When a campaign is well-planned and executed, it should run properly until its end date with no help from you. However, just because active campaigns can run on auto-pilot doesn't mean you should just "set it and forget it." If a problem arises, you'll want to know as soon as possible so you can fix it. Monitoring and maintaining your campaigns allows you to spot warning signs before they become an actual issue.
This article provides a few best-practices to keep in mind as you build campaigns to help them run as smoothly as possible.
- Keep it simple. Once you've launched a campaign, you can, of course, stop and edit it at any time. While there's nothing wrong with streamlining campaigns, be careful not to go too far in the other direction: Muddying the waters by expanding the purpose of the original campaign too much. Expanding a step here or there may be necessary, but continuing to build on a campaign needlessly will increase its complexity. This can make your campaigns harder to edit and can detract from your reporting. If you find yourself needing to deviated from a campaign's main purpose, consider breaking larger campaigns into smaller, more easily managed ones.
- Watch your campaign reporting for any spikes or dips in certain metrics. Has the average time it takes someone to go through the campaign severely sped up or slowed down? Is there a drop in the delivery rate? Are you farther away from achieving a campaign goal than you expected? Don’t wait until a problem arises before you look for ways to improve a campaign.
- Is your branding correct? Don't forget to update your campaigns (especially long-term campaigns) if there's been any changes to your organization's branding. You may be using the same templates for your regular mailings as your campaign mailings. If you edit a template for a regular mailing, that template will also update for any campaign mailings that were built with it.
- Be sure to reflect any schedule changes in your campaigns. Dates and times for events, meetings, and deadlines often change, and if they affect any of the steps in your campaign, make sure to update the time frames for your Wait Steps and the campaign's Start and End dates.
- Employ periodic campaign testing. You can send yourself and internal team members through campaigns while they are active, and should do so from time to time to verify they're having the user experience you want for your subscribers.
- Understand what constitutes a unique subscriber. When looking at subscribers going through a campaign, a subscriber is considered to be unique based on an email address (not on a remote ID).