Marketing Campaigns

Overview

A marketing campaign is a one-to-many campaign sent to an audience containing one or more recipients. Marketing campaigns, also known as bulk campaigns, are capable of presenting a highly personalized message to each recipient.

In Accelerator, Marketing Campaigns and Transactional Campaigns are kept in separate file structures for clear organization and differentiation.

Table of Contents

Campaign Overview Page

Settings

Upload Recipient File for Campaign

Advanced Options

Seedlists

Suppression List

Testing Marketing Campaigns

Personalization (Testing & Preview)

Spam Filter Testing

Recipient Data Testing

Schedule

Running Quick Launch

Scheduling Jobs

Launching a Currently Scheduled Campaign

Experiment Campaign Set-up Guide

Job List

Analytics

Campaign Overview Page

The Overview page of a Campaign provides a great amount of information about the current setup of the campaign. You can preview using the “Inspect Message Content” button, which takes you to the Personalization page, or by sending a test from the Actions > Send Test button.

Additionally, you can view important details of the campaign such as:

• Recipient List
  • The name of the datasource used for generating the recipient list.
  • Clicking the recipient list name brings you to the Audience used for generating this list.
• Approximate Size
  • The number of recipients in the designated recipient list is displayed here.
  • Clicking the refresh icon pulls the current recipient list associated with that list to reflect the most current recipient count.
• Template
  • The template associated with this campaign is displayed here.
  • Clicking the template name brings you to the Overview page of that template.
• Spam Assassin Score
  • Displays the score from the Spam Filter testing page.
  • Clicking the score takes you to this campaign’s Spam Filter testing page.
• Approx. Message Size
  • Displays the size of the personalized message for this campaign.
• Approx. Render Time
  • Displays the anticipated render time of a single message for this campaign.
• Schedule
  • The type of campaign scheduling is displayed here:
    • ADHOC, ONETIME, DAILY, DAYSPERWEEK, or ADVANCED.
    • Clicking the schedule type brings you to the Schedule page of this campaign.
• Created By
  • The user who generated the campaign.
  • Clicking the name will bring you to the User Details page for that individual.
• Date Created
  • The date and time (GMT) when this campaign was generated.
• Last Updated By
  • The user who last made changes to the campaign.
  • Clicking the name will bring you to the User Details page for that individual.
• Date Last Modified
  • Date and time (GMT) of last campaign edits.
• Groups
  • This corresponds to the User Groups with permissions to access this campaign.
  • Clicking on a particular group will bring you to a Group Details page.

From the Overview, you can also Launch the campaign. Selecting Launch will immediately send the campaign. See the "Schedule" guide section for more information about sending a Marketing Campaign.

Settings

The Settings page for a Marketing Campaign is where you designate the Template and List for the campaign’s design and recipients.

Name and description can be edited from what was set during the original creation of the campaign, and changes will display on the Overview page. These items are internal and only visible to users, not recipients.

The Category field is meant to be used as a reporting tool, allowing you to categorize and identify groupings of campaigns together. The category is returned with internal reporting data, and can be pulled into campaign content using the personalizable field for Job Category: ${Gears.jobCategory}

In the Template field, you will start typing the name of a Template created in the Content section of Accelerator and select the one you want to send. Archived content is not available in this list.

The List field is a dropdown used to select a pre-existing Recipient Data source or select the "Upload Recipient File" option to import a CSV or XML file as the Recipient Data for this campaign.

In order to provide pre-existing options in the sample drop-down, there will need to be Database Queries and/or URL Data Sources in the Audience section of Accelerator created with a Data Type of "Recipient".

Upload Recipient File for Campaign

When uploading a new Recipient File, all files must be UTF-8 encoded. There are a few different file type options and different requirements for each file type:

• XML file requirements:
  • ends with .xml
  • has a root element of "RecipientList"
  • each "Recipient" element has an "EmailAddress" node
• CSV or TSV file requirements:
  • ends with .csv or .tsv,
  • file has properly named headers (including an EmailAddress header)
  • all file rows contain the same number of elements
• Compressed file:
  • Beneficial with large number of recipients.
  • Currently supported compression schemas:
    • ZIP (ending in .zip)
    • GZIP (ending in .gz or .gzip)
    • ZLIB (files ending in .zlib or .dzip)
  • Requirements:
    • full name should end with the original file type extension, and then the compression extension (i.e. a zip file containing an xml file named my-recipients would be my-recipients.xml.zip)

Notification Email Address allows you to provide an address to receive error notifications related to this campaign. Check the “Include Progress Updates” box if you want the notification email address to receive additional job progress updates as well as error notifications.

Users with 250ok credentials have an option to include seedlist tests. Seedlist Testing helps to identify potential deliverability problems; the campaign identifier is optional, and included as a header on the mailing. The identifier may include FreeMarker interpreted fields such as ${seedlist.campaignName}.

Seedlists

Seedlists are email addresses automatically added to a recipient list for the purpose of testing and monitoring the campaign’s content rendering and deliverability across different email providers and content filters.

Using Seedlists isn’t required by MessageGears, but it is highly recommended and can be a very beneficial practice for monitoring a number of different factors that affect email deliverability and engagement. 

Advanced Options

Using the URL Append field, it is possible to add parameters to all links in the campaign, such as Google Analytics UTM strings or other parameters for internal analytics.

Supplemental Data (formerly called Context Data) is an optional XML source that is shared across all recipients for the job being processed. This data may be used to provide offer/deal content that is available for all recipients, such as "Today's Hot Travel Deals" for example. Use the dropdown to select a pre-existing supplemental data source.

In order to provide options in the datasource drop down, there will need to be Database Queries and/or URL Data Sources in the Audience section of Accelerator created with a Data Type of "Context".

A Pre-Campaign Trigger is a custom set of SQL actions set to be performed before a campaign launch. This can prevent replication of data in your database by performing actions automatically, such as changing or updating database fields.

Like a Pre-Campaign Trigger, a Post-Campaign Trigger will be a custom SQL action to be performed in relation to a campaign launch - in this case after launch.

All Campaign Triggers are managed in the Audience > Campaign Trigger area of Accelerator.

Suppression Lists are a group of Email Addresses that are compiled to be excluded from the Audience on the Campaign that you are running.

Setting a Suppression List

The Set Suppression List option in Accelerator enables you to upload a collected file of these Email Addresses. Supported file formats only include the following: XML, CSV and TSV.

Step 1

To access your campaign settings, navigate to Campaigns > Marketing, select your campaign, and then select Settings from the top-right options.

Step 2:

Next you will need to click on View Advanced Options. This option can be found near the bottom of the form.

After this has been selected, it will open up the full Advanced Options available to the user and you can click the Set Suppression List button.

Step 3:

This will open a new dialogue box and the first thing that you will need to do is to set the Encoding option for UTF-8.

After this option has been set, you can now choose your Suppression List by clicking on the Browse file and selecting the appropriate file. Again, this file must be formatted as XML, CSV and TSV to work. Importantly, the name of the files must be displayed as "EmailAddress" in the header and each address must be on its own line. The example below will demonstrate the format that the email addresses must be presented in for a successful Suppression List file.

After clicking on Submit, you should make sure to Save the Campaign. After this, you may continue to edit the Campaign or have the option to Launch it.

Testing Marketing Campaigns

Personalization (Testing & Preview)

On the Personalization page in a Campaign, you can generate a live test of the content on the page in order to test personalization rendering times and results across HTML and text content versions.

Personalization testing a Campaign may take longer than testing in the Content section, as the process retrieves recipient data as provided by the Audience.

Spam Filter Testing

On the Spam Filter page in a Campaign, you can generate and view spam scores associated with the template. This can help to identify content issues which may lead to the campaign emails landing in spam folders rather than recipients’ inboxes. This tool is powered by SpamAssassin, a commonly used spam filter.

Recipient Data Testing

With the Recipient Data tool, you can preview the message for specific recipients by sending a test copy of their personalized message to your own email. The Send Test button appears to the left of each Recipient on this page. This tool is a step beyond Personalization testing, as you can select a specific recipient and see how their email will look in the inbox.

Recipient Data testing features are only available within Marketing Campaigns.

Schedule

Running Quick Launch

Quick Launch is a feature that allows a Campaign to be easily created & scheduled from a Template in the Content section, simplifying the creation of one-time use Campaigns. In a Marketing Campaign, the option is simply called Launch.

When working within a Template in the Content section of Accelerator, the Quick Launch option appears at the top right. When clicked, you will be prompted to select a List and an Account before sending. Under Advanced Options, it’s also possible to customize the Category, Notification address, a URL Append, Supplemental Data, Pre- and Post-Campaign Triggers, and Suppression List for the Quick Launch campaign.

When working within an existing Marketing Campaign, the Launch option appears at the top right. When clicked, a dialogue box appears to confirm the details of the launch, including Name, Recipient List (with approximate recipient count), Spam Assassin Score, Category, and Date Last Modified. Once confirmed, the campaign is launched immediately.

Quick Launch is best used once you have established all of the necessary sending profiles, database queries, supplemental data, and triggers, as well as thoroughly tested the template.

Scheduling Jobs

In a Marketing Campaign, the Schedule page is where you will access detailed sending options for the campaign, including recurring sends.

With the exception of Ad hoc, time zones display the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) offset and civil times (such as Eastern Time, ET) to simplify scheduling. Refer to the World Clock to confirm current time zones for scheduling. Here are the available scheduling options:

Launching a Currently Scheduled Campaign

If the Launch button is clicked while the current campaign is scheduled for a launch at a future time and date, the Launch dialogue will alert the user to this conflict:

Initiating an ad hoc (immediate) launch of a campaign will remove the future scheduled send. There is an additional checkbox at the bottom of the dialogue box to check and indicate "Yes, immediately send to recipients."

The scheduled send time can be re-added by going to the Schedule page and re-entering the desired settings. However, without doing so the campaign remains in Ad Hoc scheduling status and will not send without being directly launched.

Experiment Campaign

Experiment Campaigns (formerly referred to as Multivariate, or MVT, Campaigns) allow users to send message variations to a subset of recipients for the purposes of testing engagement. This practice is traditionally known as A/B testing. With MessageGears Experiment Campaigns users can test and evaluate up to 26 campaign variations with MessageGears Accelerator. You can find a complete guide to building and running an MVT Campaign by clicking on the following link.

Job List

In a Marketing Campaign, you can visit the Job List page to see the list of sent jobs from that Campaign. By clicking the ID of a sent job, you access its Job Details page, which provides specific delivery and engagement data for that launch of the Marketing campaign. The charts at the top show delivery stats as well as user opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and spam complaints. Here you can track the following aspects of your campaign:

• Delivery, including the number of active and suppressed messages, the percentage of delivered or bounced messages, the percentage of messages containing content errors, and the percentage of messages that are pending or waiting to be sent.
• Engagement, including the percentage of unsubscribes, spam complaints, total open and click rates, as well as unique (individual user) open and click rates.

Additional details are available by clicking the job details link posted after the Delivery and Engagement statistics sections. Clicking that link opens a lower pane that consists of multiple tabs:

• Header information above the tabs: From address, Reply To address, and Subject
• Job Details tab: Job attributes including Job ID, Request ID, Start day, date, and time
• Recipient tab: Recipient URL and example recipient data - this is only available to users with the Audience role 
• HTML Content tab: All HTML code, including links.
• Text Content tab: All text, including personalization content.
• SpamAssassin tab: Each HTML rule and its corresponding spam core as well as the anticipated level of related delivery issues based on the score.
• Click Heat Map tab: Shows the distribution of click counts overlaid on the rendered HTML content

Analytics

The Analytics page shows you the most recent performance statistics for all individual jobs associated with the open campaign. You can click individual data points to view total counts associated with job results at a specific point in time.

The first two charts on this page reflect the most recent job launch date(s), deliverability, and overall engagement. The remaining charts reflect monthly statistical trends in engagement.