How to Set Up Sequential Messaging Campaigns
with Campaign Enterprise
Sequential email messages -- where recipients receive a
series of two or more emails timed by specific send dates,
usually with related messages -- can be set up with some simple
campaign and database management. These are autoresponder-type
campaigns, where someone signs up to receive a series of email
newsletters or other information that you provide.
In your database table, create a field to update, which
should be a numeric field with a default value of zero (0.)
When someone subscribes to the series, they will start out
at 0, and your campaign filter will look for the value of
the field to determine which records to include. Upon sending,
you would set that field to 1, either by incrementing the
field, or specifying 1 as the value. This indicates that the
first message in the series was sent. The second campaign
in the series would do the same thing, but look for records
where the value is already set at 1, the second campaign would
then change the value to 2, etc. (See the flow chart in Figure
1.)
Figure 1.
Sequential Messaging Using Four Campaigns
This numeric field will be the focus of the filters on the
Datasource tab using Campaign Enterprise. If you are just
starting your series, nobody should be found in the filter
for campaigns 2 through 4, which is fine. As the series moves
along however, you will begin to populate the list with those
who have started receiving the first messages, subsequently
moving along the process until they receive all the messages
in the series.
To prevent the recipient from receiving all the campaigns
at once, you chain them in reverse order. Then schedule the
last campaign (campaign 4 in this example) to be sent out
on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, depending on your series
schedule. Since the fields will be incremented on sending,
you’ll want to chain the campaigns in reverse order,
so that the filters will pull the correct records from the
database. If you ran the campaigns in forward order, a new
subscriber would receive all the emails in the series, one
right after the other.
Return to Technical
Tips
|
