In this guide, you'll learn how to manage members via your Higher Logic Thrive Marketing Enterprise (Thrive Marketing Enterprise) integration. This guide covers:

• Preparing your data for a marketing automation campaign
• Configuring your marketing automation campaign
• Measuring your marketing automation campaign’s success

Step 1 - Prerequisites

• You need the Real Magnet Upload Scheduler (RMUS) enabled for your account. If you're not already integrated with Thrive Marketing Enterprise or lack the scheduling function, contact Customer Support.
• You need Marketing Automation and Call to Action functionality.
• You need to have a firm grasp on the goal of your campaign. For example, are members only enrolled/emailed until they renew, or are they segmented into another track once they renew?

Checklist

• Have you prepared your data?
• Configured columns from netFORUM
• Configured custom fields in Thrive Marketing Enterprise
• Scheduled the upload of data
• Created your message(s)?

Step 2 - Preparing your data

Creating a Date field in Communications Enterprise

The first step to creating a membership campaign is to configure your Communications Enterprise account to accept a date field. To complete this action, you’ll need to manage your custom fields. To do so:

1. Click Contacts.
2. Click Custom Fields.
3. Enter a descriptive name for the field and check date.
4. Click Submit.

Personalization

You'll need to prepare other aspects of your data depending on the content of your message. Personalized messages tend to perform better than a salutation of “Dear Member,” for example, so in this case you’ll want to ensure that netFORUM has the correct first names for your registrants so you don’t end up with a “Dear ___ ."

NOTE: You’ll also want to ensure that data is being overwritten.

Scheduling the upload of data

The next step is to configure your individual query to upload to Communications Enterprise. You’ll want this information to be up to date and current. You can create an upload job in Settings > Integrations > netFORUM Management:

1. Ensure that this upload includes the columns Email Address and Primary Key.
2. Schedule a daily upload.

You'll need to prepare other aspects of your data depending on the content of your message. Personalized messages tend to perform better than a salutation of “Dear Member,” for example, so in this case you’ll want to ensure that netFORUM has the correct first names for your registrants so you don’t end up with a “Dear ___ ."

You’ll also want to ensure that data is being overwritten.

Step 3 - Configuring your campaign

When you install the Communications Enterprise netFORUM integration, you can associate a number of your individual queries without run-time parameters to a group in Communications Enterprise. These are called upload jobs. Each time these upload jobs run, Communications Enterprise makes a request to your xWeb site. The time it takes for these queries to run can vary based on the complexity of the query variables and your hosting environment. The most basic variables that must be included in a query are:

• Email Address
• Primary Key

Once the upload jobs have been configured, you’ll move on to creating your Marketing Automation campaign. Every campaign should have a clearly defined goal and action. Once a recipient reaches a goal, there should be a clear path for what happens next. In this example, the goal will be when a recipient receives the confirmation email after they've registered for the event.

Creating a Member Renewal Campaign

You’ll need to create a Member Renewal Campaign in Automation. This campaign sends a series of emails driving members to renew their membership.

• The campaign keys off of a custom date field, which stores the recipient’s upcoming EXPIRATION DATE
• You set the number of messages to send, and the number of days PRIOR to or AFTER the expiration date when each message should be sent
• Recipients continue to receive renewal messages until they either renew or go through the entire campaign without renewing their membership

A member is considered “renewed” when the Expiration Date in the custom date field is updated. Therefore, it is critical to make sure you are updating this field for ALL recipients in the campaign on a daily basis.

To create this campaign:

1. Navigate to Automation.
2. Enter a campaign name.
3. Click Go.
4. Select your industry.
5. Select the Member Renewal Campaign Type.
6. Click Select.
7. Select who is in the campaign. In this example:

1. Recipients in a Group
2. Both encompasses those who exist in the group at this moment and those who may be uploaded at a later date

8. Select the expiration date field you created in Step 2.
9. Select how many messages are in your renewal campaign. In our example, there are four messages (these are merely an example and not a recommendation for your campaign):

1. Membership Renewal 30 Days Before Expiration
2. Membership Renewal 15 Days Before Expiration
3. Membership Renewal on Expiration Date
4. Membership Renewal 30 Days After Expiration

10. Click Next.
11. On the resulting page, review your campaign. At this point, you can also test the campaign.
12. Click Next.
13. Select Schedule Start Date for a Future Date.
14. Schedule your campaign to begin at least an hour before your first message is scheduled to send.
15. Click End Manually.
16. Click Deploy Campaign.

Step 4 - Tracking your results

Tracking

You can track the results of this campaign in Communications Enterprise. To do so:

1. Navigate to the Automation dashboard.
2. Select the Campaign.
3. Click Track.

You’ll see an overview of the campaign similar to this:

This information is also sent back to netFORUM.

Tracking in netFORUM

The tracking result of a message is the only information to report back to a child form in netFORUM (this includes opt-out information). This tracking information updates once per day. The tracking data is displayed in netFORUM under the Correspondence tab:

Frequently asked questions