Best Practices for Using Typology Rules in Adobe Campaign

Leveraging Typology Rules in Adobe Campaign to ensure a more customized experience for your customer

As companies scale their marketing automation system in Adobe Campaign one of the most commonly faced challenges is maintaining a unique customer journey, while avoiding over-exposing customers to too many emails which can lead to customers ignoring emails, Email Service Providers filtering out companies emails as spam and a higher unsubscription rate among customers and prospects. By using the typology rules in Adobe Campaign your organization can more easily maintain customized business rules or, global suppression rules, to control what your customers see and how frequently they see it, eliminating the risk of over-emailing and improving your overall deliverability.

What Exactly are Typologies?

Simply put, typologies are centralized business rules defined and applied to campaign populations. They allow marketers to more efficiently control campaign messaging to customers by eliminating the need to apply exclusions or commonly used rules to each and every campaign. This ensures that you are consistently targeting the right people at the right time, in accordance with your company’s communication policies. A recipient who matches the selection criteria set in a typology will be removed from the delivery. Adobe also includes reporting functionality allowing a business to monitor how much of the population are being held out based on these rules and adjust their marketing plan and business rules accordingly.

Types of Typology Rules:

1. Filtering rules allow you to explicitly define a population to exclude, based on specific data criteria.
2. Pressure rules allow you to control the number of messages your customers are receiving, based on defined rules and message prioritization.
3. Capacity rules allow you to limit campaign volumes, in order to optimize processing. For example, if your business utilizes a call center, you may not want to send over x number of records per day, in order to keep in line with capacity restrictions.
4. Control rules allow you to use out-of-the-box or custom-built scripts to can check things such as proper unsubscription URL construction, and subject line inclusion, in order to ensure message validity.

For more examples of default typology rules, check out the full list.

The out of the box options, although helpful, don’t begin to scrape the surface of what typologies can do.

Typology Rules vs. Typology Sets Best Practices

Typology Rules

As stated above a typology rule is a specific filter which is applied at the time a delivery is processed in order to hold out a certain audience, this almost serves as the last line of defense for campaigns. These rules can be modified a number of ways depending on how they need to be applied to the emails being sent. Some organizations apply rules by brand or by type of delivery (for instance, exclude x population from direct mail campaigns). One commonly used rule is a master exclude for competitor domains.

Typology rules can also be modified to determine which deliveries they will apply to. By default, they will apply to all deliveries which use the typology grouping they are contained within. You can also put conditions on whether a rule is applied. For example, if one campaign is an exception to one rule within a typology grouping, rather than creating an entirely new grouping just for that campaign, you can put a condition in the rule which ignores that specific campaign.

As a general rule, you want to be careful how this is used; the more complex the exceptions become, the easier it is for mistakes to occur. A general guideline for typologies is they should be used if the rule applies 95% of the time. If it applies any less than that, it is better to maintain that rule as a part of the workflow.

Typology Sets

A typology set is a collection of several typology rules. All of the rules collected under a set are applied to any delivery which uses that typology set. By creating different typology sets you can group together rules based on the type of campaign going out. For example, a campaign which provides a customer with an update on the status of their account would have a very small set of rules applied since it is important the client see that information regardless of what marketing or promotional emails they may have seen.

By contrast, a campaign which is purely marketing driven, sent to a wide pool of potential clients might have a broader set of rules applied to it, including things like limits on contact frequencies for a customer, and holdouts of a broader email for a client who is also targeted in a more focused email on the same day. By managing different sets of rules for the different types of campaigns you can ensure a customer experience in-line with your current business rules, while still ensuring that essential communications are delivered to the customer.

As an important reminder, Adobe Campaign is best taken advantage of when it is supported by robust and relevant data to be translated into more relevant, personalized communications. Deciding what logic to use when can be facilitated by capturing your customers communication preferences (frequency, types of content) through preference center. Another tool in Adobe Campaign that helps your organization understand if a client is better suited for a different campaign if they’re eligible for multiple is by implementing prioritization workflows.

Typology Rules in Action (Retail Use Case)

You run a large restaurant group comprised of several national chains. Each of these chains maintains:

• A series of weekly newsletters
• Several automated campaigns which send out emails to customers based on their previous days web activity or visits to your restaurants
• A series of transactional emails which forward a customer their receipt after dining in your restaurant
• Follow up surveys on the quality of their experience sent out to that smaller subset of diners

Customers who are particularly active on your website may trigger several of these marketing emails, leading to content fatigue and a potential increase in opt outs. If they are also a frequent diner they may also be receiving targeted marketing which arrives too late and contains offers the customer can no longer use, leading to customer frustration. By creating distinct typology sets for the three different types of content (newsletter, marketing, transactional) and clearly defining within each set rules around what a customer can receive, for instance excluding from all marketing emails a recipient who was tracked at having dined in your restaurant the night before, you can prevent these kinds of issues and maximize your customers journey through your marketing process.

Overall, typologies are one of the tools in the Adobe Campaign toolbox that helps leverage data to streamline, and remove manual work for your end-users and of course, deliver a more personalized, effective customer experience.