Keep in touch with recurring campaigns

Recurring campaigns are an effective way to communicate with your subscribers at key points in time with minimum set up and ongoing management. In fact, in most cases you can simply set up and forget.

What is a recurring campaign?

A recurring campaign is an email communication that regularly occurs based on a specific date trigger. These types of campaigns are set up once and are assigned specific recipient and timing criteria. When the criteria are met, the campaign is automatically sent.

Typical examples include subscriber birthday or anniversary emails and reminders. For example, you could set up a birthday campaign to provide your subscribers with a special discount on your products or services on their birthday or during their birthday month.

Why use recurring campaigns

Recurring campaigns are another way to keep in touch with your subscribers in a personal way with a minimum of effort. There are many potential uses for recurring campaigns depending on your product or service and the profile of your subscribers.

You can use recurring campaigns to reward loyal customers, welcome new subscribers, remind customers to renew their subscription, re-engage with inactive readers and much more.

What are the elements of a recurring campaign?

When setting up a recurring campaign, you need to consider the following:

1. 1. The audience: Are you targeting your entire database, a specific segment or new subscribers?
2. 2. Subscriber criteria: What information do you require to execute the campaign? Do you have the required information for your intended audience? For example, if you are setting up a birthday campaign, you must have a birth date for all your subscribers.
3. 3. The offer/message: This is the content of your email. Keep in mind the campaign is set up once so the offer or message doesn’t change each time the message is sent out. However, customisation of the message can still occur through the use of personalisation and dynamic content.
4. 4. Date trigger: Recurring campaigns are triggered by the occurrence of a specific date or anniversary. What date field in your database will be used to trigger the campaign? This can be a system date field (such as the subscribe date) or a custom date field (such as a birthday field).
5. 5. Timing and frequency: Campaigns can be set to run on the specific date used as the trigger or within a specific time period before or after the specific trigger date. The timing will then determine the frequency of the campaign –daily, weekly, monthly or yearly.

Let’s take our birthday example to illustrate:

A restaurant wants to provide its loyal customers with a 2 for 1 dinner offer for their birthday. Loyal customers are those belonging to the restaurant’s loyalty program and identified in their database as loyalty members. All loyalty members must provide their birth date on registration, so this information is also included in the restaurant’s database.

A recurring campaign is set up with a 2 for 1 offer coupon that can be printed by the member. The member’s loyalty number and birthday is included in the email to prevent multiple uses of the coupon.

The restaurant wants to make the offer available to members during the month of their birthday. Therefore, they want the campaign to run on the first of each month for all members whose birthday falls in that month.

Broken down into its elements:

1. 1. The audience: loyalty member segment
2. 2. Subscriber criteria: loyalty member flag and birthday field
3. 3. The offer: 2 for 1 dinner coupon with personalisation of loyalty number and birth date
4. 4. Date trigger: birth date
5. 5. Timing: all birthdays occurring during the current month. Frequency: monthly on the first of each month.

Once you understand the basic elements of recurring campaigns, the applications are numerous. Refer to the online help or give us a call and we can help you design and set up an effective recurring campaign.

Contact us today.