Adding contacts to a campaign
The first step when building a campaign is choosing who will participate. There are 3 ways to do this:
- Contacts come from one or more of your segments. This is the ideal way to proceed because it gives you the ability to target accurately based on multiple behavioral and demographic criteria.
You select the target segments for your campaign directly in the campaign builder.
For more information about segments, take a few minutes to watch the tutorial video on the subject. - Contacts come from a campaign form. As you may have noticed, when you create a form, you can choose between two types of forms: standalone forms and campaign forms. Campaign forms are used specifically to add contacts directly from a form into your campaign.
As with segments, you select this contact source directly in the campaign editor.
This is not the option we recommend, since campaign forms offer fewer possibilities than standalone forms. And you will see that contacts can also be added from these standalone forms. - Finally, you can add contacts to a campaign by using the actions available in 3 places in your marketing automation software.
Indeed, you will find the action “modify the contact’s campaigns” in standalone form actions, campaign actions, and point trigger actions. These actions will force the inclusion or exclusion of contacts in the selected campaign.
Please note that it is also possible to do this without using this action. Indeed, in the same places you will find the action for modifying a contact’s segments. And, as you now know, a contact can enter a campaign via a segment.
Triggering automated actions
The second thing to fully understand about campaigns is setting up automated actions. Once your contacts have been added to your campaign, you can choose which actions you want to apply to your contact. To do this, you can choose from many events:
- Send an email
- Send an SMS
- Send a Tweet
- Send a message on Facebook Messenger
- Modify the contact’s points
- Modify the contact’s segments
- Modify the contact’s campaigns
If you want to plan a sequence of actions without a decision or condition, the builder will allow you to do so by launching the actions in parallel with one another. You will not be able to chain two actions one after the other. You will only need to manage the waiting times described later in this tutorial.
Marketing and transactional emails
I now suggest we take a brief detour through the email sending action. There you will find certain settings that raise a few questions.
Indeed, when you associate an email sending action with your campaign, you can choose between transactional and marketing emails. There is only one thing to remember: a marketing email can only be sent once to a contact. If this email is used in two campaigns and the contact is added to both campaigns, for example, they will receive the first email while the second will be skipped.
A transactional email does not take this into account and will send the email regardless.
Behavioral decisions
Finally comes the time when you can begin to personalize the inside of a campaign itself by setting up decision trees. The concept is very simple: you can set up different actions depending on your contact’s behavior. The decisions are varied and always related to the contact’s behavior:
- Opening an email
- Visiting a landing page or a URL on your site
- Submitting a form
As you can see, when setting up a decision, you now have a negative branch (for those who do not perform the expected behavior) and a positive branch. You will be able to attach new actions to these branches.
Demographic conditions
Conditions are the demographic counterpart of decisions. Same idea: they allow you to create decision trees with, potentially, different actions depending on the contact’s profile. Here, we are going to rely on the contact’s attributes to segment within the campaign. Based on:
- A contact field
- The contact’s tags
- The contact’s owner
- The contact’s segments
- A value from a form field submitted by the contact
Just like decisions, you can choose different actions for contacts depending on whether the criterion is met or not.
Managing waiting times
You will notice that it is possible to add a waiting time to each of the actions you configure in your campaign. Two options: either you add a delay relative to the previous item, or you add a fixed date. To ensure the automation of your campaigns, you should, as much as possible, use relative dates.
The same delay exists for conditions; it is the delay after which the condition is checked. Example: I check whether my contact is a man after 10 days.
Finally, the waiting time for decisions behaves a little differently. Indeed, behavioral criteria are specific because we all start by not having completed the action before doing it, even if this delay is very short. Thus, the decision will be checked for the negative branch only after the waiting time of the action on the negative branch.
For example, I send an email, I create an email open decision, and I add a follow-up email for non-openers. My campaign will check who the non-openers are for the follow-up only after the delay set on my second action.
It is essential to add a waiting time to the actions following the negative branch; otherwise, all your contacts will go down the negative branch.
Conclusion
One last piece of advice: I encourage you to prioritize your efforts on quality segmentation that is consistent with your business rather than launching into campaigns with dozens of branches going in every direction. This is rarely effective. The important thing is to track your contacts properly and offer them the right content based on their profile. It is not about planning for special cases where a contact risks ending up all alone.
Do not hesitate to watch and rewatch this tutorial when you start setting up campaigns on your marketing automation platform. You can also find all our other tutorial videos by subscribing to our YouTube channel!
