Marketing System

The Commerce Server 2007 Marketing System is a high-performance, versatile platform that you use to perform targeted personalized e-marketing through the Web or electronic mail. It assists e-commerce enterprises in effectively communicating relevant messages to shoppers in order to improve sales either directly or indirectly.

The Marketing System includes support for the following functions:

Content targeting, up-sell and cross-sell capabilities, advertisements and testing, e-mail campaigns, discounts, and coupons.

Combining and prioritizing campaign items. Campaign methods include the following:

Discounts. Create and edit discounts, combine discounts, set discount interactions, apply order-level discounts, shipping and leveraged discounts. An example of a discount is buy one product, get a second product at a 20% discount.

Awareness advertisement. Create and edit ads. For example, showcase a newly introduced product on the homepage of the Web site.

Suggestive selling. Create expressions that you can use to target ads or discounts. For example, if a shopping cart contains Product A, show banner ad B.

Direct mail. Create and send direct mail to lists of users. For example, send a newsletter or promotional mail piece to all active customers each month.

Managing campaigns for customers who compete in the same industry so that the competitor's ads never appear on the same page.

Enabling customers on the Web site to see ads and apply discounts by using coupons or entering promotion codes.

Enabling business managers to create and manage campaign items such as discounts, ads, and direct mail that they use as marketing tools to increase sales.

Publishing campaigns into production so that campaigns only become visible to the run-time system on activation and approval.

Generating reports to measure key metrics.

Marketing System Integration and Feature Areas
The Marketing System integrates with the Catalog, Orders, and Profiles Systems, and the Data Warehouse. It includes these five main feature areas:

Campaigns. Manages the campaigns, customers, advertisements, and discounts which form marketing programs. The Campaigns module is integrated with both the Profiles System and the Catalog System through expressions. Expressions enable you to target advertisements to users and to apply discounts to products.

Content Selection Framework (CSF). A platform-level framework for building targeted content delivery applications on the Internet and making customization and extension of the advertising and discount delivery systems easier. The CSF allows for multiple pieces of content to be retrieved as a record set with only one call, which creates a significant timesaving.

Expression Evaluator Engine (EEE). Provides the logic to evaluate expression objects. An expression is a condition that Commerce Server evaluates against profiles to determine whether to deliver content, or perform another action. For example, an expression might be user total visit > 100. If this expression evaluates to True, a specific piece of content displays to a user who has visited your site more than 100 times.

Mailing List Management. Manages lists of users created for a direct mail campaign. You can create, import, and export multiple lists focusing on different user profiles. You can maintain opt-out lists and references as part of a direct mail campaign. The mailing list management database maintains direct mail lists, per job opt-out lists and global opt-out lists.

Direct Mailer Service. A fast, scalable service that you use to send personalized e-mail messages from a Web page, or non-personalized mailings from a flat text file, to large groups of recipients. Direct Mailer tracks e-mail and records which messages are sent and which are clicked (opened). This enables you to analyze the success of a direct mail campaign. The Direct Mailer service is designed to send bulk personalized e-mail messages to millions of users.

Working Capital

the funds that are readily available to operate a business.
Example: Working capital comprises the total net current assets of a business minus its liabilities.Current assets â€" current liabilitiesCurrent assets are cash and assets that can be converted to cash within one year or a normal operating cycle; current liabilities are monies owed that are due within one year.

If a company's current assets total $300,000 and its current liabilities total $160,000, its working capital is:$300,000 â€" $160,000 = $140,000