Preferences provide you with the ability to further gather information about your customers to effectively target them in a campaign. Different from attributes that describe specific defining properties about the customer, preferences gather likes and interests of the customer. This allows you to target customers with similar interests into a particular campaign. Preference information can be gathered from an online form filled in by the customer or procured by a provider in a file.

Preferences are more flexible than attributes in that a customer can have multiple values for each preference type as. Using the information provided by the preference values, you can individually tailor message content for the customers. The preferences you define are stored in the Preference Master table and can be loaded into the customer database if a file of preference values by customer is provided.

The Preferences screen either displays all available customer preferences that are defined in Connect. The Customer Preferences window allows you to create new preferences or edit existing preferences. By clicking on the column heading, you are able to sort the preferences based on the name value of the column. Clicking the column heading twice sorts the preference rows in reverse order.

The Preferences screen provides the following information about the preference:

• Preference Name: The unique preference name

• Type: The data type for the preference (i.e. String, Number, Date, or Single Character)

• Bounded: Determines whether the entry values for the preference are bound to a list of selectable entries or are entered into Connect by the user. For example, the preference Cycling can be bounded by the values "Mountain" and "Road".

• Multiple Values: Indicates whether or not multiple values are allowed per customer for that preference

• Action: Allows the user to edit or delete the preference