Skip to main content
Skip table of contents

Onboarding the Zeta Way | Discovery

Overview

By identifying a list of your People, Events, and Resources. Zeta can help provide guidance on how to onboard your data specific to your vertical. Check out some pre-defined Verticals below:

  • Retail

  • Hospitality

  • Automotive Services

  • More to come…

The Zeta Marketing Platform makes sophisticated, customer-centric marketing simple. This guide will help you to discover the key concepts that power the platform and enable you to drive superior marketing outcomes. Let’s get started!

Data That Fuels Marketing

The ZMP acts on a few core elements of your data. Each of these data types helps build a complete understanding of your customers and prospects, and to convert these into optimal strategies and workflows for acquisition, retention, and growth.

People

At Zeta, we focus on the complete understanding of every individual person.

ZMP uses your knowledge of a person's interests, behaviors, and attributes, and enriches that understanding with what Zeta knows about the individual to offer unparalleled insight, segmentation, and extensibility for your view of the customer.

People within the ZMP have three important sub-components: Identifiers, Contacts, and Person Properties.

Identifiers

  • Identifiers are used to understand and connect who a person is.

  • A given person may have a variety of identifiers that can be used to refer to them.

  • Identifiers may be unique or shared across multiple people, and they may be associated with physical or digital identities.

Examples:

  • User IDs

  • Cookie Identifiers

  • Household IDs

  • Loyalty Numbers

Contacts

  • Contacts are used to specify methods of contact for a person and the subscription status for each.

  • Indicates whether the person is opted in to receive messages from your brand in that channel.

Examples:

  • Email Addresses *️⃣

  • Phone Numbers *️⃣

Person Properties

  • Person properties are fact-based data associated with a person and generally are factual data about that person.

  • They can also be associations that refer to things they have, have interacted with, or possess.

  • All properties can be looked up for use in personalization within your campaigns or used to determine inclusion or exclusion in a segment or experience flow.

  • Zeta’s flexible, schema-less architecture enables new properties to be added or adjusted at any time, whether they apply to one, some, or all of the people in your account.

Examples:

  • Name

  • Geography and Postal Address

  • Demographics (e.g. Age, Income, Race, Gender)

  • Age

  • Income

  • Total Lifetime Purchase Value

  • Most Recent Purchase

  • Customer Acquisition Date

  • Preferences within your brand (favorites, interests, etc.)

Some identifiers, such as email addresses or phone numbers, may also be used as contacts useful for messaging that individual.

Events

Your customers and prospects are doing things both online and offline that influence your marketing strategies. Events are how the ZMP captures activities like these and associates them with the people in your account.

As we process billions of events per day and enable powerful segmentation, timely individual triggers, deep personalization, and powerful analytics on them; every event has four pieces:

  • Who did the event? (Person)

  • When was the event? (Event Time)

  • What the event was? (Event Type)

  • What the object, context, and details of the event were? Event properties, like person properties, are extensible and allow new properties or values to be adjusted at any time, whether they apply to one, some, or all events (Event Properties)

While the ZMP will automatically capture all events associated with your campaigns (e.g. sends, opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes for email interactions), to gain a full understanding of your customers and brand, we will seek to capture every interaction your customers have with your business, both online and offline.

Resources

Finally, there’s the other stuff surrounding your brand that you need to refer to.

Resources are how the ZMP represents any non-person or event data that is necessary to assemble your marketing campaigns, understand and segment your users, or analyze the entities that surround your brand. While the same underlying architecture powers both, resources logically fit into two different categories: Recommendable Content and Relational Data.

Each resource has a unique resource ID for lookups, a resource type, and a flexible set of metadata that can be configured per type.

Resources can represent virtually anything, and you can have as many different types as you need. Some of the most common resource types include:

Resource Type

Description

How These Resources are Commonly Used

Digital Content

Articles, Webpages, Videos, and other digital content that may be viewed, recommended, liked, or shared.

  • Segmentation of people who viewed or liked a particular type of content

  • Recommendation of digital content in email or other digital channels

Products

Sellable goods and services bought by customers.

  • Product recommendations in email, on website, or in other digital channels.

  • Display of product information in marketing or transactional channels.

  • Tracking of purchases, shopping cart items, and cart values.

Store Locations

Information about physical locations for your brand.

  • Finding and surfacing details on preferred or closest stores to a given person.

Items

Tickets, Appointments, Reservations, or other objects your business accounts for that have association with a person.

  • Referencing details of an item in personalization

  • Segmenting audiences based on the items they are associated with

Occasions

Events, webinars, seminars, games, shows, concerts, or other occasions that are attended by customers and prospects.

  • Referencing details of an occasion in personalization (e.g. appointment reminder, post-event follow-up)

  • Segmenting audiences based on the occasions they are associated with


Omnichannel Marketing Activation

Once fully integrated with the people, events, and resources that comprise your brand experience, the Zeta Marketing Platform will enable you to efficiently deliver impactful and personalized marketing strategies. Here’s how we do it.

Experiences & Campaigns

The ZMP enables broadcast and experience-triggered omnichannel marketing.

Broadcasts are used to simultaneously message a set of people on a one-time or recurring basis, while experience-triggered campaigns are sent to an individual based on specified rules for triggering, configured via the Experience Builder.

Campaigns can be deployed in a wide variety of channels, including email, SMS, push notifications, on your website, and hundreds more as configured via Channel Manager.

Learn more about Experiences and Campaigns.

Segments & Lists

In order to manage subsets of people in your account for the purpose of analysis or messaging, ZMP enables powerful segmentation and list management tools to specify groups of customers and prospects.

Segments

Lists

Segments are filtered sets of people that are maintained in the ZMP, configured through the Zeta Audience Explorer as rules based on the identifiers, contacts, person properties, and events exhibited by those people.

Sometimes you just need to reference a specific set of people, for example, to build out snapshot control groups, seed lists, or a one-time use audience.

Because segments automatically update based on their definitions, there’s no need to repeatedly upload lists again and again that represent the same people.

Lists are not updated based on the initial filter criteria used to create them, though you can also use behavioral journeys defined in Experience Builder to add and remove people from lists.

Learn more about Segments and Lists.

Marketing Assets

From the email templates and web assets that define your brand to images and marketing collateral that you create, your assets are the key building blocks for developing and optimizing your brand experience.

The Zeta Marketing Platform offers asset management for storing and organizing these components, including images, email templates, and other file-based assets.

The ZMP also gives you a space to create, store, and manage master templates using our Visual and HTML Editors. Underpinning this content management platform is powerful personalization through Zeta Markup Language and reusability and centralization of assets through Snippets and Templates.

Learn more about Marketing Assets.

JavaScript errors detected

Please note, these errors can depend on your browser setup.

If this problem persists, please contact our support.