We've designed this guide to introduce you to Postscript's native single-message campaigns, highlight strategies for different campaign types and messaging, and help you understand campaign performance.
We recommend that you review this guide before you proceed with creating campaigns.
Overview
Campaigns are a versatile way for brands to communicate with their customers and subscribers, and make up the majority of message types sent using Postscript. In 2020, 84% of messages sent via Postscript were campaign messages.
With campaigns, you can offer a variety of experiences for your customers, whether it's a flash sale or holiday promotion, educational campaign, interactive campaign, or conversational message. By pairing campaigns with strategic segmentation, you can engage different parts of your subscriber base with campaign messages that are more likely to appeal to them and result in high click-through rates, conversion, and overall earnings.
Before we dive into how to create campaigns, let's cover some foundational knowledge that will help you craft campaigns that are both highly effective and unique to your subscriber base and brand.
How Campaigns Work
Campaigns allow you to schedule and send a single message to a specific customer segment or your entire customer base.
Here's a visual of the single-message campaign experience with Postscript:
Campaign Basics
When you create a single-message campaign you need, at minimum, four important pieces of information.
- Name. Give your campaign a name that helps you identify it from all campaign drafts or sent campaigns. Some shops choose to also include the date of the campaign in the name. It's up to you.
- Segment. Your customer segment tells Postscript which subscribers should receive the campaign. This allows you to create targeted product and content campaigns and ensure they reach the right audience.
- Safe Send. Safe Send is an optional feature that, if enabled, prevents you from sending a campaign to any subscriber in your selected segment who received another message from your shop in the last 16 hours (e.g., welcome series automation, abandoned cart automation, another campaign, etc.)
- Message. Your campaign message will vary depending on the type of campaign you're sending, and it should always incorporate the voice and personality of your brand. You can learn more about different campaign types toward the end of this guide.
What to Include in Your Campaign Messages
- Include a GIF, image, or product photo. Images and GIFS are a powerful way to showcase a product or delight a subscriber. What you choose will likely depend on the type of campaign you are sending. For example, you might include a product photo or GIF for a product launch or flash sale, whereas you might use an amusing meme GIF or image for a conversational campaign or sale teaser.
- Add personalization with message tags. Add dynamic tags such as {first_name} so that the sent message populates with the subscriber's first name. It's a simple and effective way to build rapport and trust with your customers.
- Create a sense of urgency. Use your message copy to create a sense of urgency around the cart. Popular examples include Today only!, This offer expires at midnight!, or These products are going fast—get yours before they're gone!
- Offer an incentive (optional). You can choose to include an incentive if it makes sense for your brand. For flash sales or promotions, an incentive makes sense, but for a product launch or back in stock campaign, you might hold off on offering a discount.
- Link directly to a product or your store. Use Postscript's More tag to add a store link to your message. If you choose to offer a discount, your can use Add Coupon to create a link that auto-applies the offer (e.g.m 15% off, Free shipping, etc.)
Sending Campaigns
When it comes to sending campaigns, there are some general best practices that we recommend.
- Frequency. We recommend you send campaigns twice a week. Campaigns help build relationships and rapport with your subscribers, so it’s important to send with consistency to keep your subscribers engaged.
- Variety. It's important to vary your campaign type. If you send the same type of campaign each week, it could result in higher unsubscribe rates. Try a flash sale for one campaign, then later in the week, send a campaign that educates your subscribers on your mission or an organization your brand supports.
- Timing. Later in the day works best for some shops because their subscribers have time to read the message and take action. However, your subscribers could be different. We recommended testing different send times in the beginning and seeing whether certain times of day (or day of the week) perform better. More on understanding those metrics below.
Understanding Campaign Metrics
Metrics, or data, help you understand whether the messages you send are achieving the goals you've set.
For example, with a flash sale campaign, your goal might be to see high conversion rates. This would mean a large number of subscribers who receive the campaign message are clicking the link and completing a purchase.
Below, we walk through how to interpret metrics for campaigns.
- Sent. View the total number of campaign messages sent.
- Clicked. View the number of times subscribers clicked the link included in the campaign message.
- Ordered. View the number of customers who completed a purchase from the link included in the campaign.
- Earned. View the total revenue earned due to the campaign.
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Unsubscribe Rate. View the percentage of subscribers who opted out of SMS marketing via the campaign.
- We calculate the unsubscribe rate as (# of subscribers) / (# of messages delivered) * 100
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Click-Through Rate (CTR). View the percentage of clicks the link included in the campaign message received.
- We calculate the click-through rate as (# of clicks) / (# of messages opened) * 100
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Conversation Rate. View the percentage of orders generated through the campaign.
- We calculate the conversion rate as (# of orders) / (# of message clicks) * 100
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Earnings Per Message (EPM). View the average amount of revenue generated per campaign.
- We calculate earnings per message as (total revenue) / (# of messages delivered).
Testing Different Campaigns
A/B testing is a powerful and effective tool that takes the guesswork out of how your messages will be well received. By testing multiple options, you gather useful engagement data that will help you make informed decisions.
Here's how it works:
- Create two (or more) variations on a campaign.
- Send these messages to different groups of subscribers.
- Compare your results. You can see which message has a higher click-through rate (CTR, conversion, or higher earning per message (EPM). That message is your more effective campaign.
- Use those campaign learnings for future campaigns.
Here's an example A/B test:
At a glance, we can see the End of Summer Test 1 performed better. The click-through rate, conversion rate, and earnings per message are higher than that of End of Summer Test 2.
Let's look at it from the customer perspective: Your subscribers are more engaged and/or respond better to the message you created for Test 1.
Armed with that knowledge, you can take a look at the message and see what unique strategies you used:
- Did you include a product photo, image, or GIF?
- What type of offer did you include? Was it a percent or amount off, or a free shipping offer?
- Did you personalize the message with the subscriber's name?
- Did your message reflect the voice and personality of your brand?
- What time of day (and/or day of week) did you send the message?
You can apply these learnings to future campaigns that you build for your subscriber list.
Extra Resources
- Fantastic Texts. Need some inspiration? Check out some real-life customers and how they interact with their subscribers using campaigns.
- Postscript's Video Learning Library. Level up your SMS skills with our quick walkthrough videos of Postscript features and tools.
- A/B Testing Your Campaigns. Learn A/B testing best practices and how to create your test groups.
- 2021 SMS Emoji Trends Report. Learn about the most used and top-trending emojis based on analyzing millions of text messages. 👇 😍 🔥 👉 🎉 ✨ 🛍️ 🎁 🚨😇 💅 🦋 💞 😅 🦅🏌 ☎️ 🍃 ⚾ 👔
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