When an Epiphany Outbound system is not the only system used for campaigning at an organization, a quick and easy way to include those non-Epiphany campaigns into your solution is through the use of external tables.

During design, an external table can be created with very generic column and attribute definitions. You will need the customer number, or whatever your solution uses to uniquely identify your customers, and a couple of other elements such as campaign name, treatment and cell, and a couple of “empty” columns, one numeric and one character. Be generous on the size of the columns, but try to limit them total number to make loading and processing easier.

When non-Epiphany campaigns are created, once the file is obtained, you can load them into this external table, and use them to exclude or include on your analyses or campaigns. This table can be easily loaded and unloaded to include all campaigns, or just the most recent ones.

You can also load other lists in this table that can be used to exclude or include based on your needs. With the “empty” columns, you can load any data that you would like to temporarily use in your Epiphany solution. And with the attributes that are created on these columns, you can use them in your reports or campaigns.

External tables are quick and easy ways to load temporary data into your Epiphany system for analyses, or inclusion / exclusion purposes.