IBM Campaign overview

IBM® Campaign is a web-based solution that enables you to design, run, and analyze direct marketing campaigns.

Marketing professionals typically use Campaign in the following ways:
  • Administrators perform initial and ongoing tasks such as adjusting configuration settings, mapping database tables, and defining custom attributes and offer templates.
  • Users create and run direct marketing campaigns.

To conduct a marketing campaign, you start by defining offers for target audiences. You then build a flowchart, which provides a visual representation of the campaign logic. Part of building a flowchart involves associating offers with target audiences.

To design your campaigns, you can use data from multiple sources, including relational databases and flat files. For example, you can select contact data from a database, merge it with customer data from a flat file, then suppress, segment, and sample the data. To access and manipulate data,IBM Campaign supports the use of raw SQL, macros, and functions. However, you do not need to know SQL to use Campaign.

After you build a flowchart and assign offers to various segments, you run the flowchart to generate a list of contacts. To control the timing of your marketing campaigns, you can schedule different campaigns to run at various times.

During the course of a campaign, contact history and response history are stored. Campaign uses this history to track and analyze campaign results, so you can refine your campaigns over time.

IBM Campaign consists of a back-end server and a web application server, plus security, authentication, and authorization that are supplied by IBM Marketing Platform.
Note: IBM Marketing Platform provides a common access point and user interface for Campaign and other applications, plus features related to security and configuration.