Create a Compelling Engagement Campaign
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Create a compelling birthday campaign.
- Keep customers engaged throughout their journey.
After you welcome your customer, the journey doesn’t end. You need to keep them excited about your brand, and that takes ongoing engagement efforts. That’s what you learn in this unit. Once you’re done, you’ll have everything you need to keep customers interested and active with your brand.
Happy Birthday
Let’s take a look at the time-honored birthday engagement campaign. This type of campaign is popular among brands for good reason: It works. Plus it’s simple. Each journey should include a single goal, and this campaign is a great example. Sending your subscribers a free treat or offer on their birthday keeps your brand visible year after year—not to mention the good vibes it sends.
Leung is helping an ice cream parlor client create a birthday engagement campaign, because who doesn’t want free ice cream on their birthday? She tweaks an initial email template to fit her client. Leung’s superior planning already helped the client create a great data model as part of their previous project, so she uses an existing data extension with the following data to kick off the journey.
- Birthday
- First and last name
- Email address
- Coupon code
- Redemption flag
- Mobile number (if available)
- Downloaded app flag (more on that later)
The first version of this journey sends a birthday email (with an offer for a free small cone) at the beginning of the month for all customers with birthdays that month.
This campaign gets a good response, but it also results in a huge spike in traffic on the first day of the month. The ice cream parlor wants to ease the burden on their workers and space the offer out over the entire month. Leung uses an event to check birthday values 14 days in the future and sends an email with a coupon code for a free small cone (with sprinkles!) to enjoy on their birthday. Customers who redeem the coupon get a follow-up congratulations message on their birthday. Customers who don’t redeem get a reminder of the offer. Here’s what that looks like as a journey.
Finally, Leung and her client decide to send SMS messages on the customer’s actual birthday to remind them of the offer. Customers who downloaded the ice cream parlor’s app can also receive a push reminder if they opted in. If a customer isn’t subscribed to SMS or doesn’t have the app, they get an email instead. That looks something like this.
With this birthday campaign in place, the ice cream parlor customers are in for a sweet surprise! And Leung has another happy client. But the journey to creating better interactions with your customers never really ends. Take the time to test and revise your work as you go forward to make sure you are meeting your customer at the right spots in their journey.