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Concepts

Understanding ACTITO​

As a marketing automation tool built to leverage data, ACTITO has a customizable Customer-centric Data Model. In this data model, you can define your own Profile table structures (depending on the data you have at your disposal) as well as multiple Custom tables that are connected to those Profile tables.

You are therefore able to map your own model to the one you build in ACTITO.

ACTITO then provides functionnalities to use those data to activate in the most efficient manner those profiles.

Activating profiles may involve campaigning, surveying or even scenarizing communication so as to start a real conversation with your customers/prospects/contacts.

With that goal in mind, ACTITO implements many concepts that are described below.

Entities​

The concept of "Entity" allows data and resources to be partitioned within your licence.

For example: your B2C and B2B departments may use the same licence, but use distinct data tables, processes or workflows, and you want each team to have only access to those which are relevant (and/or authorized) for them.

Every ACTITO resource (data structure, created resource like campaign or scenario etc.) is to be linked to an entity in order to specify who can have access to this resource.

When accessing a module in ACTITO (through the portal or through the API) only the resources linked to an entity the user has access to will be displayed/returned.

The list of existing entities in your licence can be retrieved via the ENTITIES API.

Profiles​

In ACTITO, the concept of "Profile" is at the center of everything. Profile tables enable you to manage data so that you are able to communicate with those profiles.

For example, a "Profile" may be a customer, a lead, a partner, any "contactable entity" who can receive a message through the channels available in ACTITO (E-mail, SMS, Print, Social etc.)

A profile table can be composed of 4 types of fields:

  • attributes: They represent the characteristics and personal data of an individual. Info such as language, sex, first name, last name, e-mail address etc.

  • subscriptions: They represent the opt-in preferences of an individual. A profile can subscribe to the "Daily newsletter" subscription and not subscribe to the "Promotions" subscription.

  • segments: They represent the business categories an individual can be part of. For example: a customer can be flagged among his expenses as Gold, Silver or Bronze ("exclusive" segment), or can be considered regarding "VIP" status (in that case it's a "simple" segment, the profile can be part of it, or not).

  • references: They represent a business key value that mark the link with a repository table. For exemple, the "preferred store" of a customer will contain the unique id of the store in the Stores repository (more about repositories in below Custom tables section).

Some attributes should be flagged as "standard" so they are given a specific semantic that ACTITO will benefit from:

  • motherLanguage will allow to manage multilingual campaigns
  • emailAddress will be used to send e-mails
  • gsmNumber will be used to send SMS

For an overview of what can be done with Profiles via ACTITO Integration Framework, take a look at PROFILES API section, at available integrations or at the use cases.

Custom tables​

In ACTITO, a Custom table is a table of the Standard Data Model which business semantic and data structure are "user-defined".

When creating custom tables, you can choose between three table types:

  • Interactions:

It can store Orders, Test Drives, any timed data linked to a profile.
See below Interactions section for more information about interactions.

  • Linked data:

This kind of custom table is an extension of the profile.
Every row is then linked to a profile.
Many rows can be linked to the same profile.

For instance, linked data can be the Cars owned by a profile, the Children of a profile etc.

  • Repository:

A repository is a table that stores referential data.
For instance Stores, Products, Departments etc.

Repository data can be then referenced in profiles (a preferred store for instance) or in interactions (the store of a purchase for instance). The same repository row can be referenced in many profiles or in many interactions.

To list existing Custom tables in your licence or to manage the data stored in any of them, take a look at our CUSTOM TABLE STRUCTURE API section.

Interactions​

In ACTITO, an Interaction is something that happened to a profile at a given moment.

There are two types of interaction:

1. ACTITO built-in interactions:

They are the interactions that are generated when using ACTITO.

  • tied to communications (e-mail, SMS, print, social)
  • tied to automation (execution of a scenario...)
  • tied to client behavior interactions (unsubscribing, goal reach...)
  • tied to participations in forms

Check out this operation in our PROFILES API to retrieve all interactions available for a single profile.

Other built-in interactions can be operated via our REST APIs E-MAIL CAMPAIGNS API,SMS CAMPAIGNS API, SCENARIOS API and FORMS API.

2. Custom interactions:

Any business interaction that can be stored in ACTITO Custom tables with "INTERACTIONS" capability. For instance Orders, Event subscriptions, Test Drives, Abandoned Carts, ... whatever.

Check out our CUSTOM DATA API to manage your custom interactions data.

Campaigns, multi-channels​

ACTITO covers many channels to communicate with profiles (e-mail, SMS, print etc.). To implement this communication, ACTITO has a concept of "Campaign" that exists for every channel.

A campaign is the definition of a structured message, which can be personnalized, and which aim is to be sent to a target of profiles.

The sending of a campaign can be:

  • Mass : the whole campaign is sent at once to the entire target
  • Ongoing: once activated, profiles within the target can be contacted one by one over time (typically through a scenario, or via API trigger)

Through our E-MAIL CAMPAIGNS API and SMS CAMPAIGNS API, you can access/modify/delete existing campaigns, define new ones (content, targeting, settings etc.), activate/launch them, or even trigger one campaign for a profile.

Note that every campaign defined through this API will be available in the ACTITO portal too and vice-versa.

Forms​

The ACTITO Forms module enables you to create a web form, to define questions you'd like to ask (type, copy, possible answers etc.), to manage how they will be displayed (layout, paged wizard) and to publish it.
Once activated, you can expose it publicly or send it as a link in an e-mail campaign sent to the profiles of your database.
For instance you can use ACTITO Forms to allow online subscription to an event, brochure or test drive request, participation to a contest, or so.

When someone answers a form, it creates what we call "a participation".
If the form is linked to a database, you can state that a participant may:

  • reply as many times as he wishes to (multi-participations)
  • only reply once but can and modify his answers afterwards (unique editable participation)
  • only reply once without any possibility to update his answer (unique non editable participation)

Those participations are stored in ACTITO as interactions.

In addition, you can define profile data enrichment rules that can be used to update the data of the participant by using the answers he gave to this form's questions.

In case you use external forms hosted by any third-party company, you can anyway push participations into ACTITO to store the answers and to be able to use them in your marketing flows as well as if your form was filled into a built-in ACTITO form.

To push participations, to list the existing forms or to retrieve their definition (questions structure), you can use our FORMS API.

Targeting​

A targeting is the definition of a profile population. This definition is composed of criteria applied to one or to many ACTITO modules.

The target population (list of profiles) is obtained by combinating the resulting population found for each of those criteria.

A targeting can be used to define the target of an e-mail campaign, the list of profiles to start a scenario for, the list of profiles to take in account in an export etc.

In the E-MAIL CAMPAIGNS API or SMS CAMPAIGNS API, you can provide an existing saved targeting as the target of a campaign.

Scenarios​

In ACTITO, a Scenario is as a sequence of decisions and marketing actions intended to be applied to profiles.

ACTITO provides a smooth WYSIWYG editor to define those decisions and marketing actions tree.

The execution of a scenario for a profile can be triggered:

  • by a business event (unsubscribing, opening an e-mail, creating a new order,...)
  • by a planned task (computation of a profile targeting, such as the anniversary, an invitation,...)
  • by an external trigger (API call)

To trigger a specific scenario for a profile, check the SCENARIOS API.