Online relationship marketing firm Postfuture Inc. filed an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for a system to personalize e-mail messages.
The patent covers a set of extensions to Postfuture's Web-based Postpublisher publishing and distribution platform. This includes features for content categorization, rules creation and customer preference mapping intended to make it easier to personalize customer communications.
Dallas-based Postfuture likens its concept to a deck of playing cards. Each HTML or text message is built as a collection of tiled areas called publishing zones to enable content insertion and categorization. Each zone can be organized as a stack of content layers called a multi-content zone that acts like a stack of cards.
Thus, each layer can be associated with a rule that selects a particular layer or card in the stack based on matching preferences in the customer base. A marketer therefore can stack the cards of content by setting conditions for the way to deal the cards to each customer.
Postfuture envisions that several multi-content zones typically are presented within a publishing template to automate recommendations for a multitude of products producing large quantities of message combinations across a single audience.
