Home / Campaigns / How to Set Up a Messaging (Email) Campaign

How to Set Up an Email Campaign

Email Campaigns and Slug Success

For information about managing an existing Email Campaign, click here

This guide covers how to create and launch an Email Campaign. Email Campaigns are a new type of campaign that allows you to email a group of students on specified dates about things they need to do or activities they need to attend. This type of campaign has no objective, unlike an Appointment Campaign, so students receive all emails in the campaign.

Strategic questions should be asked when creating email campaigns, such as:

How would you like to impact your students with campaigns?
What student populations do you envision this would be used for?

Launching an Email Campaign

To begin, open the Campaigns page and select Add New from the Messaging Campaigns section.

Define the Campaign

The New Messaging Campaign page opens. Now you set the criteria for the Campaign. The fields that must be filled out are listed and defined below.

Campaign Name: Campaign Name is visible to the person creating the campaign and any other users who have access to view campaigns, but not visible to the student. Make sure that you use a descriptive and unique name, otherwise other users will not be able to evaluate the impact of your campaigns.

Note. Start campaign names with the most important info. Academic term is the most important!. Some formats could include: Term, Population, Purpose; Term, Population, College, Purpose; Term, College, Purpose, Last name of user who created the campaign. Examples include: “F19 Frosh Reg Campaign”, “F20 1^st Time Frosh, or “S21 Frosh Major Decl, J. Smith”

Tracking URL: The URL you want students to click. This can be any URL, but you probably want it to take students directly to your site.
Tracking URL Display Value: The text students will see in the email message encouraging them to take action. When students click the text, they go to the Tracking URL.

Add Students to Campaign

The next step is performing a search to find recipients for the campaign. Set your criteria and perform the Advanced Search. The search results page appears.

Select the students to add to the campaign and click Continue. You may also save this search if you want. Once you’ve gone to the next step, this list is static and does not update.

Review the students on the next page. If a student should not be in the campaign, select the box next to their name and choose Remove Students from Campaign from the Actions menu.

Once finished, click Continue.

Add Nudges

Nudges allow for more communication from you to students during an Email Campaign. Each nudge is an email sent to your campaign list. Nudge emails are sent the morning of the date chosen when you create the nudge. As with any email, some may be slightly delayed.

To create a nudge, define your campaign and create your list of students for the Email Campaign. The Nudges page opens.

Click Add Nudge to create your first nudge. You must create at least one nudge per campaign; however, you can create more. There are no limits on how many nudges you can send.

Enter a subject line and customize the message. The available Merge Tags are listed under the Message text box. You can see a preview of the message in a panel right of the composition panel. You can also attach a file to this message.

Fields used in the message composition are:

Email Subject: The subject of the nudge email going to the student.
Message: The customized email message going to the student. Merge tags are available for this message and are shown beneath the message field.
Send Date: The date the email nudge is sent. The nudge with the earliest date starts your Email Campaign.

After creating a nudge, click Save Nudge to continue. You may continue creating nudges after this.

Important. Your Email Campaign "ends" when your last message is sent. However, you can continue to add Nudges after the last message is sent, if this is helpful to your Email Campaign.

Confirm and Send

Review your campaign details, nudges, invitees, and advisors on this page.

Click Start Campaign when you are ready to email the invites to the selected students.

Managing an Email Campaign

The Slug Success platform gives you tools to manage your Email Campaign once it has been created and sent. Open your Campaigns by going to the Campaigns page and selecting the Messaging Campaigns link.

After creating an Email Campaign, you track student engagement through the Messaging Campaigns page.

Select your Campaign’s name to open a report with statistics about the performance of the campaign.

The following metrics are available in the Email Campaigns detail page.

Students in Campaign: The number of students who were sent the campaign email.
Click to Open Rate: The click-to-open rate (CTOR) compares the number of unique clicks to unique opens.
Emails Sent: The number of emails sent by the Campaign. This number may not be the same as the number of students in your original list.
Emails Opened: The number of emails sent by the campaign that were opened.
Links Clicked: The number of times the link in the campaign email was clicked.

Beneath the metrics is a table called Students in Campaign. The list may be exported as a CSV file from the Options sidebar.