Using Groups to Automatically Add People to Campaigns
NOTE: Now you can simply use Automations to add your group to a campaign, visit this page.
You are a company that wants to put their new employees on an onboarding campaign. Each week or two you need to get a bunch of new people into your campaign. You have a roster as an excel spreadsheet (.csv) file of folks that you imported. One of the fields in your import is "orientation date". (the date that they were officially hired).
As the HR manager you need to get these folks into the drip onboarding campaign quickly and simply.
The basic process overview is to:
-Create a Group - based on contact/learner activity or contact data field(s).
-Create an Automation to Add People to the Campaign who match the group condition.
Detailed Scenario
Say I want to schedule a specific group of my sales trainees into their sales training course (or campaign) starting next Monday. One way I can group these particular folks together is by region. I can make a group for all sales staff in the Southwest region - by using a region attribute of my contacts list. This assumes that my contact list already contained a data field for region. Alternatively, you could also create a custom tag called 'region' for each of those contacts. Tags is shown as the attribute in the screenshot below.
Start the Automation
In automations: click New in the top right of the automations panel:
Select Create for Add to Campaign:
Name the automation: Add Southwest Region to Training
And Select a group for whom you want to take this training. If you don't already have a group created.....
Create a Group
Select: Create New Group
Name the group: Southwest Region
Attribute is my contact data: tags / is / Southwest
I can always verify that the system is selecting the right people by clicking on the contacts tab at right.
If that seems like the correct number of contacts I have in that region - I hit SAVE on the bottom right of the Create Group panel.
Set Timing Options
Now that I have selected my group that this automation affects - I can complete the automation by setting a date and time for the group addition to a campaign to occur.
I select the time zone - now some of these folks are on central, and some are in Pacific. Since Pacific is the earlier time zone for this group, I'll base this time selection of 9am on Pacific time- ensuring they don't get a text in the wee hours of the morning. Both with receive their first course message at the same time - their clocks will simply say different times depending on where they are.
Here's the cool part. I can set this automation to run only once. But! If this course was designed as mandatory training for any new incoming sales trainees in the Southwest region - I could set this automation to be ongoing for a set number of days! As soon as any new contact matches the condition of region is Southwest - they will be added to the group, and automatically added to this training program (the next time 9am Pacific Standard time hits).
Select Campaign to Join and Edit Welcome Messaging
On the right side panel I will choose which campaign or course I want them to join
And, I can choose to create a custom message here that will go out to them as soon as they are added to the course. I can set SMS or EMAIL or BOTH.
Alternatively, if I have already setup the welcome messaging for this campaign, I can simply leave these messages blank. Use these messages only if you want to over-ride the campaign messages, add information, or if you're not sure that you set campaign welcome messages.
I can Review this automation at this point, but let's just discuss a couple of little options here at the bottom....
Notice that you can reset this campaign for all in this group. This can be helpful if you had latecomers, and you want to start everyone over in order to be on the same page.
The 'disable all' campaign confirmations at the bottom of the page can be used in cases where you want to add people to the training quietly - without alerting them. For example, the automation is used to set people up for an event - enrolling them without their knowledge. This can be useful if you plan to present information to them first - and then let them know in person about their training course they are already enrolled in, and follow-up at a later date by messaging this group with a link to their portal to participate.
Review and Launch Your Automation
Click Review in the top right of the Automations panel.
Clicking this button brings you to a screen where we can view what's scheduled to occur, when it's scheduled to occur, and to whom. Very handy! If everything looks great, hit the Launch button.
If something looks off or incorrect, hit the back button to work on this automation some more or hit back again - and you will see it in displayed as a draft in the list of automations.