When to opt for a Master DE, a Selection Template, copy the Selection, or Data Sets?

Campaign Type Template

You want your Selection to be the base for many future Selections with similar structure, but these future versions will need some small modifications.

In this base Selection, you want to pre-set some advanced settings like Filters or Custom Values, not only the relationship between Data Extensions (since this would be possible to solve by using Data Sets instead)

Campaign Type: get orders place in a given country in the last 6 months

Selection Template: All UK orders made by men in the last 6 months.

Using this template for a new Selection: All US orders made by men in the last 6 months.

New runs of the same campagin

You want your Selection to be a template for future versions but the original version to never be modified by anyone else, leaving a description and instructions on how the team can copy it and create future versions. 

Note: A Selection that has been marked as a template can only be modified by the user who created it or an administrator. This is to prevent a template from being modified by other users or to avoid deleting it by accident

You have a campaign running monthly to give a prize to the top users. For each run, you want to generate a different Target Data Extension for archiving purposes. 

You want to save it as a template to prevent end users from modifying the original Selection for this campaign

You want to create a Selection with the same or similar structure of another Selection. This is a one/two time copy or you need the same Filter but in another Business Unit

You created a Selection for the first day of Black Friday, and now you want to reuse it for the second day, applying the same filter but updating the dates you are using in the Filter section.

As it’s a punctual need, you can just copy the Selection of Day 1 of Black Friday, change what you need, and run it

As a marketer, you always add the same combination of Data Extensions in your Selections, and you find yourself dragging and dropping the same Data Extensions several times a day

You organization often runs campaigns based on the customer orders and their order details.

In this scenario you will create the following Data Set (a combination of 3 Data Extensions)

Customers WITH MATCHING Orders

Orders WITH MATCHING OrderItems

After you have this Data Set, instead of adding the Data Extensions one by one, you can just drag & drop the Data Set and all the relationships will be automatically added 

You have some campaign types that require building a complex Data Extension combination. Creating these relationships directly in your Selection can lead to errors, or not all the users are knowledgeable enough on the structure of your Data Model

As an Admin, you can pre-build this combinations inside a Data Set

We have a campaign type where users need to apply filters on the products purchased in an order, which require building a relationship between 5 different Data Extensions.

Non-tech users are not comfortable building it, and often requires support from Admin Users to help them. 

To simplify this campaign, the Admin Users can create a Data Set called “Customers with Orders and Detailed Products” with the necessary Data Extensions, so the non-tech users can use it without knowing the structure of the Data Model

For some campaigns, you need to run queries over great amounts of data, which can lead to timeouts or very slow performance. 

To prevent it, you can build Master Data Extensions with the Aggregations of data you use in your campaigns, so they are pre-calculated when you needed (and refreshed nightly, for example)

You want to create a Selection with all customers who placed more than 3 orders in the last quarter.

Create a Master Data Extension containing the ID of the customer and number of orders in the last quarter. Whenever you need to filter out customers based on the number of orders, you can use this Master Data Extension to avoid accessing the Orders Data Extension and filter them recurringly. 

You want to simplify the day-to-day segment generation:

• You always need to add the same base filters over the same fields in every Selection (opt ins, email validation, …)
• You always combine the same Data Extensions to get fields from them into the target Data Extension
• You want to make sure marketers don’t forget to include some important filters

As soon as you are repeating the same Filter/combination of DEs daily, you should consider creating a Master Data Extension where you do that filter and scheduling it to run daily. 

After that, you can user your Master Data Extension as the base of your campaigns, knowing that the base-filters or combinations are already applied