Drip Campaigns

Hello, from my perspective, it depends on the campaign but oftentimes yes. We have several triggered email campaigns but sometimes still send manually because we can't find a workaround. For example, we'd like to automate our re-engagement series but cannot find a way for emails to trigger based on time frame like 'send email two 7 days after email one' or conditions like 'if there is no open 3 days after email one, then trigger email with a different subject line.' And we're out of our allotted engagement factors.


We can, however, automate emails using donation criteria fairly easily, e.g. sustainer ask xx number of days after a 1x gift, sustaining gift anniversary, credit card expiring soon, or lapsing donors. Or using the system creation date for emails other than the welcome, e.g. if no opens 60 days after system creation date, then send a reactivation message. We are also working on a triggered birthday message.


As far as documentation on how to create these campaigns and build the associated queries in LO -- I'm not sure if that exists or not. We end up just playing around with the tools to see what works! Hope this helps somewhat.


Lara

Hey there, Danielle.

With Boys Town, while working with them on a retainer, I was able to help create a time-based drip campaign using recurring deliveries and it leverages a date custom profile field to do it.

On this page, https://support.boystown.org/site/SPageServer?pagename=sleep_email_series, there is some custom jQuery on the page that when the page loads, it finds the “Date of Submission” question. It then hides it and pre-populates with today's date in that value. This question is mapped to the custom date profile field for this campaign.

Then, it is a matter of creating a query based off of that date where you can send any number of drip informational emails. Using this method doesn't predicate on when a new contact was introduced to the Luminate Online Constituent360 database, but rather at the time of submission, whether the contact is brand new or has been in the database for years, it will, at that point start the clock on that informational drip campaign.

This particular client has 16 separate series that I worked with them to set up. Once we ran out of available custom date profile fields (there are only 10 available to use at any given time), we then used a custom string profile field (there are 30 custom string fields to use at any given time) to capture the remaining six dates for the remaining six series that we were setting up. In this field, we would capture an epoch time stamp using an S9 S-Tag, [[S9:timestamp]], that would be inserted into the Date of Submission, in this case, a question that is a text field, on page load with jQuery and it would also hide the field from the user's view so that they didn't see this question being asked, but it would populate that text input field's value with jQuery.

Then, with the help of our Data Integration team here at Blackbaud, they wrote a daily script that would run and convert the epoch time stamp to an actual date value for me to use with a query to build a group that would then be the target audience to trigger a recurring email delivery for those last remaining six series.

Another way to do something like this, might be to use email campaign delivery filters to send a two-part campaign. You can send to members of a given group (e.g. disengaged contacts) and use the “has never been sent an email from this campaign before” filter for the first message and for the second, you may want to use the “has received an email from this campaign before” and all of the other filters (e.g. opened but didn't click, opened and clicked but didn't take action, opened, clicked and took action) to ensure that the second message always follows the first. However, with this method, given the limitations of a recurring delivery, you can only schedule these, once per day, every weekday or once per week on a certain day of the week. So, given these limitations, it would need to start and wrap up in the same week (e.g. first message goes out on a Monday and the second message goes out on a Thursday or Friday of the same week.)

I have seen something like this work for a re-engagement campaign with messages similar to these two when setting up a recurring delivery:

• http://shs.convio.net/site/MessageViewer?em_id=19422.0&dlv_id=0&pgwrap=n
• http://shs.convio.net/site/MessageViewer?em_id=19423.0&dlv_id=0&pgwrap=n

I hope you find this response helpful. If you're interested in Professional Services assistance, please note that we offer many different types of projects from a bucket of hours as a “Time and Materials” project where you are billed for the hours used during the current month at the end of that month, to retainers where you have a certain number of hours per month to use with a dedicated consultant to assist with anything you might be working on in the platform that can also offer strategic consulting as well. If you're interested at any time, please reach out to your account manager to discuss your options.

Thank you and have a pleasant day ahead,
Will
will.hull@blackbaud.com