Product overview > What's new summary > New features and functionality > What's new for business users > Management Center enhancements (business user tools) > Marketing
Dialog activities deliver timely marketing messages beyond the store pages
The Marketing tool now offers a new way to market to the customers: Dialog activities. You can create Dialog activities that are triggered by a specific customer behavior or event, for example, a customer registering or placing an order. You can then respond with a planned marketing action, such as sending a relevant e-mail or text message. This interactive dialog can be ongoing as the customer's behavior on the site changes over time.
For example, you can create Dialog activities to:
- Send a welcome e-mail to each new customer who registers with the store.
- Issue a discount coupon to any customer who abandons a shopping cart for three days.
- Send customers an e-mail one week before their birthday with a promotion code to get 10% off their next order. Then, on each customer's birthday, send a text (SMS) message with a birthday wish and a reminder of the promotion code.
Dialog activities are always perfectly timed because they are triggered by a specific customer behavior or event.
As in the previous Management Center release, you can continue to create Web activities to display targeted marketing content on store pages, and to create e-mail activities to send marketing e-mails in bulk to specific customer segments. Now, with Dialog activities, you can add another dimension to the precision marketing plan.
Use any combination of the following triggers, targets, and actions in the Dialog activities (all are new with v7, except those marked with asterisks):
Triggers Targets Actions Customer Registers Customer Places Order
Customer Participates in Social Commerce
Customer Abandons Shopping Cart
Customer Celebrates Birthday
Customer Is In Segment
Wait
Catalog Browsing Behavior Online Behavior
Social Commerce Participation
Day and Time
*Customer Segment
**Shopping Cart
***Purchase History
Send Message (e-mail or text message) Issue Coupon
Add To or Remove From Customer Segment
* Supported in the previous Management Center release. ** Supported in the previous Management Center release as three separate shopping cart targets; now consolidated into a single target.
*** Supported in the previous Management Center release as three separate purchase history targets; now consolidated into a single target.
Related concepts
Related tasks
Work with Web and Dialog activities