Guide to Creating Campaigns

PHASE 1: THINK IT THROUGH

When creating a campaign, the first step is to think through your strategy. Who will see it? When will they see it? How will it appear? What is the goal or behavior you’re promoting? The more you think it through, the more effective your campaign will be.

Who are you targeting with the campaign?

With every campaign you want to start by thinking about who will see the campaign. Should this message go to everyone? Is it a select few? Is it behaviorally driven? We recommend you express it as best as you can in the format of a sentence, for example:

The people I am targeting with my campaign are:

visitors who have visited the site multiple times but never requested a demo.
new users that never accessed feature X before.
users who have spent more than 5 minutes on the site today, added at least 1 item to their shopping cart, haven’t been to the shopping cart page yet, and they try to bounce from the site.

Once you’ve written down the sentence now you can easily create a segment in MeTRIXyst. You’ll find seeing it written down makes it easier to think through the logic of the segment. It also makes it easy to share your strategy with others for feedback.

What type of campaign should be chosen and what content should it have?

Once the target audience and segments have been determined, you can begin to design the actual campaign. MeTRIXyst makes this easy with its Real-time Editor. You have a variety of message types to choose from, and all are customizable to fit right into your site’s style without all the headaches of other design programs.

The process is simple; choose your message type and lay it out in the editor, and then set the rules for all of the segment’s user behaviors that you want to track. But again, even if your message looks great, or offers an incredibly competitive price or other resource, the rules need to be set correctly. Otherwise, the behaviors you want to track to solve your initially stated problem won’t return the data you need, or worse, track an entirely different set of behaviors instead. This is called in basic computing, “Garbage in, garbage out.” It is always best practice to write down and then simplify all of the rules for the behaviors you want to track.

Once this is complete, you can set the messages to be displayed where and on what pages you need to, and then test them thoroughly to be sure they work.

How and Where will people see your campaign?

Now that you have defined who will see your campaign as well as its goal, you need to determine how and where your campaign will be displayed. Let’s start with the “how.” With MeTRIXyst you have 4 ways to deliver your campaign:

Pop-Up – this is a traditional pop-up message, but unlike traditional pop-up messages, an MeTRIXyst pop-up is not blocked by a pop-up blocker.
Callout – this is a message that appears and looks similar to a dialogue box with an arrow pointing at some element and calling attention to it.
Infobar – this is a bar that goes across the top or the bottom of your page. It’s a very effective way to engage users if you don’t like pop-ups.
Inline – this kind of message is actually inline in your webpage itself and is used to insert net-new content or replace existing content.

Once you pick how you want to show the content, you need to determine its placement. This means that you need to note what pages you want the campaign to appear on. Should it be on every page? Should it be on select group of pages, such as a sub-section of your site or product? Should it just be on a single page?

What other rules or behavior should the campaign follow?

MeTRIXyst provides many different rules and behaviors so that you can further personalize your campaign. When setting up a campaign you’ll notice many options. Think them through and determine if any are relevant for your current campaign.

Some examples:

Delay the campaign from appearing until 2 seconds after page load—this is exceptionally effective with callouts.
Set the frequency to 1 time per visit to ensure you don’t SPAM a visitor with the same message repeatedly.
Set the message to appear if someone is inactive with your site or about to bounce.
Set the message to appear after someone scrolls down the page.
List the actions, fields, data that you need to track to create your goal and message segment.

Once you’ve written down the rules for who should see the campaign and the goals, the next step is to make sure you’re tracking everything you need to execute on it. Let’s use the rules we wrote down in step one above to illustrate this:

Visitors who have visited the site multiple times but never requested a demo
- You need to track the “Request A Demo” form submission.
New users that never accessed feature X before
- You need to track when someone accesses/uses feature X
Users who have spent more than 5 minutes on the site today, added at least 1 item to their shopping cart, haven’t been to the shopping cart page yet, and they try to bounce from the site
- You need to track current shopping cart state and the checkout process

What is the goal of showing this campaign?

Whenever you create a MeTRIXyst campaign you should come up with a goal for it. The goal should be whatever behavior you’re trying to promote with this campaign. Please keep in mind it should be a relevant goal.

Example:

You create a campaign that directs people to a landing page. The goal for this campaign should be to send people to the landing page, NOT to increase conversions. The reason is the campaign wasn’t designed to get more submissions. Instead add a second campaign to the landing page itself with a goal of increasing conversions.

Once you know your goal, we recommend you write it down in sentence format, just as you did when defining who should see the campaign.

Additionally, when thinking through your goal we encourage you to think about running a control test. This way you can test a personalization campaign against normal traffic to determine just how effective personalization is.

If you’re unsure if something is being tracked, or need to track additional data, please contact your Customer Success Director or Support (support@MeTRIXyst.com) and we’re happy to assist you.

PHASE 2: IMPLEMENT IT

Now that you’ve thought through your campaign, it’s time to implement it! At this point you need to create the message itself using our message editor. Rather than document this again here you can learn how to create a campaign here:

[Insert link address]

As you work on the campaign we encourage you to test it out. To do so, publish it in “Testing” mode. When you select this option the campaign will not appear to anyone unless the put the visual editor into test mode, or add the following parameter to your URL:

?TestMessages=true

That will make any message currently in “Testing” mode and make it visible.

PHASE 3: MEASURE AND IMPROVE

“In God we trust… all others bring data.” – W. Edwards Deming

Do not just assume a campaign works. If you went through the process above you should have a goal and a control for your campaigns. Use them to determine if a campaign worked or not. You can also set-up a/b tests, or a/b/control tests! No matter what your method is, it’s critical to look at the data and use that to drive your personalization strategy.

Steps to Making a Message: Worksheet

Phase 1: Thinking it through

1. Express your targeted audience in a complete sentence:

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2. Create a complete list of rules for your targeted segments:

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3. State your goal specifically in a complete sentence:

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4. Now, identify all the components of your campaign:

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PHASE 2: IMPLEMENTING IT

✔ Ensure all of the user’s actions can be actually be made without errors. ▢

✔ Create all your segments and the goals for each of the segments. ▢

✔ Choose best message type and create the to match your site’s style. ▢

✔ Run testing on several platforms and browsers prior to deployment. ▢

Phase 3: Measure and improve

Consider ongoing:

Study data to see that campaign was capturing what was intended.

Revert to prior phases— and new worksheets— as needed:

Refine and improve campaigns and messages.

Erik Ellis // Technical Communications || Data Analytics

Wednesday, December 12, 2018