Campaign Design Guidelines

Setting up a campaign could take between an hour and up to two days depending on your level of expertise and experience with the Simplicity platform. If you have experience with HTML this will make your job easier yet you can certainly set up a campaign without web coding knowledge.

Further this is the quality of the campaign brief that has been written. Where components or partially supplied or documented then this can consume weeks on unplanned time and budget.

Among other details depending on the specifics of your campaign you’ll need to answer the below questions before starting the set up:

What’s the purpose of your campaign? Campaign Background / Objectives Summary.
(E.g. engaging a new niche of the market, promoting a new product, analysis of the full database or a specific area of it, obtain transactional data of a period of time, etc.)
When is this campaign to go live and when are the first media tests to be sent?
What media are you going to use to accomplish this goal and how many of them? (Email, SMS, Data Extract, Dynamic Page, Outbound Call)
Is your campaign one-off send (Ad hoc) or is it going to be sent more than once? If more than once, reviewing whether to automate this campaign to be deployed at certain times every day/week/fortnight/month?
Who’s going to receive this campaign? (Audience)
How are you going to target this audience? Do you know how to filter your audience? (By Distribution group, by transaction/purchases, by country, by age or gender or are you sending this campaign to the full database?)
Who’s going to be excluded from this campaign? (Excluding records from the database).
How are you going to exclude records from the database? This could include targeting email address, log against person RSN (unique GUID), names, postal addresses or any other information you hold about a records and you can utilize to target them
Who are your test group recipients? People who will approve your media and audience before it goes live. Media Sign Off
Do you need to provide data counts for approval?
Is your test group in the data base? If not, you’ll need to add them before sending tests. Overnight process might need to happen for the records to show in the source list require, please allow a night if necessary.
What source list in the data base are you to use?
Do you know the deduping rules to be used in this campaign? (One per email, One per person) – Do you require additional time to set them up?
Questions specific to email campaigns:
- Is this an HTML, Text only campaign or both?
- HTML: Is the HTML provided to you or are you coding this? Is the copy in it? Do you have all links for your images/call to action? If you are coding the email, are you going to receive the design files? If not, are you designing the email?
- Are your URLs to include advance tracking?
- Does your campaign includes subject line testing?
- Do you have subject line/s and pre-header/s for the email/s?
- If more than 1 media file in the campaign, who (audience) is receiving which media file (email)? Are they going to be send at the same time or in different periods of time?
- What Email Address will be used as the “From Email Address”?
- Is there a different “Reply to” email address? If so, which one is it?
- Is there a text version of the email?
- Is there a dynamic page (“view online”, “view in browser”) needed for this email campaign?
Is there any personalization needed in your call/email/sms/dynamic page? E.g. First Name, Email Address, Vehicle VIN, Membership Number, etc
Is there any online forms to be linked to this campaign? (Unsubscribe, Update your Details, Competition Entry Form).

Once you’ve collected all the information needed to get started you can start setting up your campaign and more question will come up on your way.

Purpose of the Campaign/Objective

Knowing the background of your campaign will help you building an idea of what is exactly what is that we want to achieve and if this is accomplished by the campaign setup brief; Understanding the objectives of your campaign will assist in logically deducing next steps after the campaign has been sent e.g.:

An email was sent to promote entries on a promotional form built in Simplicity platform; most probably after the end of the promotion a new campaign with the data extract for the promotion draw will be needed
An email was sent with 2 media files (HTML) and different subject lines; after a period of time you would want to know which of these subject lines has mayor impact therefore a report will need to be analyzed and information capture for the next promotion or a second execution of the same campaign.