This guide describes how to manage memberships via your Higher Logic Thrive Marketing Enterprise (Thrive Marketing Enterprise) integration. It covers:
- Preparing your data for a marketing automation campaign
- Configuring a marketing automation campaign
- Measuring a marketing automation campaign’s success
Prerequisites
The following must be enabled for your Thrive Marketing Enterprise account.
- The Real Magnet Upload Scheduler (RMUS)
- Marketing Automation and Call-to-Action functionality
Additionally, you should have a thorough understanding of 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 messages
TIP: If you have any questions about, or require assistance with, any of these requirements, create a case with Higher Logic Support.
Step 1 - Prepare your data
Create a Date field in Thrive Marketing Enterprise
The first step to creating a membership campaign is to configure your Thrive Marketing Enterprise account to accept a date field. To complete this action, you’ll need to manage your custom fields. To do so:
- Click Contacts.
- Click Custom Fields.
- Enter a descriptive name for the field and check date.
- 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.
Schedule the upload of data
The next step is to configure your individual query to upload to Thrive Marketing Enterprise. You’ll want this information to be up to date and current. You can create an upload job in Settings > Integrations > netFORUM Management:
- Ensure that this upload includes the columns Email Address and Primary Key.
- 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 2 - Configure your campaign
When you install the Thrive Marketing Enterprise netFORUM integration, you can associate a number of your individual queries without run-time parameters to a group in Thrive Marketing Enterprise. These are called upload jobs. Each time these upload jobs run, Thrive Marketing 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.
Create a Member Renewal campaign
You’ll need to create a Member Renewal campaign. 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:
- Navigate to Automation.
- Enter a campaign name.
- Click Go.
- Select your industry.
- Select the Member Renewal Campaign Type.
- Click Select.
- Select who is in the campaign. In this example:
- Recipients in a Group
- Both encompasses those who exist in the group at this moment and those who may be uploaded at a later date
- Select the expiration date field you created in Step 2.
- 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):
- Membership Renewal 30 Days Before Expiration
- Membership Renewal 15 Days Before Expiration
- Membership Renewal on Expiration Date
- Membership Renewal 30 Days After Expiration
- Click Next.
- On the resulting page, review your campaign. At this point, you can also test the campaign.
- Click Next.
- Select Schedule Start Date for a Future Date.
- Schedule your campaign to begin at least an hour before your first message is scheduled to send.
- Click End Manually.
- Click Deploy Campaign.
Step 3 - Track your results
Tracking
You can track the results of this campaign in Thrive Marketing Enterprise. To do so:
- Navigate to the Automation dashboard.
- Select the Campaign.
- 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
Question | Answer |
---|---|
How do I know that the campaign goal has been met? | This is up to you. However, a typical membership campaign defines this variable as "when a member renews." In this example, the expiration date will update when a member pays their renewal fees. |
How can I exclude individuals from being sent to? | Once a member renews they will not receive any future messages. However, you may have member cancellations, or lifetime members, or even members that have opted to not receive any emails. Once someone is enrolled in a campaign they never really leave, unless they're suppressed or unsubscribed in the Thrive Marketing Enterprise system. It’s best to either exclude member cancellations by creating a group of these recipients and excluding them on send or suppressing them. |