Introduction

This documentation outlines the basics of Taguchi® V4 including email creation, subscriber management and post-broadcast reporting.

About Taguchi

Taguchi® is a world-class, enterprise-level digital marketing platform. It integrates with a range of existing data sources. It has powerful analytics, sophisticated automation, and patented optimisation technology.

But what sets Taguchi® even further apart is its ability to accurately predict your short and long-term ROI. Understanding the lifetime value of your database enables you to plan and implement your marketing strategies with more confidence than ever before.

For marketers, retailers and publishers, Taguchi® is much more than a one-to-one communications tool. It’s a window to the future.

Support

If you require further assistance with Taguchi® V4, please visit our support portal. Alternatively you can raise a support ticket with our Australian based support team, Monday to Friday, 9am – 5:30pm AEST.

Logging In

Navigate to your Taguchi assigned instance (e.g. https://(client).taguchimail.com/admin/) using a supported web browser. The login screen will display with a username and password field, enter in your details and click 'Log In'.

If you do not have a username and password for Taguchi yet, please ask a team member in your company who is a Taguchi administrator, to add you to the organisation. After they have added your account, you will be sent further instructions on how to set a password and log in to taguchi.

If you have forgotten your password, simply navigate to the log in screen, type in your username in and click the 'Forgot your password?' link to send a password reset request to your email. The email may take 1-10 mins to generate.

Resetting your password

If you have forgotten your password, simply navigate to the log in screen, type in your username in and click the 'Forgot your password?' link request a new password.

An email will be sent to you with details on how to reset your password, simply follow the instructions within the email to reset your password. The password reset email can take up to ten minutes to reach your inbox.

Dashboard

The dashboard is your first point of reference when logging in to Taguchi®. It contains a general overview of all operations within your organisation.

You can utilize the Date Range picker in the top right corner to customize the data shown on this page. Simply click on the date range picker, and select your own date (start and finish date) or select one of the presets on the left side.

The Campaign Response graph shows you a three-tier bar graph outlining the statistics of sends for each day or week (depending on the date range you select). Hover over a bar to see the Sent, Opened and Clicked figures.

The Database Growth graph gives you an overview of your subscriber base growth in a bar graph format. Hover over each week or day (depending on the date range you select) to see how your subscriber database has grown (added subscribers) or shrunk (unsubscribed or invalid subscribers).

Activity Status gives you a quick reference to Draft, Approved, Scheduled and Deployed activities within your organisation.

Further down the page, Upload Status provides information about current or recent imports that have either completed, or are currently in progress.

Campaign

Campaigns are the primary tool Taguchi® provides to enable organisation of online marketing activities. Similar to the campaign structures offered by Google AdWords or OpenAds, Taguchi® campaigns represent a grouping of individual email broadcasts, triggered email messages, and web pages. The individual elements grouped within are referred to as Activities (this is explained further in this documentation).

A Campaign can include a mix of activity types; for instance, a Newsletter Campaign might contain a series of weekly broadcast emails, a web page to manage subscription status, and a triggered email to provide confirmation of sign-up.

Other Campaigns could include a series of triggered emails sent periodically to new subscribers, with broadcast emails in support of those. This structure provides roll-up reporting of performance — including conversion and subscription rate data, across a set of marketing activities.

Creating a Campaign

Campaigns are created by clicking the clipboard ‘Create a Campaign’ button at the right of the Taguchi® menu bar.

A simple light box form is opened and the Campaign’s display name (the name given to the Campaign in the UI) must be provided. This name can be changed later using the Campaign Detail view.

• Select a date and time for easy identification post campaign. This date may not be the date the activity is actually broadcast or scheduled.
• Campaign naming convention: we recommend using a logical description, as well as any marketing reference codes, job number codes that will help identify the campaign in future e.g. ABC1357 Launch Campaign.

Editing a Campaign

When the ‘Create’ button is clicked, the detail view for the newly created Campaign is shown. The Campaign launch date and conversion event can be set by clicking the ‘Edit Campaign Details’ link under the Title and new activities can be created using the ‘Create a new Activity’ button on the right.

Cloning a Campaign

Returning to the Campaign List view, another way to create a new campaign is the clone feature (tick Campaign to clone, select an action drop-down box) in the taskbar of the campaign table. An “Activity” can also be cloned this way too. An activity will be explained in the next section.

Activity

An activity is an individual broadcast email, a triggered message, or a web page: a stand-alone marketing message to which a subscriber can respond. Activities form the building blocks of a campaign, and can be linked together to create a logical sequence of related messages to maximise engagement.

Activities are designed to be re-useable with little modification and TAGUCHI® provides a number of systems to enable content and images to be updated quickly and easily. The activity types supported by TAGUCHI® are email (triggered and broadcast), web page, and SMS (triggered and broadcast).

Creating an Activity

Activities are created within the Campaign detail view, shown below. When the ‘Create an Activity’ button is clicked, a form appears in the browser and the activity’s display name (the name by which the UI will refer to the activity) and the activity type and subtype can be set.

• When selecting a name, we recommend using a logical eDM description. This could be followed by the broadcast date or reference job number. Select a date and time for scheduling.
• The date selector can be used to schedule the activity for a future date/time.
• The following types are: Email, Web Page and SMS.
• You can choose to repeat the activity trigger every hour, day or week.
• You can easily assign a cluster keyword to this activity using the dropdown. Cluster keywords are used to build a profile of an email recipient’s interests over time.

Editing an Activity

The ‘Edit’, in Select an action drop-down box link provides access to the activity’s scheduled launch date, and also enables the activity display name, organisation and subtype to be changed after creation. You need to select the activity by selecting the check box.

Cloning an Activity

As explained previously in 'Campaign', you can also create a new Activity by using the clone feature.

Simply tick the Activity you wish to clone, select the ‘Clone’ action in drop-down box in the taskbar of the activity table. This is a helpful feature when the content within an Activity is similar each broadcast.

Activity Edit Interface

The Activity Edit Interface is shown next to a preview of the activity. The preview pane is updated each time the content is saved, so when the view first loads the preview will not be displayed. In the case of especially wide email templates, one edge of the view might be cut off.

Depending on the template and activity type, different fields will be displayed in the Activity Edit Interface. The content blocks developed vary across your all of your templates.

Template Selection

Template selection is the first step of the web page and triggered message setup process, and the second step of the broadcast setup process.

This interface simply lists the Templates available for the current activity type; there are two types of templates available, JS Templates are the current supported templates, and XSLT Templates are the unsupported legacy templates.

An example of this interface is shown. To select a Template click on the green ‘Select Template’ button.

A pop up box appears. Simply click on a template’s preview image or title to select it.

Changing the Subject Line

Just below the Activity Edit Timeline area, in the grey panel there is a cell called ‘Subject 1’. For example the subject line has entered as “Spring getaways from $358 per couple”, but this can be changed by simply re-typing the subject line copy that currently appears in the ‘Subject 1’ cell.

When the subject line is present, the ‘optimize’ link can be clicked to display multiple subject lines; additional subject line alternatives can be added or removed. TAGUCHI® will automatically split-test these alternatives as it sends the broadcast, or as messages are triggered.

Unless your SMART Template has been customised to do otherwise the TAGUCHI® optimizer will try and send more of email containing the most subject line (as determined by the open or click through rates). The optimizer’s ability to respond to subscriber open and click behaviour will vary according to the variation in subscriber response, size of the email and speed of the broadcast.

Adding Content to the Activity

In the grey-bordered section called the ‘Main Content section’, you can use the ‘add item...’ dropdown menu at the top-right corner of the content block, to add the previously mentioned content item blocks.

Once an item has been added, its details can be modified, and its position relative to other items can be changed by ‘dragging and dropping’ the item header bar (between the item type on the left and the ‘delete’ button on the right).

Items can also be dragged to other content blocks (for example, between a Main Content area and a Sidebar area), provided the item type is available in both.

After updating item details, or re-ordering items within the email, click any of the orange ‘Save’ buttons (top or bottom of the page) to save the changes, and the content is then updated in the preview pane.

Please note that if multiple users are editing an activity simultaneously, the changes made by each user will overwrite any previous changes.

Adding Copy Manually to a Content Block

To enter marketing copy in the respective Content Blocks such as Intro Articles or Article Blocks, it is a matter of simply typing this directly into the cell in the Wizard Editor.

If you copy and paste directly from MS Word, MS Word styles its text with invisible XML and as a result may cause the font to render incorrectly. This is because it carries over ‘junk’ code. To ensure your intended copy renders correctly, paste the copy into a Text File or a Note Pad Editor first, before importing in the copy cell in the Content block.

Taguchi has added a new ‘sanitize’ filter to the Content text fields. This should automatically clean out any junk code from MS Word, Photoshop, Dreamweaver etc. It does a fairly good job, however it’s not 100% perfect. If you do encounter this problem, then the easiest way to fix this is to click on the ‘HTML’ view button </> in the Content section of the affected Intro block, and delete everything except for the actual content you require.

Adding Images to a Content Block

To add an image to an Article Block, click on the grey ‘Select’ button next to the ‘Image’ cell in the content block. The following pop-up box appears. Click on the ‘Choose File’ button and select the appropriate image from your image library. Then ‘Save’ your changes.

Adding Hypertext Links to a Content Block

Adding Hypertext Links to the articles enables you newsletter subscriber to click on a link which will automatically directed them to another website, landing page, microsite or online information portal.

To create the link, type in the description of the article you would like the reader to see in the newsletter. In the Editor section of the article block, make sure that you highlight the ‘article copy’ with you mouse and at the same time click on the icon with the chain and the green plus sign.

Fill in the following details:

1. The URL link of where the article appears
2. Give the link a name

Click on the grey ‘Update’ button.

Adding an Email Address Link to a Content Block

To create a RTE pop up in a newsletter article for an email address, the email format that needs to entered in the product content cell will need to be the following: mailto:email@example.org The next step is to turn off link tracking for that email address. To do this, they need to go into HTML mode.

Click on the blue HTML button which is the forth icon from the left hand side.

Once you are in HTML editing mode the next step is to add {onclick:notrack:} to the end of the ‘href’ attribute: In the code this will look like: <a href=”mailto:email@example.org{onclick:notrack:}”>Email address</a>

Subscribers

The SUBSCRIBERS tab area contains the functionality associated with adding, managing, reporting and extracting subscriber data.

Your subscriber records in the Taguchi system are managed in a single customer database for your organisation. For marketing and communication purposes, this single database can be divided into multiple separate target lists referred to as ‘Destination List’.

A single subscriber record can be associated with multiple Destination Lists. An activity broadcast from TAGUCHI® can be targeted to;

• Single Destination List
• Multiple Destination Lists
• Subsets of either of the above

Subscriber Lists

Lists form the basis of TAGUCHI®’s subscriber management system. In order for a subscriber to be accessible to the TAGUCHI® application, he / she must be a member of one or more lists, even if unsubscribed; subscription status is tracked on a per-list basis, and every change is logged to facilitate database auditing and compliance procedures.

Some lists have special roles within the TAGUCHI® application UI; for instance, lists can be used to manage proof and approval stages in the activity workflow, and reports can be distributed to designated lists on a scheduled basis. These special-purpose lists still have the same functionality as regular lists, so subscriber data is consistent between proof, approval and deployment.

The email address of a subscriber plus any external ID associated with that subscriber record (if applicable) acts as the default “Unique Identifier” for an individual subscriber record within the TAGUCHI® Subscriber database.

• If a subscriber in the TAGUCHI® database has 2 different email addresses’, the default logic is that these are treated as 2 different subscribers.
• Where a subscriber with a single email address is a member of multiple Destination List, they only have one unique database record in TAGUCHI® for your organisation.

Subscriber Set Up Methods

The 4 main ways to set up a subscriber within TAGUCHI® are:

1. Manual upload: this is performed via SUBSCRIBERS tab within TAGUCHI® user interface. This option is generally applicable for subscriber lists containing between 1 to 150,000 subscriber records at a time. For Destination List sizes greater than 150,000 records, we recommend either option 2 or 3 below.
2. Programmatically: using TAGUCHI® Subscriber APIs as outlined in the online technical support documentation.
3. Custom Import: using the upload options such as FTP and SFTP. These import processes need to be specified and implemented directly with TAGUCHI® Technical support services.
4. One-time: large batch import. Contact TAGUCHI® support.

Creating a Subscriber List

Clicking the ‘Create a List’ button on the ‘Subscribers’ creates lists.

A light box form appears, and space to enter the External list ID and display name is provided e.g. Newsletter Subscriber List.

Click on grey button ‘Create’. Unlike other TAGUCHI® object IDs, list IDs are designed to be externally meaningful, and therefore accept any unique ASCII string. The display name is simply the name given to the list in the TAGUCHI® UI.

Uploading Subscribers

In the far right hand corner click in the ‘plus’ icon and a menu appears. If you click on the ‘Create a Subscriber’ option the following pop up box will appear and you will be able to add the subscriber record manually one by one. Simply add email address, First Name and Last Name respectively. Select ‘Create’ and the subscriber record is added to the List.

If you select the ‘Import Subscribers’ option, the ‘Import subscribers’ pop up box appears. Select your CSV or TSV file, or manually paste the data in to the textarea. Select the ‘Load Data’ button.

Use the drop down boxes to select the category that best describes the data in the column. For example. Title, First Name, Last Name and Email (mandatory). Each subscriber in a Destination List can have any number of ‘custom’ fields associated with their database record.

List Management

Lists are managed using the List Detail interface.

Select the list that you would like to add subscribers, then go to the following button located on the right on the grey bar.

As explained earlier the ‘Import Subscribers’ button will start the import process, which is the most efficient way to add large numbers of subscribers to the database.

The ‘Add a Subscriber’ button displays a form with email address, first name and last name fields, allowing a single subscriber to be added to the list without using the full import process.

Settings

The ‘Settings’ administration section is accessed via a link that is located at the top right hand corner of UI by the ‘Log Out’ button. The ‘Settings’ menu includes the following tabs:

• Account
• Proof Lists
• Approval Lists
• Notification Lists
• Cluster Keywords
• Users
• Theme
• Social Networks
• API Tokens

Setting up a Proof List

An Activity at any stage of the production process can be submitted to a designated Proof List. This is the area where you can determine who should receive a copy of the Activity Proof to make further annotations.

Click on the grey ‘Add a new proof list’ button and the ‘Create a List’ pop up box will appear. Simply enter a description in the List Name field.

Once a Proof List has been created, you add people to the list by clicking on the green ‘Add Subscriber’ button. Fill in Name, Last Name, Email address and click on the ‘Save’ button.

Alternatively, you can upload a bulk list by clicking on the 'details' link and importing the list by following the 'Uploading Subscribers' steps.

Setting up an Approval List

Once an Activity’s content has been completed, it must be submitted to a designated Approval List before it can be deployed.

Like Proof Lists, Approval List set up is the same. Click on the grey ‘Add a new approval list button’, give it a List Name and press ‘Create’.

Once an Approval List has been created, you add to list by clicking on the green ‘Add Subscriber’ button. Fill in Name, Last Name, Email address and click on the ‘Save’ button.

Alternatively, you can upload a bulk list by clicking on the 'details' link and importing the list by following the 'Uploading Subscribers' steps.

Setting up a Notification List

Notification lists are used to receive extracts, reports, activity checks and other system notifications. Notification lists can also be used for response notifications to proofs or approvals within activities. Every subscriber within a notification list will receive the intended notification when requested.

Like Proof Lists and Approval Lists, Notification List set up is the same. Click on the grey ‘Add a new notification list button’, give it a List Name and press ‘Create’.

Once a Notification List has been created, you add to list by clicking on the green ‘Add Subscriber’ button. Fill in Name, Last Name, Email address and click on the ‘Save’ button.

Alternatively, you can upload a bulk list by clicking on the 'details' link and importing the list by following the 'Uploading Subscribers' steps.

Adding a User

A User needs to be set up, so that they can access the TAGUCHI® Digital Marketing System. To add a user, go to the ‘Settings’ link located in the top right hand corner (next to the ‘Triggers’ tab).

Click on the ‘Users’ tab. You will see other Users that have been added to the System. To add a User click on the green ‘Add User’ button and the following cells will appear.

Fill in the details, select a ‘User Class’ and then click ‘Save’.

User Classes

Public:

• Limited read-only access. Can only view top level stats on each tab
• Able to download extracts and reports sent via email notifications

Content Commenter:

• Can only comment and provide feedback on an Activity only through a Proof
• Cannot approve or reject Activities

Content Editor:

• Full access to templates
• Can create, delete, update, send proofs, request approval and queue activities
• Can create, delete and update campaigns
• Can create, delete, generate and update reports and extracts

Content Approver:

• Can approve, reject and comment on activities

Data Analyst:

• Can create, delete and update Campaigns & Activities
• Can create, delete and update Views
• Can create, delete and update lists
• Can view, create, delete and update subscriber records
• Can import subscribers
• Can create, delete, generate and update reports and extracts

Power User:

• All of the above except Can approve, reject and comment on activities

Administrator:

• Full access including the setting up of Users (adding and deleting).

Setting up Cluster Keywords

SMART Template links can be tagged a key word to build a profile of an email recipient’s interests overtime. ‘Cluster Tags’ are recorded against the subscribers profile every time they click on a link. Links within email blocks or individual emails are allocated cluster key words. Overtime this information is used to understand the products or categories that the subscriber is most interested in.

Algorithms run in the background to determine if there is a particular pattern for that subscribers’ click through behaviour related to any key word. If so, that subscriber is added to a cluster. This process isn’t based after a few email sends. It may take months depending on the frequency of the communication and subscriber responsiveness.

Subscribers with similar interest categories are grouped into ‘Clusters’ that can be targeted with specific offers overtime. Unlike stated preferences, Cluster preferences are dynamic and based on what the recipient actually did, not what they said they thought they would do. Once there is sufficient data to determine whether a subscriber belongs to a particular cluster, TAGUCHI®

SMART Templates can be adapted to automatically deliver content according to cluster preferences.

Creating a cluster tag

Go to the Settings link in the top navigation and then click on the ‘CLUSTER KEYWORDS’ tab.

Click on the ‘Add a new cluster keyword’ button. A pop up box called ‘Create cluster keyword’ appears. Enter in the box the name of your Cluster keyword and press the ‘Create’ button.

Social Networks

You can now add the organisation’s social network profiles (e.g. username or screen) via the ‘Settings’, Social Networks tab. Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn are supported.

Enter your username for each of the Social Network types. Add Like, Tweet, +1 and Share buttons to your article blocks and product grids. Save the changes by pressing the ‘Save’ button.