February 29, 2016
The Problem:
Once I had a client who had a significant amount of dynamic content to include in his emails. However, the content was being pulled from six different tables. To further clarify, in order for their dynamic content to be populated in an HTML template, it needed to also be present in the Solicit Template. This meant that the fields needed to exist on the join that the MarketWide Solicit Template was referencing. This raised another issue because if we were to include all of the necessary tables in the join, it would be massive. There would have been hundreds or possibly thousands of rows per customer! In past versions of MarketWide, the only way to populate dynamic content, without having it exist on a table at the address level, was to add a column to the Promotional History table. The campaign would then grab the appropriate value for a field when it selected a customer and post it for that particular campaign. The downside to this is that you end up with a messy Promotional History table with lots of fields you do not always use. We all know that cluttered tables lead to extreme inefficiencies in processing time by bloating the database with excess information.
I realized that all of the dynamic content that the client was trying to populate in the HTML was found on the tables he was selecting from within their TouchPoint campaign. Furthermore, if we were to set them as Pass-Thru fields in TouchPoint, the values from the records that the customer was selected on would be stored in the temporary work tables generated by TouchPoint. So we knew we could get the data we needed, we just needed to create a way to link to that Passed-Thru data on the work table from the Solicit Template.
The Solution:
To fix this dynamic dilemma, Solicit Pass-Thru’s were born. Now, you can set up your Solicit Template to include some Pass-Thru fields. Then, when you build your TouchPoint, you can go to your MarketFlow tab and map those Pass-Thru spaces in your Solicit template to any field, expression, or aggregate that you have set as a Pass-Thru in your campaign. The hassle of creating large, complex joins or adding columns to your Promotional History tables is part of the past; you don’t even need to call a DBA! The Pass-Thru fields’ content is pulled directly from a temporary work table and gets applied to each individual email when we process the HTML once the send is executed.
About the Author
Jason Hounshell has been working for Decision Software, Inc. (DSI) for 10 years. Jason was originally hired as a junior database administrator, but has worked his way up the ladder to become one of our company’s most valued assets as Director of Client Services. He is an expert with our world class campaign management system, MarketWide. Now, Jason spends much of his day helping DSI’s clients use our software efficiently to get the most effective results.
Contact us for more information: 301-459-9000 or info@dsimarketingservices.com.
