A campaign tool that cannot see your customers sends the same email to everybody

The export is where marketing software goes wrong, and it goes wrong quietly. Somebody pulls a CSV of customers, uploads it to the campaign tool, and builds segments on top. For about a fortnight the segments are accurate. After that they are a photograph.

What follows is familiar to anyone who has run a list this way. A customer who churned in April gets a renewal offer in June. A ten-year client gets the new-customer welcome sequence. Somebody unsubscribes from the campaign tool and keeps receiving invoices from a different system, which is the version of this problem that has legal consequences.

Segments built from records, not exports

Rutba Marketing runs on the same customer records the sales team maintains. There is no import step, because there is nothing to import from — the contact in the segment is the contact in the CRM.

• Segments read live CRM data, so a segment is a question rather than a snapshot.
• Unsubscribes stick everywhere, because there is one contact record holding the preference.
• Opens, clicks and conversions are attributed back to the contact who converted, on their timeline.
• Approval steps before anything goes out.

An unsubscribe honoured in one system and ignored in another is not a bug. It is a compliance incident with a delay on it.

Email and social on one calendar

Two applications ship in the product. Campaigns does mailing lists, templates, drip journeys and send reporting. Social plans and schedules posts to every connected channel from one calendar, with the same approval step.

Keeping them together is a judgement rather than a technical necessity: the same person usually runs both, the same approval usually applies to both, and a campaign that goes out by email on Tuesday and on social on Thursday is one campaign with two channels.

And the mail actually has to arrive

Campaign sending runs on Rutba Send, the same relay that carries transactional mail — receipts, password resets, invoices. That is deliberate: sending reputation is a property of a domain, not of a product, and splitting your mail across two providers means managing one reputation in two places and understanding neither.