Data Process Automation - Consumer Marketing



Consumer marketing and communication 

As part of any eCommerce business, interaction with the consumer is the foundation of a successful repeat customer.  If you don't communicate and interact with your customers in the right way, they'll not return.  Targeted /personalised marketing, abandoned basket emails, timely order confirmations, some of the many interactions a business will have with their customers.

There are many platforms within the market which provide an enhanced consumer experience in relation to communication and marketing.  In this post, I'll be discussing how the integration of the Magento eCommerce platform and Adobe campaign (the consumer marketing platform) was achieved.

What was the challenge? 

To leverage the full potential of this platform, there was a requirement to enable the synchronisation of customer and transactional data between the eCommerce sites and Adobe Campaign, this allows automation of enhanced content emails to be triggered via Adobe Campaign as part of the consumer experience within the eCommerce sites.  Along with providing enriched consumer behavior data to the Campaign platform to support email marketing, segmantation and consumer engagement.

What was the solution?

Firstly, the technologies in use.  
  • Adobe Magento 2 (eCommerce platform);
  • Adobe Campaign (consumer marketing), Alteryx (analytics/data process automation);
  • Amazon S3 (data storage);
  •  7Zip (file compression).

Stage 1

Using Alteryx, product data, consumer profile data, wish list content and consumer transactional data is extracted directly from the Magento database, blended within Alteryx, stored locally as .csv files with a csv file produced to list all files created.

Alteryx workflow

Stage 2

A second workflow then picks up the file listing csv and processes the csv files in to Zip files (through custom macros).

Workflow 2 - File Processing

Macro 1

Processes file listing and identifies the most recent of each of the files created in the main workflow. 

The macro utalises the RegEx (regular expression) tool within Alteryx to dynamically identify a predefined set of patterns within the data.

In the example below, this picks up any value which starts with alpha characters followed by an underscore (highlighted in yellow), then looks for a set of 8 numeric values (highlighted in blue) followed by an underscore, then finally a set of 6 numeric values followed by .csv (highlighted in green).

[a-z]+_[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]_[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9].csv
Macro 1 - File processing

Macro 2

Takes the output list of files from macro 1 and processes each csv file to a .zip compressed file.

Utalising the information passed in to the macro from the Alteryx workflow via the macro inputs, file name (#1) and file path (#2), this macro dynamically builds (update value with formula) up a command line instruction to compress the csv file in to a zip file.

"/c" +  "7z.exe a -tzip \\[server name]\Data\UAT\[source]\[folder1]\[folder 2]\" 
+ Left([#1],Length([#1])-4) +".zip" + " " + [#2]

This uses the 7zip command line interface (CLI).

Macro 2 - Zip


Stage 3

The final steps of the process, uploads the processed zip files to an Amazon S3 bucket, ready for Adobe Campaign to pick up an process.

Alteryx Workflow - Amazon S3 Upload

Macro 3

Takes the list of zip files and uploads the files to the Amazon S3 bucket via the Amazon Command line interface.

Utalising the Amazon Command line interface (CLI) the macro dynamically build the CLI command using the infomration passed in to the macro via inputs #2 (the file path of the zip file to be uploaded) and #3 (the bucket location on Amazon S3).

"/c " + "AWS s3 cp " + [#2] + " " + [#3]

 

Discoveries

  • No out of the box integrations of the two Adobe platforms, resulting in-house development to support  complex process required to interface Adobe M2 data with Adobe Campaign.
  • Alteryx provides technical foundation to adapt to and address complex challenges in a timely manner. 


Achievements

  • Automation of Magento / Campaign integration.
  • Removal of any manual intervention and processing of data.
  • Development of reusable tools within Alteryx to support potential future Adobe platform integrations.
  • Cost avoidance due to internal solution development, no reliance on external (costly) resource.



This is why I get excited knowing I can utalise a platform like Alteryx when a business challenge presents itself.  Data Process Automation, supporting complex integration challenges with a rapid deployment, low code solution.



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