Using Output Refinement in A SAS Customer Intelligence 360 Direct Marketing Task
The purpose of this post is to explain why it is important to use the output refinement option in a SAS Customer Intelligence 360 direct marketing task.
When a direct marketing task is executed an export file that includes the specified fields is generated for the subjects whose criteria were met in the segment map.
For example, in the table below the subjects whose criteria were met have their data for Subject ID, First Name, Last Name, OK to Email and Email Address exported.
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When an export file is created it is possible that extra output records are included. This is especially likely if there is a one-to-many relationship to the subject in the export table. A one-to-many relationship is when a single subject - such as customer john doe shown below - has one or more corresponding records - such as multiple email addresses - in another table.
One option to remove these extra output records is to check the Discard rows with duplicate subject IDs for each input source box in the export file settings.
This option keeps the first instance of the subject id and removes the rest. This alone could be problematic. In the example below the email that would be retained is also marked as do not email whereas the two emails below are OK to email. The Ok to Email records can be kept by using output refinement.
Output refinement is selected on the targeting tab by selecting nodes to be used for output refinement. If OK to Email was selected and added to Output Refinement, then only records who have OK to email would be included in the export file when the direct marketing task was executed.
The following is what would happen by applying these two settings to our example earlier of John Doe having multiple records. First, if OK to Email was selected for output refinement, then the first record that is do not email would not be included.
Second, if the discard rows with duplicate subject ID’s box was checked then the third or any other records would be removed, resulting in only one record that is OK to email.
This example has shown conceptually why it is important to use the Output Refinement option when executing a direct marketing task. For more detail including how to use the output refinement see the SAS 360 Direct Marketing Tasks course in the SAS Customer Intelligence Learning Subscription.
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