Overview

The Cordial Edge Channel Affinity model looks at a contact's past engagement behavior to determine which channel they interact with most: email, SMS, or Push (mobile). This gives you the ability to communicate with customers in the channel where they're most likely to engage. With Channel Affinity, you no longer need to guess which channel customers prefer or compare channel engagement analytics manually.

Channel Affinity is available as a predictive attribute in the Audience Builder and Contact Profile.

Contact your CSM to enable Channel Affinity in your account.

How it works

1. Cordial counts the number of clicks each contact makes on each channel and identify which channel received the most clicks.

2. We calculate the average clicks per day for each channel to determine the highest performer in each timeframe.

3. Finally, we combine the results from both methods to identify the channel that consistently delivers the best performance across both periods.

Use cases

• Re-engagement campaigns: For customers who've become less active, you can set up automated re-engagement campaigns using their preferred channel.
• In tandem with STO: Use Channel Affinity alongside Send Time Optimization to send customers messages on their preferred channel—at their preferred time.
• Alongside Category Affinity: Use the Category Affinity tool to send customers messages about items in categories they’re most interested in—on their channel of choice.
• With cart abandonment messages: Send reminders to customers through their preferred channel to remind them about items left in their cart, encouraging them to complete their purchase.
• Loyalty program updates: Send updates about loyalty points or exclusive offers through a customer’s preferred channel to drive engagement and incentivize repeat purchases.

Use Channel Affinity

Channel Affinity is a string value: crdl_ai_channel_affinity

• Once enabled in your account, you can use it to build audiences in the Audience Builder.
• You can also view Channel Affinity in each contact's Contact Profile. 

Sufficient channel engagement data is required for Channel Affinity to function. Channel Affinity data is automatically updated on a daily basis.

Build an audience with Channel Affinity

1. Navigate to Contacts > Audiences and select New or edit an existing audience. 

2. Under rules, type in Cordial AI Channel Affinity or locate it under Attributes.

3. Click on Cordial AI Channel Affinity or drag it into the Include Contacts section. 

4. To load applicable contacts, choose Matches and enter the desired Channel Affinity: email, SMS, or push.

5. Click the Actions button and select Save. 

6. Once your audience is saved, you can select it when creating or editing messages.

Use case: Browse Orchestration

One way to utilize Channel Affinity is in a forked Podium Orchestration. The following example uses a browse event on a website to trigger an Orchestration. The Orchestration is then forked into two paths by Channel Affinity: customers who prefer email, and customers who prefer SMS messages. This way, you could send an automated browse message to people in the channel they prefer.

1. Navigate to Automations > Podium Orchestrations and create a new Orchestration. 

2. Click the Trigger panel and select A Contact's Real-Time Behavior. 

3. Select the customer event that will trigger the Orchestration and click Continue. The example below will send an automated message when someone browses nineties jeans on a website.

4. Click the + button and select Add fork.

5. Configure the paths for your fork by selecting an email affinity audience for one path and an SMS affinity audience for the other. The steps to create an audience using Channel Affinity are laid out above.

6. Once your paths are saved, configure the Delay, Filter (audience), and Action. The Action in this case will be sending a message in each contact's preferred channel: email or SMS.

7. Publish and Enable your Orchestration.

• Learn more about Podium Orchestrations here.

View a contact's Channel Affinity

1. To view Channel Affinity for an individual contact, navigate to Contacts > Contact Profile and select the contact. 

2. Click the Attributes tab and locate the Cordial AI Channel Affinity attribute.