Getting Started Guide – Documents Portal

Welcome to Fabriq! The below Getting Started Guide is meant to help guide you through the documentation and processes required to make the most of the offers you send to customers through our platform. Your CSM will give you an overview of the steps you need to take during onboarding, but please review and refer back to this document at any time.

Table of Contents

General Planning & Roles/Responsibilities
Campaign Brief Template
Experimental Design
Technical Details
a. Data Exchange
b. Audience Management
c. Product Catalog Management
d. Transform Functionality
Metrics Overview

1. General Planning & Roles/Responsibilities

By defining roles and responsibilities among our teams, we will identify the resources that are needed, when they will be needed, and what the process will be to ensure success for the onboarding process.

There are 3 phases of planning:

Implementation
Enablement
Ongoing Operations

During Implementation, we are focused on technical onboarding. This includes:

Reviewing Formation’s technical specifications together prior to beginning development
API integrations development
Setting up connectors and transformations
Setting up the product for your team to use
Full end-to-end test for integrations

Additionally, we’ll share details with your team about our processes and what to expect in the Enablement and Ongoing Operations phases.

In the implementation phase, your team is responsible for ensuring that all set up and technical integrations are complete according to spec. End-to-end integration testing will be run collaboratively with Formation before proceeding to launch.

Resources required of your team during this phase:

IT/Engineering for development work
Project manager/main point of contact

The Enablement Phase includes:

Time for your teams to develop the campaign brief (see below) and prepare creative assets ahead of your first campaign launch
Live Product Training session(s), which include live assistance from your CSM while you configure your first campaign.
User acceptance testing conducted by your team with support from Formation
First launch

Resources required of the your team during this phase:

Project manager/main point of contact
Marketing operator
Analyst

In the Ongoing Operations phase, work is focused on setting your team up for success for all future campaigns. The Formation team and your CSM will be available for ongoing technical and product support. We will review your product usage and suggest best practices when appropriate. And, as new offer types, features, and product enhancements are added to the UI, your CSM will be in touch to review and help you understand how best to leverage to achieve your business objectives.

Coming Soon: Optimization Best Practices

Resources required of the your team during this phase:

Marketing operator

2. Campaign Brief Template

By developing a campaign brief, your team will ensure that you have set an outline for how to make the most of the Formation offers that you send to your customers, have key metrics in place to measure your dynamic offers, and make sure that the campaigns you send meet your business objectives. Guardrails and business rules will ensure that you do not go outside the bounds of best practices for your marketing department and reward customers appropriately.

Define a business goal for the campaign
Select a campaign objective that aligns to the business goal
Select the appropriate audience
Select run dates
Define business rules / guardrails
Align on success metrics based on the MSP

Here is a link to more info on the Campaign Brief Template

3. Experimental Design & Control Groups

In order to best understand how Formation offers are performing on an on-going basis, we recommend that your team defines a group against which you can compare Formation offers. These could be static offers or a Global Control group that receives no offers. We recommend that the Control Group only be reshuffled once per quarter such that enough time is allowed for optimization for the group receiving offers. The most important thing is that the comparison group allows for an apples-to-apples comparison with Formation offers. The only real difference between the two groups should be that one is receiving Formation offers.

Please also note the following considerations for Control Groups:

Formation does not manage control group information in our product, and any customer in an audience file loaded through the UI will receive an offer.
Control groups should be of an appropriate size and similar to the corresponding audience (in make up and purchasing behavior) to replicate the conditions of the test audience. We recommend running a power analysis to find the appropriate sample size.
Since you will receive events from the transaction API and financial metrics through the UI, test/control comparisons can be completed using this data.
Ideally, no other marketing initiatives would be running on the offer audience or its comparison group during a Formation campaign. However, if other marketing initiatives are necessary during this time, they should target the Formation offer audience and its comparison group in the same way.

4. Technical Details

Now that we’ve covered the operational and working processes, this section will cover the work that must happen first to enable your team to execute offers. This work will need to be completed and tested in order for offers to be sent through the platform.

a. Data Exchange
In order to use Formation, several data sources must be connected to our product using a series of APIs, transformations, and connectors. (Transformations may not be needed.) Audience management files and product catalogs are also used. More information about each of these follows.

APIs:
Formation currently offers several APIs. They are:

Ingress

Transaction: Send transaction data from customer to Formation

Activation: Send events to Formation when customers opt in to their offers, allowing them to progress and earn rewards

Action: Send non-transaction events to Formation

Egress

Status: Query Formation for a customer’s offers & status

APIs require authentication by creating an API key following these directions.

*Where to find API Key Creation in the UI

For additional API documentation, please reference our specs and the Developer Docs Portal.

Transformations:

You can customize Formation payloads received from Connector events or the Status API by using jQ transforms. You can read more about jQ here. If you use transforms, they must be created before you create your connectors.

Some use cases for utilizing transforms are:

Sending reward events to your loyalty platform API directly versus creating a middleware endpoint.
Triggering an email directly using your Customer Engagement or Customer Data Platform, or Email Service Provider APIs directly.
Receiving an abbreviated dataset to your own endpoint for some event types.

More information about transformations can be found here.

Connectors:

There are multiple Connector Event Types that the Formation platform sends to inform the messages you share with your customers. Read more about them in the article linked above.

All existing offer types use the following connector event types:

- - Ready - Sent when you have launched offers from the platform and they can be communicated to customers.
    - This event is often used as a pre-trigger for campaign sends.
  - Achieved - Sent when your customer has made progress in their offer by completing an assigned step.
    - This event can be used to trigger a message to your customers encouraging their continued progress toward offer completion.
  - Activated - Sent when your customer has activated their offer.
    - This event can be used to trigger a message to your customers that elicits excitement about offer completion.
  - Completed - Sent when your customer has completed all of their assigned steps.
    - This event can be used to trigger a congratulatory message to your customer for completing their offer.
  - Reward - Sent when your customer has completed a step that has an associated reward value.
    - This event can be used to trigger points issuance.
- The following connector event types are only available for some offer types:
  - Progressed - Sent when your customer has made progress towards a cumulative offer but has not yet achieved a step.
    - NOTE: This event type is currently only available in the Week Streak offer type.
    - Similar to the achieved event, it can be used to trigger an encouraging message to your customer to complete their offer.

If your organization uses data platforms that Formation has integrated with, please read about how to utilize those here. If a data platform you’d like to see integrated with Formation isn’t listed there, reach out to your CSM.

b. Audience Management

Your team can use whatever methods of segmentation or management that make sense to your business practices to create your audiences. From there, these audiences should be formatted as a single column CSV using the column header customer_id and uploaded to the Formation platform.
Audience management files should only include the marketable customers to whom you intend to send offers. Our ML will assign all users in a file an offer, based on the parameters selected.
Any control customer holdouts must be managed on the customer side. Formation does not manage or report on control populations.
Audiences can be updated and re-used as segments shift over time, and assigned to future campaigns.
We recommend that the logic being used on your side when creating audience segments remains consistent over time, even as the audience members change.
For information on creating new audiences, refer to this article.
For more information on Audience Management, read here.

c. Product Catalog Management

You are responsible for loading and maintaining the product catalog used for your offers.
This functionality enables you to send offers to your customers that require a specific category purchase for qualification.
Through this process, you can also manage which categories or SKU’s will be excluded from counting towards offer spend.

The product catalog must be formatted as a single JSONL file using the following schemas:

{ "category_id": "string", "category_name": "string", "is_excluded": boolean }
{ "product_id": "string", "product_name": "string", "categories": list<string> }

Read more about setting up and using the Product Catalog function here.

5. Metrics Overview

The Formation platform allows for your team to review the progress of your campaigns while they are live in-market. Over time, new capabilities will be added to the UI to give your team more flexibility to review and compare the outcomes of your campaigns.

In order to make the best use of your data, you will need to ensure that you can easily find it! Creating naming conventions (campaigns, audience files, and product catalogs) that are user-friendly, descriptive, easy to find, and easy to understand will go a long way in measuring impact and understanding your ever changing customers.

Here is an overview of the current capabilities. Our team can also share an exported version of these metrics for easier import to your internal BI tools.