Tutorial 4.1: Setting up an email loyalty campaign

This is a step-by-step guide to creating a loyalty based campaign for an email series. You'll also cover how to setup an anniversary email. It should take about 15 minutes to complete but feel free to work through at it your own pace.

Setting Up an Email Loyalty Campaign

Login to your your sites administration dashboard, go to Marketing -> Email Campaigns and create a new campaign as you would for a standard one-off email.

Choosing your type of loyalty campaign - One-off vs Loyalty

In Step 1 of the email campaign wizard you'll need to select 'Create a customer loyalty program for recipients you choose' as the campaign type. Selecting this will show the Loyalty program types that you can choose from. Currently you're able to select whether you want to send the email on

• the recipients birthday
• any of 5 the anniversary dates that you can set for each customer
• as an email series i.e the email is triggered to be sent when the recipient joins or is added to the series mailing list.

Select the 'Email Series' option here.

Setting Your Delivery Date

Step 2 of the email campaign wizard is where you decide what day the email will be sent in relative to the anniversary or campaign join date. In a one-off email campaign you would be entering the actual date and time that you want to send the email campaign. However with a loyalty campaign, the email send date is expressed as the number of days after the anniversary or campaign join date.

In the example below the email will be sent 7 days after the recipient has been added to the email series mailing list. If you want to create a 3 part series of emails to be sent weekly then you will have to create 3 different email newsletters with the 1st one to be sent on day 0, the 2nd email to be sent on day 7 and the 3rd email to be sent on day 14 after the recipient has subscribed to the list. This process is repeated for everybody who subscribes to the list attached to these campaigns and everyone receives their weekly emails on their own timeline.

Creating a Mailing List for subscribers to join

Save your email and click on 'Lists' in the 2nd level menu to create a new mailing list for your email series. You need to create a mailing list so that site visitors are able to subscribe to this list and trigger the scheduled email series.

Give your new email list a meaningful name such as '5-part Email Tips, Tricks and Tidbits' and click on the 'Add Subscribe Box' to a webpage to add a small form to your site enable visitors to sign-up for the newsletter series. When they submit their name and email they are automatically added to this mailing list. Subscribe one test email address to this list so that you can test the scheduling of the email series.

Follow the remaining email campaign steps

Now you can go back to your campaign and select the new mailing list you've created as the recipients for your email series. After this step you can continue designing and editing your newsletter content following the wizard steps.

Using Anniversary Dates

So far we've seen how to create send an email series after a visitor has subscribed to the mailing list for that email series. However the system can also automatically send email campaigns dependent on the users birthday or any of the 5 anniversary dates you use to choose set for the user.

Here are some examples on how you can use anniversary based campaigns within your business.

• A travel agent could update the Anniversary 1 date with a date 12 months from the date of a customers travel package purchase. Now you would setup a campaign of Anniversary 1 type which sends a reminder to your customer that it's been 12-months since their last travels and that its time for another holiday!
• As a mechanic you could service a customers car and then tell the customer that their next service is due in 6-months. You update the customer's record and enter a date 6-months from now for Anniversary 2. Your campaign will automatically notify any customer when their next car service becomes due.

Every business can and should take advantage of anniversary based campaigns. These types of campaigns can save you a significant amount of time whilst delivering significant benefits and driving repeat business for your business.

Choosing the Anniversary Date

To choose the anniversary date within the customers record that you want to use, just select it in step 1 of the email campaign wizard as you are selecting the campaign type. Here we're going to use Anniversary 2 within the customer record.

Make sure the Anniversary Dates are recorded in your Customer Records

For the anniversary emails to work properly you'll need to make sure that your customers have the correct date recorded inside their records. To check and change this go to your customer record and click on 'Anniversary Dates' inside the action box. You can manually set the dates here for each customer or you can build customized webforms that collect the anniversary dates from customers when they fill out forms and automatically store it in your database.

Send it to your entire database

When using anniversary dates, it's possible to send an email campaign to your entire database with each person receiving the email only on their anniversary i.e their birthday. Just select the 'Entire Customer Database' option when choosing the recipients for your email. You're also able to use a targeted mailing list and this will send the email to everyone on the list only on their anniversary.

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