Dripping Messages to Contacts

Drip marketing is a form of e-mail marketing where a company sends (“drips”) e-mail messages to contacts on a scheduled basis. You can create your own drip campaign in Bronto by employing date-based automated message rules. The rules that you use to create this type of drip campaign are based on the creation date of the contacts that is stored by default in the history of each of your contacts.

The Contact Enters Your Database

The entire process begins when the contact signs up on an add contact form that you provide. In this case, the contact adds themselves to a list by signing up for emails from The Widget Gallery.

You can see below that the contact is now in your contact list and has a creation date of 07/08/2010. This date is the key to your drip campaign. Each email sent will be sent on a date determined by a fixed number of days after this creation date.

Creating The First Rule

In this example, the first rule that you will create is a rule that sends each contact in your list a message 7 days after they were created. You will need to click on the “Automated Message Rules” link under the Messages tab in your Bronto account. Once there, click on the link that is prompting you to create a new rule. You will then be prompted to name your rule and specify what type of rule you would like to set up. I have chosen to name this rule “Week 1 Message” in an effort to keep this drip campaign organized. Choose Date-Based for the Rule Type. The application will then ask you for a couple of pieces of qualifying information concerning this date based rule. You will need to choose “Contact Created” for the field that contains the date you are basing this on. Then, you will need to choose your preference for “Type of Match” which, in this example, will be “Check Day, Month, and Year Every Day”. Once you have completed this, you can move to the next step in the wizard.

Choosing a message to send and setting it up is almost exactly the same as sending a regular message in Bronto. Once you have set your message up, you will be asked to establish your Timing Options. In this first rule’s options, I specify that the message should be sent at 10:00 am 7 days after the contact was created. I also make sure to go into the advanced options area and choose the name of my list that contacts are being sent to when they fill out the form referenced at the top. Once I do this, I am able to move to verifying my rule.

The Second Rule

The second rule in the campaign is set up as the same type of rule, with the differences being the message I’m sending and the timing option. Since I want the second message to be sent 2 weeks after the contact is created, I specify in the Timing Options area that I would like this message sent 14 days after the creation date.

Verifying Your Rules

Once you have created each rule, you will be asked to verify it. Bronto will give you a readable explanation of how your rule works. If you are sure your rule is set to do what you want, you will then be able to save and activate it.

How Do I Know The Rule is working?

Once you save and activate your automated message rule, it becomes active. You should now be able to see scheduled messages in your delivery calendar that will let you know that your rule is running every day.

Stopping The Rule

If you would like to deactivate your rule, just head over to the Automated Message Rules list and choose the rule that you would like to stop. You should see the link below. Just click on the link to Deactivate and your rule will stop functioning.

You now have all the tools and knowledge that you will need to create a successful Drip Marketing campaign in Bronto. If you have any questions on this, please feel free to comment below or contact client services.

Frank Chapman
Bronto Client Services

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Often times automated messages are sent as text only messages, chock full of info with a few terse sentences, as is often the case with purchase receipts. As a marketer, you see these not only missed cross-sell opportunities, but also as failures in brand building.

By utilizing the API and Automated Message Rules you will take control of content while gaining access to detailed aggregate statistics. Let’s check out how you set that up and what you get out of it.

Own the Content

With Automated Message Rules you own the message. Any information that you need in order to customize this message will be passed to you via API message tags. This allows you the freedom to make changes to the copy and creative of your emails without any development or tech resources.

API message tags (%%#examplemessagefield%%) are similar to personalization fields (%%firstname%%) and allow you to provide contact specific data that is only relevant for this email. The values for these api message tags will be provided via the API when a message is sent. In the example below you can see that we are providing the details of what you have purchased via an API message tag, as well as the last four digits of the credit card (it’s best not to store credit card details with your marketing data).

You now have the ability to recreate your emails within Bronto. But don’t stop there, now you can move things around, adjust creative and copy, and add in a few marketing aspects. Remember that this is a transactional message, don’t overload it with marketing copy. A few marketing touches will do.

Get the Reporting You Need

An API Automated Message Rule will allow us to make the connection between API calls and the message we just created. While setting up this Automated Message Rule we will specify an API Handle. This handle will be referenced later by the API call.

Once we start making API calls that use this API handle, Bronto will start aggregating reports. That means that all the opens, clicks, conversions, and everything else will be brought together into one report. With the ability to view data over time ranges (e.g. today, last 7 days, last 30 days, last 180 days) you can start to understand how effective these messages are.

Not only can you see the effectiveness of these messages, but you can work to improve their effectiveness by making changes and monitoring their performance over time.

With these tools at your fingertips, you can harness yet another communication mechanism that has been underutilized all this time.

Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto

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For most marketers, this is no easy task. But alas, you are an email marketer, and even better, you are an email marketer using Bronto! Not only can you send relevant/timely messages in response to your customer’s actions, but you can do so automatically using behaviorally targeted automated message rules. Here’s how:

Setting Up Your Behaviorally Targeted Automated Message Rule

1. Go to Messages->Automated Message Rules.
2. Click the Create New Automated Message Rule link.



3. You will be brought to Step 1 of the create an automated message rule wizard. This four step wizard is designed to make creating automated message rules easy. Choose a name for your automated message rule.
4. Click the radio button next to the Behaviorally Targeted automated message rule type.
5. Specify the Type Settings for the automated message rule. You will need to choose the related message that the automated message rule will watch for. You will also need to choose the action or behavior that the automated message will look for in the related message. So for example, you could send a follow-up message to contacts who opened and clicked links contained in an email you sent to them regarding your Summer 2009 Sale.
6. Click Next.
7. You will be brought to Step 2 in the wizard. From here, you can pick the message that will be sent via the automated message rule in response to the action or behavior you choose to look for. You will also need to specify all the sending options for the automated message rule. These are similar to the sender options you specify when scheduling a regular delivery.
8. You can now click Advanced to continue on to Step 3 in the wizard, or click Verify Settings to bypass Step 3 and continue directly to Step 4 in the wizard. If you click Advanced, you can specify some of the advanced settings associated with automated message rules. After you are done on Step 3, you can click Verify Settings to continue to Step 4 in the wizard.
9. Once you are on Step 4, you can either click Save As Draft, which will save, but not activate the automated message rule (i.e. no messages will be sent via the automated message rule until you activate it), or click Save And Activate, which will save and activate the automated message rule.

So there you have it. By utilizing the power of a behaviorally targeted automated message rule, you can let your customer’s actions drive your email marketing efforts in an unobtrusive manner. Now all you have to do is sit back and let the automated message rule work it’s magic.

Have you used behaviorally targeted automated message rules in Bronto? If so, we’d love to hear about it in our comments section below.

John Gunther
Technical Writer/eLearning Specialist at Bronto

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Start at the beginning

No matter what your goal, you will be best served if you stop and think things through before you start. Understanding who you are communicating with and why you are communicating with them is critical to crafting an effective Automated Message. If you have planned thoroughly then the creation of your Automated Messages and Rules should be just a matter of selecting the right options & settings (which is why we created our easy to use Automated Message Rule Wizard).

Once your Automated Messages have been mailing for a little while, you will have some baseline metrics. With these metrics in hand you can start to make some changes. Because Automated Messages are continually being sent, you have the ability to easily carry out tests. With each test, change one thing, such as the subject line, intro copy, offer, or creative. Then watch your metrics to see if they go up or down. Through analyzing these results and optimizing the automated campaigns, you will be continually improving your metrics and ROI.

Divide and Conquer

But testing isn’t limited to changes in content, you can also change who you are mailing to. Using segments you easily break up your subscriber base into targetable groupings; perhaps you have a special promo just for women under 40, or maybe you want to vary messages by region. Defining these groups via segments will allow you to treat them accordingly.

Good Automated Message tools will provide this ability to easily select a cross section of your audience for targeted messages. Once you’ve identified who you think can benefit from a more personalized message you just need to make some changes to your content or offer. Within Bronto we allow you to limit who is eligible via segments or even exclude segments, this gives you the ultimate control over who gets which message.

Reporting For Service

Just as I said before, after every change you will need to watch your reports for trends for a few days or even weeks. By viewing a report of your metrics over time, as you can see below, you may very well see shifts in some of your key metrics. Keep in mind that not all changes will affect your metrics, and some might even change things for the worse.

What can complicate this process is that one change may improve conversion for one segment, while reducing it for others. So it’s important to change only one variable at a time, you may even want to keep a control group, a group of contacts who will see no change, so you continually have a baseline to compare to.

Rinse & Repeat

That’s part of the fun of marketing, there are always new ways to optimize your campaigns. This is a process that you will want to continually take part in. But don’t fret, the wonder of Automated Messages is that it helps to free up more of your time by handling much of the minutia of scheduling and content creation. This allows you to focus more on optimizing your messages, and that’s a win-win situation no matter how you slice it.

Adam Covati

Product Manager at Bronto

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