by the campaign. As last criteria, the target group should not include any consumers younger than 18 years.

This exemplary target group has quite a few attributes and may not necessarily be a standard case. However, we want to explain how such a complex case can be consistently documented and later build in segmentation. As you can see in table one below, we are using four leading questions to qualify the target group.

Segment Group A
Inclusive Master Data Attributes

Segment Group B
Exclusive Master Data Attributes

Segment Group C
Inclusive Interaction Attributes

Segment Group D
Exclusive Interaction Attributes

Leading Question

Which master data attributes (e.g. country, loyalty membership) qualify contacts to be part of the target group?

Which master data attributes (e.g. country, loyalty membership) disqualify contacts from the target group?

Which specific interactions (e.g. product purchased, video viewed) qualifies contacts to be part of the target group?

Which specific interactions (e.g. product purchased, video viewed) disqualifies contacts to be part of the target group?

Target Group Definition (Example)

Country: United States OR Canada
AND

Gender: female

City: New York
OR
Age: Below 18 years

Has made a purchase within the last 6 months
AND
Has opened a marketing email in the last 4 months

Has raised a complaint within the last 3 months
OR
Send an inbound mail within the last 2 weeks

This clearly documented target group definition has multiple benefits:

Let segmentation users know exactly which target group to build.
Help to structure the segmentation build, resulting in more streamlined segmentation models.
Serve as a communication method of target group definitions outside of the marketing tool.
Allow to define target groups for which data points may not be available yet, serving as a basis for an implementation request.

Now that we have the target group definition, we will discuss in the next section how to build up the target group in SAP Marketing Cloud using Segmentation.

Multi-step segmentation approach

The Segmentation within SAP Marketing Cloud is a powerful tool and offers a lot of flexibility. On the one hand, this flexibility is great for building target groups which are very much tailored to your campaign requirements. On the other hand, the segmentation flexibility can also result in some typical challenges:

Segmentation models which are not build in a structured way can easily become confusing, hard to understand and incorrect.
Depending on the quality of the segmentation model, the resulting segmentation performance can greatly vary.
Identifying and correcting errors in unstructured segmentation models is very difficult.

Let us address these challenges by introducing a structured multi-step segmentation approach, along with additional recommendations on how to best build up your segmentation.

We found that the previously shown method to define target groups (see table above), helps to build up a comprehensive segmentation model. The four segment groups (A-D) by which the target group is described can be used to build up the segmentation flow in subsequent steps:

Step 1: Start by building Segment Group A, including all the filters for inclusive master data attributes into the flow.
Step 2: From the Segmentation Group A, exclude all the attributes defined in your Segmentation Group B, by using the "equal-to & exclude" operation.
Step 3a: Build parallel segmentation branch(es) with the inclusive interaction data (Segment Group C), starting from the root segment. Use one branch per interaction type if you need to further qualify them (e.g. different date range).
Step 3b: In case of multiple branches with inclusive interaction data, combine them after you have segmented the individual interaction types. For combining inclusive interactions, you typically use an Intersect operation to represent a logical AND.
Step 4a: Build parallel segmentation branch(es) with the exclusive interaction data (Segment Group D), starting from the root segment. Use one branch per interaction type if you need to further qualify them (e.g. different date range).
Step 4b: In case of multiple branches with exclusive interaction data, combine them after you have segmented the individual interaction types. For combining exclusive attributes, you typically use a Merge operation to represent a logical OR.
Step 5: Subtract the exclusive interaction data branch (Segment Group D) from the inclusive interaction data branch (Segment Group C).
Step 6: Intersect the segmentation branch with the master data attributes with the segmentation branch containing the interaction data (build in step 5).
Step 7: Create your target group on the last segment.

You can examine the previously described steps in illustration-3 below.

Illustration-3: Multi-step segmentation on master data and interaction data

In addition to a comprehensive segmentation flow, the separation between master data and interaction data helps to prevent common segmentation mistakes which can happen by mixing master data and interaction data in one branch.

Next to following the multi-step approach as described above, there are further recommendations which help you build your segmentation model. We group these tips into three chapters: Correctness, Usability and Performance. The next chapter provides you with tips on how to avoid common logical mistakes and build correct segmentations models.

Segmentation Correctness Tips

Filtering on Interactions

In general, segmenting on interaction data needs special attention. When you filter on an attribute (be it master data or interaction data), all the following segments will only show contacts which meet the previously defined criteria. This should be kept in mind especially when you filter on different interactions. As soon as you filter on an interaction type (for example "Sales Order"), all the following segments in the same branch only filter on these specific interactions.

Illustration-4 shows this behavior with two different ways to segment on Sales Orders and Email Opened interactions.

Illustration-4: Filtering on interactions

Flow A uses one segmentation branch per interaction type and then combines them. It therefore achieves the desired result to select consumers who have made a purchase in the last 6 months and opened an email in the last 4 months.
Flow B in contrast is filtering on both interaction types sequentially in one branch and returns no contacts, even though it includes the same filters as Flow A. This makes sense if you think about the fact that an "Email Opened" is not the same as a "Sales Order".

This emphasizes our previously given recommendation to use separate segmentation branches per interaction type.

✔️ Best practice
When segmenting on interactions, it is best practice to first select the interaction type and then further specify the interactions in the child segments based on additional interaction attributes like date, reason or channel.

The difference between "Equal to & Exclude" and "Not-equal to & Keep"

A common pitfall we have seen is the incorrect usage of the "Equal to & Exclude" and the "Not-equal to & Keep" operations. At first look, it might seem that the two operations mean the same thing. However, there are important logical differences between them. These can especially get tricky when filtering on attributes which have a 1:n or n:m relation to the contact. The following table explains the results of the two operations in more detail.

Contact to Attribute Relation	Equal to & Exclude	Not-equal to & Keep
	Returns all contacts who do not have the specified attribute value.	Returns all contacts who have an attribute value (not null) which is not matching the specified value.
1:1 Relation Example: Country	Contacts with null values (no value for the attribute) are included.	Contacts with null values (no value for the attribute) are not included.
1:n Relation Example: Interaction Type	Contacts which have the selected attribute value (e.g. have the specified interaction type) are excluded.	Contacts which have any other attribute value (e.g. have a different interaction type) are included. Contacts may also have the specified attribute value, as long as they meet the criteria that they also have a different value.
n:m Relation Example: Target Group	Contacts which have the selected attribute value (e.g. are member of the specified target group) are excluded.	Contacts which have any other attribute value (e.g. are members of a different target group) are included. Contacts may also have the specified attribute value, as long as they meet the criteria that they also have a different value.

Let us further clarify the logic for 1:n (or n:m) relations with an example. Assume you want to filter contacts on the interaction type "website visit". What are the outcomes of the two segmentation operations?

"Equal to & Exclude": Selects all the contacts which did not perform a "website visit" interaction. (See segment A on illustration-6 below)
"Not-equal to & Keep": Selects all the contacts which have at least one interaction which is different from a "website visit" (see segment B on illustration-5 below).

Illustration-5: Visualizing the difference between "Equal To & Exclude" and "Not-equal to & Keep"

Keeping the above explanation in mind, please make sure you use the correct segmentation operation, depending on the individual use case.

✔️ Best practice
Should you be able to model your segmentation with "Not-equal to & Keep", you should preferably do so, since the exclude operation in "Equal to & Exclude" tends to be more performance intensive.

Filtering on Campaign Members Instead of Target Group Members

A very common requirement in Segmentation is that you filter on recipients of a campaign. Just to name two use cases:

You want to exclude contacts from a dynamic target group who already received communication from a related recurring campaign.
You want to include recipients from a specific campaign into a follow-up campaign.

Let's look at an example for the first use case (exclusion) in more detail:

You are running a customer satisfaction survey campaign in Germany which consumers should receive every 90 days, given that they have provided permission. The campaign is scheduled with a weekly recurrence to include new contacts via a dynamic target group. You want to make sure that target group members do not receive a new survey email with every weekly execution, but only if they haven't received the email in the last 90 days (including the current month).

Our proposed segmentation sequence for this use case is shown in illustration-6 below.

Illustration-6: Filtering on campaign members and actions

In general, segmenting contacts based on campaign interactions can be flexibly achieved by combining the following interaction attributes in one segmentation branch:

"Campaign ID" and/or "Content ID" (if you want to specify interactions on individual content items)
"Interaction Type" (e.g. outbound email, click-through)
"Interaction Date"

This approach to segment campaign members based on campaign interactions can be used more granular than only filtering on the membership in a target group. Therefore our general recommendation is to filter contacts based on campaign interactions, rather than on the target group attribute.

Segmentation Usability Tips

Keep Segmentation Intelligible by Naming Segments

Especially when multiple business users are using the same target groups or filters (live target groups) for their campaigns, it is important that the underlying segmentation model is easy to comprehend. This should include all the segments included in the segmentation model. A simple, but effective way to make your segmentation more comprehensible is the usage of named segments.

Per default, when you created a segment, it will be named according to the segmentation attribute and the values used as filter. This can be sufficient when you filter only on a few attribute values. But quite often, a segment can be based on many attribute values or, in the case of interaction attributes, include a time dependency. In these cases, we recommend the usage of segment names which have been defined by the user. Illustration-7 shows a common example where the segment name which was automatically created based on the filter criteria is not self-explaining.

Illustration-7: Using segment names to improve readability

In this example, the consumer base is filtered to all consumers which live in Europe. This filter on countries obviously includes a fairly long list of attribute values, which cannot be fully displayed in the segment name. However, by simply renaming the segment to "European countries", the purpose of the segment is easily understandable.

✔️Guideline when to rename a segment
Put yourself in the shoes of another person looking at your segmentation model. Is it easy to understand the meaning of the segment just by looking at the automated name? If this is not the case, you should consider renaming the segment with your own description which should be precise and easy to understand.

Segmentation Performance Tips

In general, the performance of your segmentation models is influenced by a number of factors. Some of these factors are in control of the segmentation user, others are more depending on the underlying data model and are therefore rather in control of the marketing operation team.

The following list displays the most important performance influence factors.

Segmentation Sequence

In control of: Segmentation users
Recommendation: The sequence of your segmentation steps can have an impact on segmentation performance. This is a factor which can be influenced by the business user building the segmentation model. For a detailed recommendation, please see the section "Segmentation Sequence" below.

Segmentation Operations

In control of: Segmentation users
Recommendation: The Segmentation application is translating the UI-based segmentation into SQL statements to query the data. It is important to know that certain operators are more performance intensive than others. Please see the section "Avoiding Costly Segmentation Operations" below for more details.

Segmentation Complexity

In control of: Segmentation users
Recommendation: Complexity of a segmentation or building block is defined as the amount of ancestor segments for a particular segment and the depth of the segmentation model. You should try to avoid building highly complex segmentation models in order to avoid performance and reliability issues. To safeguard the stability and reliability of Segmentation, SAP has introduces Segmentation Complexity Restrictions.

Data Volume

In control of: Marketing operations team
Recommendation: In general, the higher the data volume (e.g. number of contacts and interactions) you have in your system, the more system performance is required to calculate segmentation results. We strongly recommend that you only keep data (contacts and interaction history) in your marketing system which is required for your marketing activities. This can be achieved by implementing a data retention and deletion policy.

Parallel occurring jobs, processes and workloads

In control of: Marketing Operations Team
Recommendation: Keep in mind that there may be other jobs or processes (for example data imports, score calculations or campaign executions) running in parallel to your segmentation activities. You should check with your marketing operation team that your segmentation activities are aligned with these processes to avoid a high load on the system. In this context, you should also check that the scheduled execution of campaigns and other performance intensive system processes are not impacting each other.

Segmentation Extensibility

In control of: Person responsible of data model extensibility
Recommendation: Custom Views are a very flexible tool to customize or extend the standard business objects (e.g. Contact or Interaction) you use within Segmentation. However, depending on the number, complexity and performance of these custom views, they can have a high impact on the performance of your segmentation model. In addition to the extension of the standard business objects, Custom Business Objects provide another flexible way to extend your segmentation model. Our recommendation is to always check whether your segmentation requirement can be achieved with standard attributes before bringing in additional, potentially performance-intensive, custom views and custom business objects.

Segmentation Sequence

We recommend to use filter attributes in a sequence from "strong selectivity" to "weak selectivity". This means that you should reduce the volume of your segments early in the segmentation flow. You should also keep in mind that complex attributes (for example Scores and attributes based on custom views) typically require more computation time than "simple" attributes. In most cases, an improved calculation speed can be achieved by placing these performance intensive attributes towards the end of your segmentation flow (with less contacts). Illustration-8 shows a simple example on how to apply these two recommendations in a performant filter sequence.

Illustration-8: Filter sequence

You can see in the example that branch "A" has a more selective attribute early in the flow and the more performance intensive attribute at the end. In many cases, an optimized segmentation sequence offers great potential to achieve a significantly faster segmentation calculation time.

✔️ Recommendation
It might not always be possible to strictly stick to the filter sequence recommendations mentioned in this section. Nevertheless, especially if you filter on large data volumes with performance intensive attributes, you should try to optimize your filter sequence as good as possible.

Avoiding costly segmentation operations

Contains Pattern and Contained in File

The comparison operators (like "Equal to", "Greater than" or "Contains pattern") which are used when building segments come with different cost in computation. Please be aware that especially the operators "Contains pattern", "Does not contain pattern" and "Contained in file" tend to be performance intensive. This is because they are using regular expressions on data base level to not only select exact value matches, but also values which contain the defined pattern in a text string (e.g. domain within an email-address). In addition, these operators need to convert the data to same case before doing the comparison. You can find more details on case sensitivity on the following help page.

We generally recommend to use the "equal to" operator instead of "contains pattern" if this can be achieved. In case the operation "contains pattern" is still required, you should try to use it towards the end of your segmentation flow, following the recommendation given in the previous section.

Reduce Randomly per Reference Object

Another costly segmentation operation is the usage of "reduce randomly per reference object". A common use case for this operation is the deduplication of email addresses as described in SAP Note 2448963. In case you have multiple contacts which share the same email address, you should check whether this is intended behavior or poor data quality. Typically shared e-mail addresses are common in a B2B context (corporate email addresses), but not in a B2C context. In case the shared email addresses occur due to poor data quality, we recommend you to investigate with your marketing operation team (or implementation partner) why this happens and how the contacts can be corrected.

Same as with the other performance intensive operations, should you not be able to avoid the usage of "reduce randomly per reference object", you should try to only apply it on already reduced data volume towards the end of your segmentation model.

Segmentation Diagnostics

Closing this chapter on segmentation performance, we want to provide you with some tips on how to analyze the performance of your segmentation models.

The easiest way to see the calculation time for a specific segment is to do a mouseover on the segment name, until a box with additional segment information appears. This information box contains the calculation time of the segment. We use the similar example as in the section on Segmentation Sequence, now showing the individual segment calculation times in illustration-9.

Illustration-9: Analyzing calculation time of segments via mouseover

When analyzing the runtimes of the segments, it is best practice to recalculate the segments individually, starting from top to bottom. This approach allows you to try out different segmentation sequences, optimizing the overall runtime of your segmentation model.

A more advanced way to analyze the runtimes within your segmentation model is to use the "Segmentation Diagnostics". Illustration-10 shows how to get to the segmentation diagnostics within the Segmentation app.

Illustration-10: How to turn on Segmentation Diagnostics

The segmentation diagnostics allow you to trace the runtime of your segmentation model in detail, including runtimes for the individual segments as displayed in illustration-11.

Illustration-11: Exemplary segmentation diagnostics including SQL runtime per segment

The segmentation diagnostics can also be exported to a CSV file, which allows you to further analyze the data in external tools like Excel.

Conclusion

In this article you were introduced to best practices in building correct, comprehensible and performant segmentation models to determine target groups for your campaigns. You have learned about a multi-step segmentation approach based on a templatized target group definition, as well as further tips on how to improve segmentation usage.

To summarize, Segmentation in SAP Marketing Cloud is a powerful and flexible tool to create very specific target groups. The great flexibility can also come with challenges on how to optimally build your segmentation model. We hope that the article gave you good tips in mastering Segmentation with confidence.

Is your organization ready for a marketing transformation?

2024-03-28T20:08:53.899000+01:00

“Fruit of the Room”, a prominent online retailer specializing in fruit-themed products for the home, has been a long-time SAP Marketing Cloud (SMC) customer. Contact profiling, marketing permissions, trigger-based campaigns, and landing pages are just some of the features regularly used. Recognizing the need to evolve their marketing solution, they contacted their Customer Success Partner, Taylor, for advice.

Taylor knew SMC licenses won’t be renewed past December 2026 as SAP adjusted innovation investments towards other marketing relevant solutions. Taylor also understood the need for a transformation; the one size fits all model of SMC wouldn’t suffice and an adaptable and composable Martech stack was needed. This approach harnessed the power of SAP's suite of marketing solutions, including SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement and SAP Customer Data Platform, and created a more agile and effective marketing ecosystem. Taylor assembled a team of experts to evaluate their current use of SMC and to showcase how the breadth of SAP solutions allowed Fruit of the Room to update their marketing landscape.

By transitioning from a monolithic architecture to a composable one, businesses like Fruit of the Room can unlock many benefits. These benefits include the separation of data from marketing tasks, simplifying workflows, and use of real-time engagement and Business-AI for improved customer experiences. The Fruit of the Room leadership team was enthusiastic about SAP’s state-of-the-art Martech approach to marketing execution, omnichannel customer engagement, and customer data management. They were also glad to see how the composable framework was easily integrated with other solutions.

With Taylor's guidance and the support of their implementation partner and SAP Services, Fruit of the Room transitioned to their new marketing landscape without disrupting ongoing campaigns. They also saw a significant increase in revenue, thanks to the implementation of omnichannel campaigns driven by SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement and enriched by customer profiles from SAP Customer Data Platform.

The success story of Fruit of the Room shows how important it is to rethink and adapt the marketing stack to meet evolving business requirements. For organizations ready to embark on their own marketing transformation journey, the message is clear: don't hesitate to contact your Customer Success Partner and take advantage of SAP’s expertise in business transformation. Together, we can build a future-proof marketing ecosystem tailored to your goals.

Clean Core within SAP Sales and Service Cloud extensions

2024-04-28T18:57:18.366000+02:00

The first wave of CRMs helped tidy up customer data and processes, but they didn't really make the customer experience much better. Nowadays, companies of all sizes are focusing on improving customers experience because it's been proven that happy customers are more likely to come back. If their experiences aren't memorable, they might choose a competitor next time.

Because of this, businesses are always brainstorming new ideas to make their products and services even better. But improving things like system stability and scalability is essential for these changes to work smoothly.

In the past, companies could tweak (through exits, BAdIs or, even by copying standard objects) their SAP systems however they wanted because they were usually kept in their own data centers. But things changed when SAP shifted to a cloud-based approach. Now, all Sales/Service Cloud customers share the same SAP baseline, so changes can't be handled any further as they were made in the past. That's where the Clean Core approach comes in—it's a new way of thinking about extending SAP's capabilities specifically for the cloud era.

Understanding the Clean Core Concept

Clean Core revolves around maintaining a clear separation between core functionalities and customizations, with the aim of achieving a modern, flexible, and cloud-compliant system. In the realm of SAP CX extensions, this translates to safeguarding the integrity of the core SAP CX products while allowing for tailored enhancements to meet specific business needs.

Think of it as organizing a toolbox where each tool serves for a unique purpose without clutter. Similarly, a Clean Core architecture ensures that the essential functionalities (for example, customer data management, order processing, or marketing automation) remain untouched by customizations. This not only ensures system stability but also facilitates seamless upgrades and future scalability.

Benefits of a Clean Core Approach

Embracing the Clean Core concept offers several advantages for businesses leveraging SAP CX extensions:

Streamlined upgrades: By keeping customizations separate from the core SAP CX platform, businesses can streamline the upgrade process, minimizing downtime and reducing the risk of compatibility issues.
Enhanced agility: A Clean Core architecture empowers businesses to respond quickly to changing market demands and customer expectations. With the ability to innovate without compromising system integrity, organizations can stay ahead in today's competitive landscape.
Improved performance: Removing unnecessary customizations from the core SAP CX platform can lead to enhanced system performance, responsiveness, continuity and stability, resulting in a smoother customer experience.
Simplifying the way of working: Promoting the fit-to-standard compliance with clean core modular innovation makes customers to use “out of the box” SAP solutions and add their additional capabilities at the desired pace.

Additionally, it could be pointed out the fact of making reduction in the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) by using infrastructure and licenses in a much more efficient way.

Extensibility within Clean Core approach

Clean Core Extensibility is basically a way of extending SAP systems without messing with the core application. It's all about keeping your custom enhancements separate from the main SAP setup, so you can update your system without causing any issues. In simpler terms, when you add extra features or tweaks, they won't interfere with the basic functions of SAP that keep your business running smoothly.

For Sales and Service Cloud products, there are in-app (built-in) tools that help you customize things without getting too technical. But for more complex changes, you might need to consider side-by-side extensions. The In-App tools in v1 are mostly UI related. In terms of more complex extensions for v1, the way to go is through PDI development which has caused (to me) many issues. This PDI developments are introduced through a programming language called ABSL (ABAP Scripting Language) which, for being direct on my words, has nothing to do with ABAP and it is implemented through an SDK. Also, coding this has lots of restrictions in comparison to the coding we were used to develop those who have invested years with ABAP.

In v2, in-app extensibility is limited to fields and can't create full custom objects as possible in v1. So this could be solved by implementing a RAP or CAP solution in BTP and connecting it into the v2, for example, through a Mashup.

The concept of clean core extensibility can be distilledin this framework of best practices that a customer adopts when implementing SAP Sales/Service Cloud products:

Adopting a policy of zero modifications
Eliminating enhancements that are redundant to standard code and functionality and also eliminating copies of SAP objects
Using released APIs only ("upgrade-stable interfaces")
Leveraging the key user (in-app) extensibility to its full extent
Employing the capabilities and services offered by SAP BTP to build larger extension applications
Using SAP Integration Suite

Best Practices for Implementing a Clean Core

Implementing a Clean Core approach within SAP CX extensions requires careful planning and execution. Here are some best practices:

Modularization: Break down complex functionalities into modular components, allowing for greater flexibility and easier maintenance.
Encapsulation: Protect core functionalities from direct modification by encapsulating them within well-defined interfaces and abstraction layers.
Version Control: Implement robust version control mechanisms to manage customizations effectively and track changes over time.

Real-World use cases

Over the past decade, I've worked on several projects implementing C4C (now known as Sales/Service Cloud v1) where I tackled various challenging requirements. Looking back, if I would face similar tasks now, regardless of whether it's a v1 or v2 product, I'd opt for a side-by-side extension approach.

For instance, on a Service Cloud project, a client needed a feature where a main ticket would automatically close once all its sub-tickets were marked as 'Closed'. Surprisingly, neither v1 nor v2 had this feature when I last checked.

My approach today (for v2) would involve setting up a trigger using an Autoflow, which activates whenever a sub-ticket is closed. This trigger would then call a service on SAP's Business Technology Platform (BTP), developed using CAP. This service would then check if all sub-tickets are closed and, if so, it would also close the main ticket.

Also, my approach today (for v1) would involve setting up a trigger using Workflow Rules, which calls a PDI action that ends up calling almost the same CAP development from BTP. Although logic would be the same, the only adjustment inside CAP would consist on calling different endpoints.

However, when I encountered this requirement previously, the solution we implemented was a bit different. We created a Workflow Rule triggered when a ticket reached 'Closed' status. This rule would then execute an action developed using PDI, which would check if all sub-tickets were closed and decide whether to close the main ticket. This approach could have been tweaked by integrating the Workflow Rule directly into the PDI solution, triggered by an AfterSave event.

Closing comments

One of the big challenges we face is figuring out how to transition the army of tech experts who've been immersed in SAP CRM technologies like WebUI, BOL, and GenIL for decades into SAP CAP/RAP developers. This is the challenge that really gets me thinking and motivates me to take action.

I think the key lies in finding a balance between employees and employers. It's about consultants being proactive and open to learning new ways of doing things, while companies need to step up and offer opportunities for their teams to not just learn, but actually put their new skills into practice.

What do you think about this? Are you willing to jump into this new Era? Have you already done it? Do you agree with Clean Core principles? Have you already worked with this side-by-side context within SAP CX? I am interested to read your experiences, don't be shy!

SAP Sales and Service Cloud side-by-side extensions - Development Patterns

2024-05-06T03:02:28.153000+02:00

On my previous blog, I wrote about “Clean Core within SAP Sales and Service Cloud extensions” and defined the Clean Core Extensibility as the “way of extending SAP systems without messing with the core application”.

But, when speaking about Clean Core extensions, we should not only think of a side-by-side development, yet, we should always think as our first alternative of an in-app extension prior to a side-by-side one.

Every In-App comment you will read in the upcoming paragraphs applies to Sales and Service Cloud v2 products, however, when speaking about side-by-side extensibility patterns, this applies to any other SAP CX or, even, SAP S/4 HANA products (although the way for plugging them will not be the same, the overall concepts would be similar).

Extensibility within Sales and Service Cloud v2

From now onwards, I will refer to ”SAP Sales / Service Cloud v2” simply as “v2”. In v2, customers should always extend the solution through built-in tools when receiving requirements such as:

adding a custom field without the need of implementing a complete new custom object;
adjusting field attributes such as the ability of being filterable, searchable, sortable, required, creatable, updatable;
implementing simple validations;
implementing simple determinations;
triggering email or system notifications under certain conditions

Although there are various things that can be achieved through In-App tools, it will happen at some point that business needs to introduce complex logic, or retrieve information from another source or mix various logics, which takes us into the need of a side-by-side enhancement. And that’s the point where we want to get for deep diving on this blog article.

For those who do not have professional development experience, it is possible to build extensions based on SAP Builds. For those who have professional development experience, there are two flavors for developing side-by-side extensions: RAP (RESTful Application Programming) or CAP (Cloud Application Programming). It is not a matter of deciding whether to use RAP (based on ABAP) or CAP (based on Node.js or Java) as both have their own purpose and benefits. We could spend a whole article discussing about this but this is not the aim of this one so we can leave this discussion for another post.

Side-by-side design patterns

Despite v2 being technology agnostic, SAP’s preferred way for extensibility is based on BTP, using SAP Builds for UI extensions and CAP development for server side implementations. But, as all the development patterns are based on web standards (mashups inside iFrames, REST APIs and webhooks for eventing), this enables the users to pick what they like most or what it fits them best!

In comparison to v1's existing setup, oData APIs are not supported for v2.

In the upcoming paragraphs, I will present certain patterns that can be used as construction bricks to construct almost any use case. All the extensions that I will be presenting at a later stage of the article, end up fitting with one of these extension patterns. A few weeks ago, SAP presented “Webcast 3: Introduction to Side-By-Side Customization (with SAP BTP)” which inspired me on writing this article. As pointed out on that webcast, these design patterns should fit for v2, as well as for v1, as we are discussing about SAP BTP development. The difference lies on how to connect each of these extensions with v1 or v2: v1 could trigger it through PDI while v2 could do it through Autoflow. Also, and just to be extremely clear, a BTP extension developed through CAP for v2, won't work straight forward for v1, for example, as each product uses different APIs; while v1 uses oData, v2 uses REST-based APIs. For sure, in the future we could deep dive on a separate blog on how to make an app usable for both, v1 and v2.

Having said this, let's jump into the design patterns:

Pattern #1: Event Consumer

the overall concept relies on having our v2 system triggering a webhook, which is an HTTP request sent to our BTP application, containing a data payload, which triggers certain action asynchronously
asynchronous execution which means there is no impact on end-user's performance, the application has "no rush” to do what it needs to do as per this asynchronism
as per this pattern, even in case the BTP app would fail, users could continue with their daily tasks without these being affected
CPI is a good choice for this scenario as per the fact that there are no performance requirements when using this design pattern. However, it is also possible to demonstrate this pattern through a Cloud Foundry application.

Pattern #2: External Hook

the overall concept is similar to BAdIs, custom code is executed in a synchronous manner so user can't continue with his duties until the execution ends
the performance is key for making things run smoothly; the danger on this pattern is that if the BTP application results faulty or slow, this will have direct impact on the response to the request
this approach is quite powerful and useful, for example, when dealing with complex validations or determinations that can’t be achieved through in-app tools
to be released soon by SAP

Pattern #3: External Job

the overall concept is to use the BTP job scheduling service to trigger certain activities; alternatively, some CPI flows could be also scheduled
this is useful when needing to adjust information under certain conditions or under certain periods of time, when not able to use scheduled field updates or autoflows (to be released soon for v2)
asynchronous execution which means their is no impact on end-user's performance

Pattern #4: Mashup

the overall concept is to integrate BTP applications or simply 3rd party tools into the v2 where v2 could send request parameters in order to get the expected content exposed
SAP is currently working on making this integration through UI events in addition to sending request parameters; by doing this the UI will be able to connect back and forward with the mashup so, in case you make a change that affects the object you are working on the mashup, this mashup could send an event back to inform the object screen to reload

Real-world use cases

Example #1 - Event Consumer: when a sub-case status is set to "Completed”, if no others exists or if the others are all under "Completed” or "Closed” status, the parent Case should be set to "Completed”.

The overall approach would consist on setting up an Autoflow upon the closure of a sub-Case. This should call a BTP application which, asynchronously, retrieves the parent Case and checks whether this has other related sub-Cases that are not yet completed nor closed. If no others are pending for completion, the parent Case status should be updated to "Completed".

Example #2 - External Hook: when a Case has just been created and is assigned to certain processor, an additional validation should occur in order to see whether that person is the right candidate based on his current workload. In case he is not, it should be re-assigned to a dispatcher or left un-assigned.

The overall logic would consist on triggering the validation upon the setting of the “Assigned To” field, only upon the creation of a Case. The validation will be contained on a BTP application which would call certain APIs for reading the processor of the Cases and ensuring that the limit amount of assignments was not reached. In case it was, the application would return an error message or simply clear out or reassign the Case to a dispatcher processor.

Example #3 - External Job: a daily job that runs every night and, for those Cases which have priority “Urgent” or “Immediate”, have status “Customer Action” and have not been updated for the last 48 hours, its priority should be reduced.

The overall approach would consist on scheduling a job in BTP that triggers the BTP application which retrieves the list of Cases that meet the priority and status criteria and, for each of them, it should be checked that they have not been modified during the last 2 days. If any under this situation, the priority should be decreased.

Example #4 - Mashup: the customer wants its processors to have a common way of working so based on the Case category, a predefined set of activities should be performed. In order to achieve this, a mashup will be embedded and this will present a list of predefined activities. The processor will be able to interact and mark as completed the desired activities of the ToDo list.

The overall logic for achieving this requirement consists on developing a CAP application with its corresponding data model, services and UI for handling ToDo activities and, also, for recording the status for these activities for certain Cases, This BTP application will be embedded as a mashup inside the v2 screen.

Closing message

This is becoming a really exciting, yet, challenging journey where plenty of new things are appearing and where innovative-thinking must be part of every consultant’s toolkit. Also, I strongly suggest everyone to keep up to date with latest BTP, CAP and v2 news as things are changing rapidly!

For those who are currently on v1 and could start creating complex extensions through BTP instead of complex PDI solutions, that would be a great investment as, once you shift into v2, part of the effort would have already be done in the past and it would just be a matter for an additional adjustment.

For those who are already working with v2, enjoy!

What do you think about this article? Are you aligned with these design patterns? Have you already worked with these within side-by-side extensions? I am interested to read your experiences, don't be shy!