Obviously, most of our customers seek to automate as much as they can in Core iQ. Whether you are working from the viewpoint of offloading work, or planning out your quarter in Core iQ, targeted audiences and schedules can help you get work done faster in the system. However, there are times in which creating a single-instance campaign can be more beneficial. In this article, we will outline a few of these reasons.
Complex criteria or missing data
If you have a detailed list of complex criteria that needs to be used to send an offer, it is usually best to use Core iQ reports. This guarantees that you have access to all of the fields that you want to query in order to make your audience, and it give you the opportunity to filter your audience further using data not present in Core iQ. If you start with a report in our platform, the options that you have to easily narrow your audience are greatly increased. While we can always mimic report criteria with an automated schedule, it can sometimes be cumbersome. Using reports also allows you to take your list out of Core iQ in order to do additional filtering using external criteria. You can then import your list back into the platform using the Matching Customer/Member Identifier report.
Transparency or budget requirements
For those that value transparency over all, Core iQ reports are better for sending product offer templates to large audiences. This is because a report will give you an easily digestible list of recipients for the offer, whereas automation will not necessarily show you your audience until after the campaign is queued. You will also receive additional transparency on a pricing estimate when using a campaign, making it easier to maximize your reach in Core iQ. We have several customers that manipulate criteria in order to get the larger audience size for a campaign with a fixed budget. This isn't nearly as easy using automation.
Expediency
The third reason that campaigns tend to work better than automation in certain cases is that they can be queued immediately. Automation within Core iQ removes the need to physically queue items because they all queue at the same time, after the nightly import. If you need to queue a campaign immediately, then a campaign is the best way to go as you can instantly queue the communications for processing. While we do institute a 30-60 minute delay on Processing these items from a campaign, it is still faster than creating an audience through automation, as those items will be delayed in Processing until after the nightly import.