How to Set Up an Email Campaign

View information about managing an existing Email Campaign

This workflow guide covers how to create and launch a Messaging Campaign. Messaging Campaigns allow you to email (or text, if you have the correct permissions) 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 Appointment Campaigns, so students receive all messages 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?
• Who should be launching campaigns? Should campaigns be part of each staff member’s personal workflow? Or should they be more centralized and launched by unit leaders?

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, to make your campaign easier to find in the future.

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.

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.

Note. Welcome messages are the first nudge sent to students. It sends at the start of the campaign or immediately after a student is added to the campaign

To create the Welcome message and any additional nudges, define your campaign and create your list of students for the 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, though only one message may be sent per day.

You can use Content Templates for any Messaging nudge. Enter a subject line and customize the message. For email messages, you can add an attachment to the message. The available Merge Tags are in the rich text editor. 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 nudge is sent. This field does not appear when creating the Welcome Message, as the nudge will send immediately after starting the campaign. If you set the campaign start date for the next day or after, the first nudge sends at 10 AM Central Time of the date set. If you add students later, the send date will be immediately after they are added to the campaign. For non-Welcome Message nudges, you can send a message on a Specific Date or a Relative Date.

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

For nudges that are sent after the welcome message, you can send the nudge on a specific date or a relative date. 

Sending on a specific date is more useful if you have a narrow, time-bound campaign that will not add many (if any) new students. If a student is added after a specific date nudge, they do not receive the nudge.

A relative date may be more helpful if you will be adding new students to a campaign regularly. This allows you to send a nudge X number of days after being added to the campaign based on what you enter in the Send Offset field.

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.

Review your campaign details, nudges, and recipients on this page.  You can preview email nudges in the new email preview window from this page as well.

Click Start Campaign when you are ready to send the messages to the selected students. If your welcome message is scheduled to send the same day as your campaign creation date, the nudge will send almost immediately (if there are recipients in the campaign already). If the welcome message is scheduled for the next day or after, it sends at 10 AM Central on that date.

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.