[SalesForce] How to use Contact Builder Data Model and Data Filters for Email Sends

Francesco.

Great questions!

First, for example’s sake, let’s pretend you just added 100 subscribers to your subscriber_all data extension, and you know at least some of them qualify for the filter/filtered data extension you are sending to.

If you send an email to a filter, the filter is run at the time of send. Therefore, those subscribers you just added who qualify for your filter will be included on the send. A downside of targeting a filter (in my opinion) is that you won’t know how many subscribers will be included on your send.

If you send to a filtered data extension, the data extension would need to be refreshed before sending the email in order for those new subscribers to be included. However, by refreshing the filtered data extension, you can see how many subscribers the email will send to.

If it’s a one-time send, you are probably safe setting it up either way (so long as you refresh the data if you send to the filtered DE!). For reoccurring, automated sends, you are more likely to want to send to the filter itself.

I hope this helps!

Kelly

If the personalization info you need is in an all subscribers attribute, you dont need it to be in the data extension, just use the personalization strings you indicated.

Personalization strings always check for a match on all subscribers profile attributes as well as the DE audience.

If they are not, you can use ampscript functions in the body of the email to pull from wherever the data is located.

Supposing that firstname is a column in a DE called 'subscribers', and that this DE has an 'emailaddress' column you could do this:

%%[
set @email = [email address] 
set @firstname = Lookup('subscribers','firstname','emailaddress',@email) 
]%%

This lookup function basically says return the value of firstname from the DE 'subscribers' where emailaddress equals this specific subscribers email address, then assign that value to @firstname.

To have it write to the html, instead of %%firstname%%, write:

%%=v(@firstname)=%%

Regarding your data filter question: I dont believe you can filter on tracking data with a data view without a solution like Audience builder.

You could, however, build a query activity and join in whatever columns were needed. This would return all the subscribers who meet your criteria:

select subscriberkey from _click 
where jobid = 12345
where linkcontent like 'http://http://%'

From that point, you'd want to add an inner join, likely on subscriber key, to include whatever other columns you'd like in your sendable DE.