Campaigns enable you to better manage your email marketing messages by grouping them together. Campaigns are great for a series of messages in a life-cycle, a multi-message promotion, and even newsletters.  First, let’s take a look at the Campaigns Dashboard in Bronto.

Campaigns Dashboard

The Campaigns Dashboard lets you see all of the campaigns that you have created in the Your Campaigns table. In this table you can see the Name, Color, Last Modified date, and number of items associated with a campaign. The Items column indicates the total number of items (messages, automated message rules, or RSS feeds) that have been added to a particular campaign. You can click the pencil icon to edit a campaign, or click the delete icon to delete a campaign.

Creating & Editing Campaigns

To create a new campaign in Bronto:

1. Click on the Campaigns tab.
2. Give your campaign a name in the Name text box.
3. Choose a color for your campaign by clicking anywhere in the color selection box. When you click in the color selection box, a color palette will appear that allows you to choose a color for your campaign. You can also adjust the saturation level by adjusting the saturation slider next to the palette.  The color you choose for your campaign is assigned to all of the messages associated with the campaign and is displayed the on the Deliveries calendar. This feature makes it easy to associate deliveries displayed on the calendar with the campaigns they are assigned to. For example, if you choose the color blue for your campaign, all deliveries associated with that campaign would appear with a blue dot next to them on the Deliveries calendar.
4. Provide a description for your campaign in the Description text box.
5. When you are finished, click Save.

Adding/Deleting Messages, Automated Message Rules, and Feeds

The basis for a campaign is the comparison of messages and feeds sent to your contacts. To compare messages, automated message rules, and feeds in a campaign, you first need to assign these items to a campaign.

To add messages, automated message rules, or feeds to a campaign:

1. Click Add Messages, Automated Message Rules. or Feeds.
2. Click the checkbox next to the message, automated message rule, or feed that you want to add to a campaign.
3. Click Add to add the message, automated message rule, or feed to the campaign.

You can view the messages added to a campaign and the specific deliveries associated with the message on the Deliveries tab on the Manage Campaign page. From here, you can also remove the messages and specific deliveries from a campaign by clicking the checkbox next to the message or delivery you want to remove, and then clicking Remove. When you remove a message or a delivery, the item you removed is only taken off of the campaign and is not deleted from the account. When you remove a message, all deliveries of that message are removed. When you remove a delivery, only the selected delivery is removed.

Using Campaigns

Once you have created a campaign and added messages to it, you can begin managing it by clicking on the name of the campaign on the Campaigns Dashboard. You will then be brought to the Manage Campaign page.

As you can see, we have all of our messages in a single location with the tracking data side by side for easy comparison.

Aggregate Reporting, Averages Per Delivery, and Delivery Tables

The Aggregate Reporting and Averages Per Delivery tables provide a high level overview of your campaigns performance based on the time period chosen from the Viewing Time Period pull-down box. The Deliveries table lets you see the metrics associates with an individual delivery. Each of the metrics used in these tables is described below:

• # Sent – The number of messages sent.
• # Delivered – The number of emails delivered.
• %Delivered Rate – The percentage of messages delivered.
• % Open – The percentage of emails opened.
• % Click – The percentage of emails that were clicked.
• % Clicks/Open – The percentage of clicks compared against the number of opens.
• % Turnover – Turnover is the percentage of contacts that received the message but are no longer a part of your account, either because they unsubscribed or submitted an unsolicited email complaint.
• Conversions – The number of conversions made from a given delivery. A conversion is a metric you define to measure when a contact performs actions from your pages, such as making purchases, making donations, or filling out surveys.
• Revenue – The amount of money (in dollars) made from a conversion. This value will remain at $0.00 if the conversion you are tracking is not measured monetarily.

Generating Reports

Bronto allows you to build a report of the campaign you have created.  To generate a report based on your campaign, you can click the Generate Report link. Generating a report provides you with additional information about your campaign.

Campaigns are a powerful tool you can use to compare your messages side by side and review their performance.  Leave us some examples of how you have implemented campaigns, and the successes you have had doing so!

Rob Slade
Client Support Specialist at Bronto

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Prerequisites

There are a few things you’ll need to have before we can actually create the rule that controls our automated message, here is a list of what is required:

• A Bronto Professional Edition account
• A date type field in your account that contains birthday information for each of your contacts
• A message that you want to send to your contacts on or around their birthday

That’s it! Once you have all of your ingredients, you are ready to begin.

Automated Messages Rule!

To begin creating the Automated Message rule, go to Messages –> Automated Message Rules, which brings you to the Automated Message Rule page.  This page lists all of your previously created rules, along with information such as what type of rules they are, whether they are active or inactive, and how many messages have been sent as a result of this rule in the past 30 days.  From here, click the Create New Automated Message Rule link on the upper right part of the page.

Rule Creation – Step 1

On the screen that follows, let’s give our new rule a name that indicates what the rule does so that it is easy to identify.  For this example, I would suggest something like “Happy Birthday!”.  We can then choose what type of rule we would like to create. For our birthday message, we’ll use a Date-Based rule.  Once we choose the type, the ‘Type Settings’ box at the bottom will expand to allow us to input our initial criteria.

The first criteria determines what field we would like to use to trigger our rule.  Since we selected a Date-Based rule, only date type fields will show up in this drop down.  This is where we select our Birthday field.  The next criteria asks us what we want to match. For a birthday message, we’ll only want to match the day and month, so our rule will repeat each year on the contacts birthday.  So choose Check day and month every day.  Click next to continue to…

Rule Creation – Step 2 – Content & Scheduling

Step 2 of the rule creation process contains 3 parts.  If you’ve used Bronto to send messages before, part 1 – ‘Sender Options’, should be familiar to you.  It is the same as setting Sender Options for a regular send. You need choose your From Name, From Address and Reply-to Address for the message.  You can also specify if you would like Sender Authentication, Reply Tracking on or off.  The third checkbox here, ‘Override Frequency Caps’, will, if checked, allow this message to be sent to your contacts even if it goes over your normal frequency caps.

Part 2 is where you select the message you’d like to send to contacts who meet the criteria set in Step 1.  Just choose the message from the drop-down box.

Part 3 lets you decide when the message is sent.  You can choose a specific time, and a number of days before or after the criteria matches.  You can also choose whether to defer this message to the next weekday if the date happens to fall on a weekend.  Once you’ve got options set as you like, click ‘Advanced Settings’ to proceed to part 3. If you are satisfied with what you have, click ‘Verify Settings’ to go to step 4.

Rule Creation – Step 3 – Advanced Settings

We’re not going to delve too deeply into the advanced settings here, but you can use this step to set an expiration date on your rule, set how quickly your message goes out, and choose lists and segments that are eligible or ineligible to receive this message.  If you’ve set your advanced settings and are ready to finish up, just click ‘Verify Settings’.

Rule Creation – Step 4 – Verify Settings

This step is pretty self explanatory. It allows you to look over your settings and ensure that everything is looking good.  At the top, you are given a plain english sentence that describes exactly what the rule will do.  Then you can review your sender options and message appearance.  When everything looks good, you can either click ‘Save as Draft’, which will save the rule as deactivated, or you can click ‘Save & Activate’, which will save your rule and start its monitoring process.

The next time you click on your rule from the Automated Message Rules page, you’ll see the detail page for that rule. The detail page shows what the rule is doing, a preview, how many messages have been sent, and links to view tracking reports for those messages.

So that wraps up our guide on creating a simple Happy Birthday Automated Message Rule. For some other great ideas on how to leverage Automated Messages for your marketing campaigns, check out Kristen Gregory’s great post on the Bronto Blog – ‘10 Automated Messages That Rock‘. Go forth and automate!

Lucas Weber
Bronto Client Services

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