Everyone loves creating Informed Delivery campaigns – it’s kind of fun. Figure out a strategy, get an image or two, and maybe even make a landing page. Then you get to go into the Business Customer Gateway and create your campaign. OK, that’s not as much fun. You need to figure out what MID is on the piece, get the serial number range on your IMb’s, dates, URLs…that’s kind of a pain. Still, it’s not that bad. And when you’re done, you’re done, and then…well. What then? You can’t really see an ID campaign – it’s off in the ether or the cloud or something. When your mail gets delivered, enrolled prospects will see your ad in their email, but how do you know who got it? That’s where the reporting comes in. Reporting within ID is…ummm… less than fabulous. For starters, there is nothing automatic about it. You’ve got to go back into the Gateway (whee) and request your reports. You can request them at the “end” of the campaign, you can request them weekly, you can request them daily – you can request them whenever you like, assuming the portal is in the mood. It often isn’t. After you have requested them, well…talk among yourselves – this could be a while. Maybe today. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe you need to resubmit. Of course you need to keep track of all of the campaigns you have in process – it can get confusing. But you’re patient and now your reports are ready to download – oh no, they don’t come automatically. So it’s back into the gateway (yay) to download them. So now you have your reports! Two of them for each request – a summary and a detail. They are not pretty SnailWorks-style reports. They are Excel files. The summary is not too bad. It looks like this:
So you will need to bring in your mailing quantities, calculate percentages, all of that fun stuff. The detail is another matter. It looks like this:
Ewww! This Excel file contains a row for every presence of a subscriber, email sent, email opened, click, and so on. Each record is identified by a MID/serial number combination. You will need to marry these records back to your mailing data with that information to get any meaning out of it. Oh – the MID/serial number combo may be missing leading zeroes from the serial number– which somehow occurs in the middle of the combined field. Tell your IT guys we said “Hi!” They’re going to love you. On the plus side, it’s all free – as long as you don’t have to pay your staff. Or you can have reports automatically sent to you that look like this:
Is this even a decision? You need reporting to provide ID services. You can get them automatically from SnailWorks or you can do that other process. We call it Direct2Digital ID. And the reports aren’t even the best part. In all fairness, we do expect reporting out of Informed Delivery to improve markedly in the future, but that future is probably at least a year away when ID information is delivered by the IV system. Certainly not before the fall ID promotion. In the meantime, maybe we should talk.