Whether you're new to marketing automation or have used other marketing-automation software in the past, this article is where you should start before you build your first campaign in Higher Logic Thrive Marketing Professional (Thrive Marketing Professional).

Thoughtfully planning your campaigns is one of the best ways to build successful campaigns. Think of a campaign as a trip: you should know where you're starting from and where you want to go, so that you can decide on the best route to get there.

How campaigns differ from messages

No matter how many messages you've created, a campaign is different primarily because it has a different objective. Where a message is typically intended to inform, a campaign is typically intended to trigger an action; that is its goal.

See Campaign Goals to learn about goals and how to configure one for your campaign.

Some key differences in campaigns:

• Planning a campaign is more complex than planning a message.
• Campaigns typically have multiple messages, and when they are sent is determined by recipient interactions, rather than a specified date.
• Opens and clicks are important metrics for messages and campaigns, but they are less important for campaigns because the campaign's goal (such as register, volunteer, purchase, or participate) is what determines its success.

Getting started

To maximize your time and effort when you start creating campaigns, consider the following questions and their answers.

• What is the purpose of my campaign (its goal)?
  • Decide on a goal for your campaign. Having a clear objective should make it easier for you to focus your efforts when you design the campaign, in particular with the Decide and Wait steps.
• Who is the target audience of my campaign?
  • It's likely that your answer to the previous question will guide your answer to this question. If your goal is to get members to renew their memberships, then your audience is obviously lapsed and soon-expiring members.
• How do you get to your goal?
  • Build a clear and actionable campaign. Consider one of our pre-built Campaign Starter Kits.
• Which assets and resources will I use for my campaign?
  • In addition to the messages, consider the variety of assets and resources that are available to you and which could help you make the best possible campaign. Consider: personalizations, reviewers, testers, AMS/CRM data.

Reviews and tests

After you have a rough draft of a campaign and, if possible, have others review it.

• If your reviewers can understand what you are trying to achieve, then your campaign is in good shape.
• If your reviewers struggle with the purpose or the logic of the steps, revisit the campaign with their feedback and polish any trouble spots. Then, have the revised campaign re-reviewed.

When you're ready to test a campaign, send it to multiple testers, if possible. The more people who test it, the greater the likelihood that any issues will be uncovered.

• Assign different, specific actions to each of your testers so that you can get as wide a variety as possible of different outcomes. (An individual tester would have to go through a campaign multiple times for you to get the same data.)
• Take advantage of the A/B Test feature to determine whether some small aspect of a message (e.g., subject line, friendly from, link placement) might affect the engagement that the message garners.

When to activate

When you are deciding when to activate your campaign, be sure to consider the factors that might affect the timing and the anticipated feedback and engagement.

• Be mindful of your target dates when building your campaign steps.
• If certain actions should not occur on or around specific dates and time-frames, be sure to reflect that when inserting wait steps.
• Consider the impact of holiday seasons when people might be less likely to interact with your campaign, which could skew your metrics.

Clarity and focus

As you build a campaign, be clear on what you want to track and measure; these things could end up dictating the size and structure of the campaign.

• Be clear on, and keep in mind, what you consider to be a "conversion."
• Remain committed to your decided-upon campaign goal.

Conventions and standardization

It's a good idea to establish a few conventions and standards for your campaigns, especially if you anticipate building a lot of them. For example:

• If you have a standard set of steps for several campaigns that are fairly similar, you might be able to see "good" and "bad" patterns as regards the specific steps or the types of campaigns.
• If you have similar campaigns but which are sent to differing target groups, consider establishing a naming convention for those campaigns for reporting and managing.

These seemingly minor details might be very helpful in keeping your team organized.

Do the heavy lifting

If you want to build effective campaigns, you should consider that there might be a lot of up-front work in order to establish a solid foundation.

Putting in the effort to plan your campaigns thoroughly before you build them should mitigate the headache of making complicated "fixes" later.

It's okay to not know the answer to everything when you begin, but spending time preparing your tools, resources, and personnel, should make the whole process go more smoothly.