Fair Use Policy

To ensure that every user is able to get most out Copernica Marketing Software, we have a fair use policy. This means that users aren’t allowed to cause excessive or unnecessary data traffic. After repeated violations of this policy, Copernica BV reserves the right to block access to the account of the user concerned.

When causing excessive data traffic, user create an unnecessary load on our servers. Not only can this results in a loss of performance for the account involved, this can also have a negative impact on the application performance for other Copernica users. We therefore request you to use our software responsibly.

To help you do so we’ve created some guidelines:

Backups and copies are unnecessary

Copernica backs up all its databases. Don’t create database backups and/or copies in your Copernica account. This only results in unnecessary data storage. 

Remove unnecessary data

To improve the performance of your own account and reduce the load on our servers, we request you not to store any unnecessary information in your account and to regularly clean up your database(s). A few tips:

• Remove selections you don’t use (you always have the option to recreate selections. By removing selections, no database details will be lost.)
• Remove double databases
• Remove databases you no longer use
• Remove expired information from your database(s)

Don’t perform unnecessary exports

Only export data if it’s really necessary. Performing a daily export for example isn’t very useful if your database is only updated once a week.

We also request you to schedule large imports and exports to be performed outside office hours.

Improve your imports

When you import data, it’s not necessary to overwrite your entire database. You can also just update the fields that haven been altered and/or added:

• In Copernica, go to ‘Profiles’
• Under ‘Current view’ select ‘Import/Export data’
• Choose ‘Import’
• Select the location you want to import a file from
• Go to the tab ‘Settings’
• In the ‘Type’ field, select ‘look for matches based on the key fields’
• In the ‘Matches’ field, select ‘update matching (sub)profiles’
• In the ‘Non matches’ field, select ‘create missing (sub)profiles’
• Start your import

An even easier way to synchronise automatically is by using our SOAP API .

We request you to schedule large imports and exports to be performed outside office hours.

Selections based on invalid email addresses

For your %deliverability sake it’s important to exclude invalid email addresses from your emailing list.

You can do so by adding a selection criterion that checks if an email address has resulted in a bounce in the past. This however is not the optimal way to do so.

You can reach the same goal while causing a lot less load by setting up a follow up action. Using a follow up action in a document, you are able to automatically add a value to a database field in a profile whenever a bounce occurs.

This then allows you to make a selection, where you exclude profiles that have a certain value in a database field. A selection on a field value causes a lot less load than a selection based on results of emailings sent in the past.

Learn more about follow up actions

Narrowing down selections

Let’s assume you have a database with people that have newspaper subscriptions. In that database you created a selection that includes everyone that has a half year subscription. An now you want to send everyone whose half year subscription is about to expire a reminder.

The wrong way
You could do so by creating a subselection under the selection ‘half year subscriptions’ with the additional criterion: everyone whose subscription start date was five months ago.

This however is a method that is not recommended. To be able to send an email to these profiles, the software has to rebuild two selections: the one that includes the profiles with a half year subscription and the profiles whose subscription started five months ago.

The right way
A more efficient way to create such a selection, is by adding two criteria to one selection:

• Profiles where the database field ‘half year subscription’ is set to ‘yes’
• Profiles whose subscription started five months ago

Because in this example you won’t be using subselections, only one selection has to be rebuilt every time you send an emailing.

Indexing fields

Please make sure that all fields you call upon in a selection are indexed. By indexing your fields you are able to fasten up the search process in your database, and the (re)building of selections. Also, this creates less load on our servers.

You can index fields as follows:

• Log in to Copernica and go to ‘Profiles’
• Choose the database you want index fields in
• Pick ‘Database management’ -> ‘Edit database fields’
• Select the field you want to index
• Tick the ‘This field is indexed’ box
• Click ‘Store’

Please note: you can index no more than 64 fields. Indexing large fields (text fields that can contain large amounts of characters) is not possible.

Slow statistics?

Do you send large emailings regularly and have  you noticed that it takes longer until your statistics are available? Please contact our support department . They will be happy to help you clean up your database by reordering your email destination table. This’ll remove old statistics and improve your account performance.