This guide describes how to manage third-party event promotion 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

NOTE: The information in this guide is relevant only if you're using netFORUM's Events tool.

Prerequisites

The following must be enabled for your Thrive Marketing Enterprise account.

• The Real Magnet Upload Scheduler (RMUS)
• Marketing Automation and Fixed Send Date Event Promotion functionality

Additionally, you must configure your event in netFORUM with the confirmation code snippet and confirmations@realmagnet.com in the BCC field.

Checklist

Have you...?

• Prepared your data
• Configured columns from netFORUM
• Configured custom fields in Thrive Marketing Enterprise
• Scheduled the upload of data
• Created your event with confirmations@realmagnet.com in the BCC field
• 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

Schedule the data upload

The first 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:

1. Ensure that this upload includes the columns Email Address and Primary Key.
2. Schedule a daily or hourly 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 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 fixed send date event promotion campaign

You’ll need to create a Fixed Send Date Event Promotion campaign, which sends a series of emails driving prospective registrants to register for an event.

• The campaign keys off of groups in Thrive Marketing Enterprise
• You set the number of messages to send
• Recipients continue to receive messages until they either register or go through the entire campaign without registering

A prospective registrant is considered “Registered” when they receive the confirmation message. Therefore, it's critical to configure the confirmation message properly.

To create this campaign:

1. Navigate to Automation.
2. Enter a campaign name.
3. Click Go.
4. Select your industry.
5. Select the Fixed Send Date Event Promotion 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. For the goal, select I will use E-mail notification code.
9. Select how many messages are in your event-promotion campaign. In our example, there are seven messages (these are merely an example and not a recommendation for your campaign):

1. Save the Date Message 100 Days Before Event
2. Early Bird Special Message 90 Days Before Event
3. Early Bird Special Message 60 Days Before Event
4. Regular Registration Message 40 Days Before Event
5. Regular Registration Message 30 Days Before Event
6. Regular Registration Message 20 Days Before Event
7. Regular Registration Message 10 Days Before Event

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.

Create a confirmation template

Once you have the confirmation code, (it should look like this: ( ==RM:5678995656666==)), update the confirmation template in netFORUM: Embed this code somewhere within the message and add confirmations@realmagnet.com to the BCC field.

Step 3 - Track your results

Thrive Marketing Enterprise Tracking

You can track the results of this campaign in Thrive Marketing 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.

Thrive Marketing Enterprise 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. Thrive Marketing Enterprise tracking data is displayed in netFORUM under the Correspondence tab:

Frequently asked questions