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SAP Marketing Cloud - Using channel affinity to calculate "Preferred Communication Channel"

stefansickert2
Participant
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Hi community,

I was wondering if anybody already created a calculation for a "preferred channel" of a customer. For example with a logic of calculating affinities per channel, compare them and use the biggest value.

Of course the calculation of all channel affinities have to be fair (only relativ values or plain customer attributes as foundation).

I think thats fine for email, sms, push. More challanging would be print, but when there are success measure coming back from print (used voucher codes, registrations) that

In the end I would recommend to use this kind of attribute "preferred channel" only for enriching campaign communication, for choosing a channel per customer exclusivly to prevent bigger losses.

I have already searched the community but only found:
https://answers.sap.com/questions/12708023/channel-affinity.html

https://answers.sap.com/questions/13253888/output-parameter-determination-check-if-email-reci.html

which does not gave me the inspiration I hoped for.

Any experiences or ideas you have to share on this topic?

Many thanks in advance, best regards, Stefan

Accepted Solutions (1)

Accepted Solutions (1)

carsten_heuer1
Participant
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Hi Stefan,

thanks for posting this question. I can shortly outline my view on Channel Affinity from a scoring perspective.

Here a collection of my thoughts:

  • An individual score per customer requires individual customer behavior data.
  • The customer behavior data are mainly response data on outbound campaigns via different channels.
  • For Email, Mobile Push Notifications those response data are normally available (e.g. Email opened, clicked, deleted, ...).
  • For SMS a little less response data are available.
  • For Social Channels (Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, ...) often no individual, but only aggregated response data are returned.
  • For print potentially response data might be available based on vouchers or registrations (as you wrote), but this might only be sporadic.
  • For phone calls other data might be available, e.g. person could be reached, person accepted the conversation and had time, ... partly a call center agent would need to record the response behavior of the customer.
  • ...

Altogether, personal behaviors per channel are different as well as available response information per channel are different. Channel-specific affinity scores could be calculated (e.g. an Email Affinity Score), but how to compare an Email Affinity Score of e.g. "45" with a Print Affinity Score of "35"? Which one is better and how to interpret them?

I think, score across channels are hard to compare and some weighting might be needed. The right channel also depends on the nature, purpose and intention of the campaign and the business behind. For example, for a brand awareness campaign other channels might be relevant compared to a Customer Retention Campaign or a New Product Launch campaign. I would say, a generic algorithm to propose automatically the best channel is difficult to achieve. I agree with you, that this could rather be a recommendation.

Hope my thoughts help you a little in your investigation. It just reflects my personal view on it and I do not see an universally valid answer. But I would be interested, if you have other findings.

Best regards, Carsten

Answers (0)