Before you run your first campaign
Before starting with your first campaign, please go through this checklist to make sure that your Custobar is also ready.
- You have imported customers to Custobar and they're present in the customer overview.
- If you are sending a email campaign
- You have set up a template either using the template wizard, or created them manually
- You have warmed up your domain name and ip address for sending email. Warming up your email ip address is essential in making sure your messages don’t end up in the spam folder. If you have any questions, please contact Custobar support.
- You have installed the tracking script on your e-commerce site during onboarding.
- Custobar is easy to use, but it’s important that you have also received the basic training for Custobar.
If the answer to all of these questions was yes, then you are good to go and create your first campaign!
Email campaigns
Email is a great channel for targeted marketing to your customers about new products, offers in their closest store, guides about a product they just bought, or virtually anything else.
Email is still the preferred communication method for communications between a company and a customer, in addition to marketing of course transactional messages like order confirmations can also be sent from Custobar and even those can have marketing elements, like personalized product recommendations etc. Email is also an owned channel of communications for you, meaning that you have the total control over it, as opposed to social media channels, where you are bound with their terms of service.
You can either send one-time campaigns, like an email about a new product that might interest specific customers based on their earlier interests and tendencies, or send an email as a part of new customer automation sequence, in order to highlight why they made a good judgement while buying from you and after that why they should take a look at the rest of your offering.
Like for most campaigns you can send them to everyone (which is not recommended), but much better results in conversion, customer satisfaction etc., you get if you use emails for more targeted communications, which hasn’t ever been easier than now with Custobar. Next paragraph tells a bit about this.
Segmentation
Segmentation is the action of filtering and sorting your customers in smaller subsets based on criteria and filters of your choosing. In Custobar, those segments are called audiences, and once defined, an audience will be constantly updating in real time to reflect customers changes due to data updates or the consumer's own behavior.
Audiences are highly relevant for marketing since you can analyze different segments and compare them and communicate to each audience in the most effective manner. From the viewpoint of a pet store for example, cat owners and dog owners have very different interests and segmenting them and communicating to them separately makes sense, and is essential for success.
All audiences in Custobar are “live”, meaning that as all the searches are based on live data the audiences are also dynamic and change based on the most recent data. As an example: A customer has not bought anything during the last 6 months, so she has become part of the audience “Passive customers 6 months”, which is used to activate passive customers to buy again. Then when she buys, she’s not part of the audience anymore.
What data can you use for segmentation?
You can use virtually any customer, sales or event data to create segments and customer audiences to be used in campaigns. How many times, from where and when customers have bought a specific product/product type/category, what they have been browsing, or any data that you ask from them like when they have their birthday.
You may start creating a campaign from the customers view by defining an audience, or just create a reusable audience and save it. You may also pin audiences created in the customer view for them to appear in the dashboard, which then means that this audience can be used in the future for campaigns, used for the RFM matrix or to be followed through KPI’s and statistics.
Segmentation is essentially the same thing as creating audiences, so it follows the same principles, which you can read more about here.
If you are an advanced user and want to extend the segmentation capabilities even more, you can read more details about creating searches for segmentation.
Message content
Creating the campaign after the segmentation/audience selection is a very straight forward process of first selecting the campaign type; email in this case. Then the email template to be used, after which you create the content of the message with WYSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get, i.e. easy to use email editor based on ready templates).
Campaigns can also be scheduled to be delivered a on specific time and date, which can be great way to plan your campaigns before hand. More details about the steps of creating the campaign step by step can be read here.
Results
Custobar offers a breakdown of campaign results with easy to understand detailing of the relevant metrics such as delivery, open and click rate, which featured products or non-featured products performed best following the campaign and tools such as an interactive click-map to see how well your content performed.
This allows users to quickly learn how to drive engagement and sales and if they choose so, design a new plan of action based on quantifiable metrics and visible customer behavior.
SMS campaigns
Getting in touch with your customers via SMS is a brilliant way for example when wanting to invite your most loyal or best customers to your local store, tell them about new products they are surely interested in or contact them to inform that the product they were interested but didn’t buy is in discount in the store closest to them.
Choosing the audience works just as easily as with any other campaign type – you can use your existing audiences, redefine them or find a campaign target group from scratch. The content part is very easy as it’s 160 characters at most.
You can naturally also schedule SMS campaigns or create automated SMS based on events as triggers.
You can also use two-way SMS in Custobar. This means that your customers can also respond to your messages, which is very useful as your customers can unsubscribe from SMS marketing with a specific response. Another great application of 2-way SMS is the customer satisfaction survey, which can be sent as one of or as an automation from Custobar, and then the customer gives her satisfaction score and written feedback.
Read more on how to create a SMS campaign or learn about two-way SMS.
Automations
Automations are campaign actions which are sent to customers that fit specific criteria, either because of their profile or because of their behavior, at any point in time during which the automated action is enabled. This can be because the customer is part of an audience through specific search or the automation can be triggered from an event. The difference between these different types are detailed below.
Automated messages are messages that are sent to customers based on dynamic audiences or customer searches that they are part of. They are used to create marketing automations such as welcome messages, activating passive customers, bonus level automations etc. Additionally the message can be repeatedly sent to customers who stay in the audience for a specified amount of time.
Automations which are triggered through events are called transactional messages. They are used for example to send order confirmation messages to customers. Transactional messages are triggered with events from other systems, and the content of those events can also be displayed in the transactional messages itself.
As an example: A customer buys a product from your online store, your system sends a ORDER_CONFIRMATION event from your system (ERP/e-commerce etc.) and triggers an email or SMS order confirmation message to the customer with the order confirmation data from the event shown in the message.
External campaigns
To further expand the campaign channels in Custobar the External campaigns are a great way to use your customer data and the power of segmentation for targeted physical mailing campaigns, nowadays often an overlooked way of bringing your cost down and increasing conversion.
So external campaigns are a campaign type, with which you can take out your campaign audience as a list of email or post addresses and use that in another system, the output file type is CSV. The segmentation works exactly like normal in Custobar, after which you just choose if you’d like to take the campaign audience list out as list with email address (used for example as custom audiences for Google Ads or Facebook) or as address list (used to do targeted print campaigns or an inviting customers to a VIP event in your store).
Read more about creating an External campaign action.
Push campaigns
One of the most unique features of Custobar is to be able to send segmented push notifications based on your own customer data to your mobile apps – that is one of the most used ways of using the push campaigns.
The push campaigns are done by using a technique called webhooks, which means that any data can be sent from one system to another system, as long as they have open API’s, in the case of in-app notification from Custobar to the back-end of the mobile app.
Push campaigns can be one-off campaigns or automations that run all the time in the background.
Besides using the push campaigns for in-app notifications, you can also push any other data to other systems from Custobar. One real-time example would be to create an automated push campaign, which sends data from Custobar to your customer service systems (such as Zendesk), to create a ticket for your customer service agent to contact the customer, in a situation that your customer has given a bad customer satisfaction survey score through Custobar’s customer satisfaction survey. In other words, a great way to push relevant data to other systems in order to take action or trigger other actions.
Before you start sending push campaigns there are certain technical things that have to be set-up both in Custobar and in your end. More information can be found in our push campaign guide.
Banner campaigns
Banner campaigns are used to show targeted banners to customer segments identified in Custobar on your own site. The targeted banners are pushed to the site using the Custobar Javascript and injecting the selected banner content to your site to the selected banner spot. The customers who are seeing the banner are identified with the Custobar cookie. This is a brilliant way of easily having targeted content on your site for specific customer groups.
The segmentation is done as usual, but then in the message creation face, you choose a banner template and the banner spot on your website, to which you would like to push the content to.
Read more about setting up banner campaigns, or continue to Other data types in Custobar.
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