Linking Dialog and Web Activities in WebSphere Commerce Marketing

... out-of-the-box marketing features

IBM WebSphere Commerce 7.0 comes with a substantial set of marketing activities, namely web activities, e-mail activities and dialog activities. These are all part of a feature known as 'Precision Marketing' which works roughly as follows:

An active customer action or a background processing action causes a 'trigger' to fire. If this triggering can be scoped to a 'target' (qualification), then an 'action' occurs.

Activity types: Web and e-mail activities push content along, while dialog activities respond to specific shopper request behaviour.

Poor Man's Recommendation Engine: Now, a recommendation engine pushes content and products based on past shopper behaviour, whether specific to that shopper, or general past shopper behaviour.

If a dialog activity's end action is to persist captured user behaviour, then triggers and targets based on the persisted behaviour can then be used in a web activity to display specific content.

Thus, combining the two with some custom enhancements that put together some logic and data storage and you may have a specialised recommendation engine for your specific business needs.