Creating a Campaign

This section introduces the core functionality of the Email Autoresponder in the order needed to create a campaign. The section should be followed in sequential order.

Pre-requisite: A mail server must be configured prior to creating a campaign.
Pre-requisite: Email Templates must exist prior to create campaign email steps.
Navigate to:

Main Menu → Marketing → Autoresponder

The Autoresponder Campaigns Home page contains Administration Links and a listing of all campaigns. Click the new button located in the black header.

The Add/Edit Campaign page is unique to the UltraCart site. When viewing an empty page, it contains standard html input elements. However, after saving a campaign, it will also contain a step hierarchy allowing for step creation and management. The step hierarchy is a tree structure powered by Javascript allowing for drag-n-drop management.

First things first – check the Suspended check box. The moment you create your campaign, it will be activated during the very next scheduled process. Depending on load, a campaign will process every 30 minutes to an hour. To avoid painful happenings, suspend the campaign until you have everything ready.
I pity the fool that don't suspend his campaign.

Figure 70 - Autoresponder Campaign General Settings

Field	Description
Name	An internal reference to the campaign. The customer will never see this name. Choose anything to provide a handy reminder as to what this campaign does. Examples: Abandoned Cart Campaign Weekly Coupons Upsell Item XYZ
Public Name	The customer will see this name if he/she chooses to opt out of the campaign. Make this name something attractive to the customer. Bad Example: Ways to make moolah Good Examples: Weekly Special Deals Special Offers New Product Announcements
Public Description	The customer will also see this description on the opt out screen. Use this field to provide information that would make a customer not want to opt out! Good information to include in this field is the frequency of emails. If a customer is opting out after receiving two emails from you, they might defer opting out if they see the description contains "3-4 emails a month", etc.
Mail Server	Select a mail server to send emails. As mentioned above in the Mail Server section, you are advised to develop and test your campaign with a non-vital sender address to ensure you don't lose a critical mail address to a spam list if you accidentally do something offensive with your campaign during development.
Enrollment Triggers	The triggers are hooks to the shopping experiences that allow for automatic enrollment to a campaign based on an event. There are six triggers. Return Email – This trigger will enroll any cart (containing an email address) into the campaign. It will trigger based on the `Global Settings` in the Return Email configuration screen. Abandon Cart – This trigger will enroll any abandoned cart (containing an email address) into the campaign. It will trigger based on the Abandon Interval settings. Purchased Product – This trigger will enroll any customer making a purchase into the campaign. Enrollment Items can filter this enrollment trigger. Auto Order Decline – This trigger will enroll any customer who has an auto order declined. Auto Order CC Expiration – This trigger will enroll any customer who has an auto order credit card expired. Auto Order Canceled – This trigger will enroll any customer who has an auto order canceled.
Enrollment Items	The enrollment items work in conjunction with the enrollment triggers. They are filters for the triggers. If you provide a list of items, then only events with those items will trigger an enrollment. For example, consider the result if you add an item id, such as 'SOMEPDF' to the enrollment items field and check the enrollment trigger 'Purchased Product'. With that configuration, onlypurchases of SOMEPDF items will result in enrollment. This is useful if you with to upsell certain items or provide item specific marketing material. Enrollment Items only affect triggers. Items are meaningless without triggers. Enrollment Items affect all triggers. There is no pairing certain items with certain triggers. If you need different items for your triggers, create separate campaigns. Zero Enrollment Items is the default. With this default, triggers will fire for all items. Remember that Enrollment Items act as filters. You probably would not want to add any enrollment items to Auto Order triggers. That would cause those triggers to selectively fire, which would be undesired.
Email Lists	Email Lists are managed in a different part of the site. Navigate to Main Menu  Marketing  Email Lists to manage lists. By associating an email list with a campaign, the site will, on a regular basis, scan the list and enroll any new emails. This is yet another powerful way to automatically enroll customers. Be warned! The process will add any emails not in the campaign. The following scenario will happen if caution is not exercised: An Email List is associated with a campaign During the next sync, customers from the list are added to the campaign You delete a customer belonging to the mail list During a subsequent sync, the process will see the customer as 'new' and re-add them to the campaign, enrolling them as active at step 1. If Email Lists are used, a good practice is to never delete a customer from a campaign. If the customer should not progress in the campaign any further, use the Recipients screen to terminate the customer. But wait! How will I use the bulk operations to restart my campaign customers? Won't that customer be selected as well? No. The button on the campaign list screen does not affect Terminated recipients. The only way to affect terminated customer is explicitly using the Recipients screen (see following image). Figure 71 - Individual Recipient Actions
Suspended	This check box will suspend or activate a campaign. A suspended campaign will not sync Email Lists or run through the hourly processing.
Save Changes	Click to save your changes.

After saving changes, the page will reload with an additional item on the page – a start step. This is the initial step upon which all other steps in the campaign will originate from.

Warning: The Campaign page makes heavy use of Javascript and Ajax. The page communicates with the server frequently. If you see the message box below appear on the screen, wait. Seriously, just wait. The page doesn't lock the controls or treat you like a child – you could go click happy while the message box is up. But that would be bad - bad like "I hear something in the basement. I don't have a flashlight, but I think I'll go check it out any way." bad.

Figure 72 - Campaign Edit Screen Wait Message