Alteryx & Adobe: Consumer Marketing and Communication

[ThalitaC]

Author:

David Elliott

Role:

Global Solutions and Data Innovation Manager

Company:

Mayborn Group

Overview of Use Case

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 and 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 use case, I'll be discussing how the integration of the Magento eCommerce platform and Adobe campaign (the consumer marketing platform) was achieved using Alteryx.

Describe the business challenge or problem you needed to solve

To leverage the full potential of this platform, there was a requirement to enable the synchronisation of customer and transnational 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 behaviour data to the Campaign platform to support email marketing, segmentation and consumer engagement. 

Describe your working solution

Firstly, the technologies in use.  

• Alteryx (analytics/automatic process automation);
• Adobe Magento 2 (eCommerce platform);
• Adobe Campaign (consumer marketing)
• Amazon S3 (data storage);
•  7Zip (file compression).

Stage 1

An Alteryx workflow extracts product, consumer profile, wish list content and consumer transactional data directly from the Magento database. Then, it blends .csv files stored locally with a csv file produced to list all files created.

Stage 2

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

Macro 1

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

The macro utilizes 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 orange), 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 2

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

Utilising 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).

Stage 3

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

Macro 3

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

Utilising the Amazon Command line interface (CLI) the macro dynamically builds the CLI command using the information 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]

Describe the benefits you have achieved

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 utilise a platform like Alteryx when a business challenge presents itself.  Data Process Automation, supporting complex integration challenges with a rapid deployment, low code solution.