How to use Campaign Series within Salesforce
Campaign Series is a tool designed to assist in the forward planning of campaigns and gives you the ability to send a predetermined series of campaigns on a specified time offset.
For example a welcome series for your newsletter signups could send an email straight away, another 24 hours later, another after a week, and so on.
From an analytics point of view you can measure the marketing benefit of the series as a whole, in addition to the individual campaign within the series. You can plan out the series over the course of weeks, months or even years.
You will need to build each individual campaign as usual with one slight difference. Setting the ‘Action Type’ to ‘Campaign Series’.
Building each campaign
Each campaign within your series should be created within Salesforce, The first one should have your audience attached. All other campaigns within your series do not require an audience to be attached, but should also be sent through the integration.
Check your audience
Open your first campaign (that has your audience attached). Firstly, go to the Audience tab, and make a note of the audience that has been attached. You will need to refer back to this later.
Setting the campaign type
Go to the Detail tab and set the action type to 'Campaign Series'. This will remove the Audience tab from the screen. Repeat this step for every campaign within your series.
Create the Series
go to Tools - Campaign Series, then Select 'Add New Series', give it a name and click on 'Add'.
Series Setup - Series Details
Group - Select the group that you made a note of earlier.
Series Action Type - Select (Static = a static audience list. Refresh Non-recurring = allows you to add new people to the beginning of the series).
Suppress Contacts - See the last chapter (excluding contacts part way through a series).
Dates - the start and end dates for the series. End date refers to the first campaign in the series. If someone joins the series just before the end date, they will continue to receive the other campaigns.
Series Setup - Campaign Selection
Choose the first campaign to be sent in your series, and apply an offset. Typically the first campaign will be set as immediate. Then click on add.
Repeat this step for each campaign in your series with a different offset. The offset refers to the amount of time between each campaign, NOT from the beginning of the series.
Series Setup - Campaign Series
Each of the campaigns in the series will appear here. you can move and delete these from the grid.
Initiate the series
You may now initiate the series.
Adding New Contacts
If you selected your series to refresh, you will need to add the members to your Salesforce campaign (The first in your series) and resend it to CommuniGator. This will add all new members to your series.
Excluding contacts part way through a series (Suppress Contacts)
It is possible to exclude people from a series if they no longer meet the conditions of the group by selecting the 'suppress contacts' check box in the campaign series setup screen, although to use this feature you will need to recreate your audience group within CommuniGator's Group Builder tool and then use this group within your series.
To refresh your contacts you will still need to push the first campaign in your series (with an audience attached) from Salesforce. This will send your contacts through, at which point they will be picked up by your CommuniGator group that's assigned to your campaign series.