This 'Mark Customers' update has the same filtering capabilities as the 'Promotional Labels' report, the 'Customer Directory' report and the 'Customers' export. It can select subscribers to any one of several publications, or it can select subscribers to all publications in a given list of publications. By itself, that ability does not seem remarkable. The unique characteristic of this update is the ability to "remember" the selections that it makes by setting one or more of the eight"selection flags" in the customer record or by setting or incrementing values in the four numeric demographic fields. This is best illustrated by a couple of examples.
Example 1
You have created a promotional mailing using a complex selection of customers involving publications they have purchased in the past, the age of their most recent order and other criteria. Six months later you have an idea for a new promotion but want to save costs by avoiding sending the mailing to those people that received the previous promotion. To solve this problem mark the customers that you are sending a promotion to by running the 'Mark Customers' update using the same filter criteria that you are going to use for the mailing. Instruct the 'Mark Customers' update to set one of the eight selection flags. Later on, when you are ready to send the second mailing you can exclude those customers that have the selection flag that was previously set.
Example 2
You are the publisher of three publications. Lets call them PUB1, PUB2 and PUB3. You would like a list of "multi-buyer" customers, that is those people who have purchased two or more of those publications. To do this you will need to run the 'Mark Customers' update four times. The first run will select all customers and set the value of demographic field A to zero. We will be using this demographic field to store a count of the number of publications purchased by that customer. The second run will select customers who have subscribed to PUB1 and will add one to demographic field A. The third run will select customers who have subscribed to PUB2 and will also add one to demographic field A. The fourth run will select customers who have subscribed to PUB3 and will again add one to demographic field A. Finally you can run the 'Customers' export to get your list of multi-buyers by filtering for values of two or greater in demographic field A.
Test run
Check this box and no changes will be made to your customer records. A report will be produced that shows the changes to the selection flags and demographic fields that would have been made if you ran the update in non-test mode.
Clear these selection flags
Indicate which selection flags you wish to clear. Clearing the selection flags as the first step in a complex multi-step selection is a good idea. Please note that only those customers that match the update filter will have their flags cleared. If you want to be certain of the initial state of a flag then you should make an initial run of the update that clears that flag but has no other filter criteria.
Then set these selection flags
Indicate which selection flags you wish to set. Only those customers that match the update filter will have their flags set. You can set just one flag, or any combination of flags that you wish.
Set the demographic codes to these numbers
Indicate the initial values of the demographic code fields that you want to set. Typically you will want to make a preliminary run of the 'Mark Customers' update to set the demographic code field to zero or some other known value, but with no other filter criteria. This ensures that the demographic code field of all customers is in a known state.
Then add these numbers
Specify the value that you want to add to the demographic code field(s).