Creating Triggered Campaigns

A triggered campaign sends an email, push notification, in-app message, SMS or web push notification to a particular user (or various lists of users) after the occurrence of a triggering event.

For example, order confirmations and password reset emails are triggered campaigns of a transactional nature, while emails or push notifications sent after users look at a particular product or section of a website are marketing-focused triggered campaigns.

This guide describes how to create and send a triggered campaign.

# Table of contents

# Permissions

To work with campaigns in Iterable, you'll need various permissions:

• To view your project's campaigns, you must have the Workflows, Campaigns & Experiments > View permission.

• To draft a campaign, you must have the Workflows, Campaigns & Experiments > Draft permission.

• To activate a triggered campaign, you must have the Workflows, Campaigns & Experiments > Activate & Manage permission.

# Instructions

To create and activate a triggered campaign, follow these instructions:

# 1. Set up the campaign

To create and configure a triggered campaign, navigate to Messaging > Campaigns and click Create New Campaign:

Then, on the New Campaign screen:

• Specify a Campaign Name (this value is for your reference only, and can help you locate the campaign in the future).
• If necessary, set up a custom conversion metric.
• For Campaign Type, select Triggered.
• Choose a Message Medium.

To choose content for the campaign, click Continue to Templates.

# 2. Choose starting content

On the Template step of the campaign creation process, you can select a pre-existing template or campaign on which to base the new campaign (you can edit the new campaign before sending it, and changes won't impact the original). Alternatively, you can start the new campaign from scratch.

• To base your new campaign on one of your project's reusable templates, select the Templates tab and pick the template you'd like to use.

• To base your new campaign on a previous campaign, select the Campaign Content or Workflow Content tab and choose the campaign you'd like to use.

  TIP

  To search for a campaign, enter its name or an ID in the search input.

After you've selected a template or campaign (or if you've decided not to), click one of the buttons at the bottom of the screen:

• Use Selected Template (or Use Selected Content) copies the selected template or campaign content into your new campaign, so that you can edit it without impacting the original.

• Pre-populate Selected Template with Data Feed (or Pre-populate Selected Content with Data Feed) causes Iterable to make a single request to an external data feed and merge the returned data into the selected template or campaign, overwriting any Handlebars expressions the data can resolve.

  NOTE

  Iterable makes this data feed query once, as you're creating the campaign. However, Iterable also supports per-recipient data feed queries, as described in Personalizing Templates with Data Feeds.

• Start from Scratch allows you to select a template editor (and, if you'd like, a pre-built layout), and start your campaign's content with a blank slate.

# 3. Edit and preview the template

On the Edit Template screen, create the content for your campaign and preview it.

• To learn more about editing and previewing options available for each message medium, read:

  • Template Options for Email
  • Template Options for In-App Messages
  • Template Options for Push Notifications
  • Template Options for SMS
  • Template Options for Web Push Notifications

• To personalize this content for each of your campaign's recipients, use:

  • Handlebars expressions to reference data from a contact's Iterable user profile (whether to display it directly or use it to show specific content to specific contacts).
  • Data Feeds to call a a web service—once for each of the campaign's recipients—and display it in the message.
  • Catalog to dynamically find and display information about your organization's relevant products or services that a given recipient might find interesting.

When you're done editing and previewing your template, click one of the buttons on the bottom of the screen:

• Save & Continue to Review to open the Review & Launch screen, where you can activate campaign.

• Create A/B Experiment to add an A/B experiment to the campaign.

# 4. Activate the campaign

For a triggered campaign to send a message, you must first activate it. Do this on the Review & Launch screen:

After you activate a campaign, it will be in the Running state, and you can trigger it by calling Iterable's API.

# 5. Trigger the campaign

To send a triggered campaign, use Iterable's API:

• POST /api/campaigns/trigger - Sends the specified campaign to the supplied lists of users.
• POST /api/email/target - Sends a particular email campaign to the specified user.
• POST /api/inApp/target - Sends a particular in-app message campaign to the specified user.
• POST /api/push/target - Sends a particular push notification campaign to the specified user.
• POST /api/sms/target - Sends a particular SMS campaign to the specified user.
• POST /api/webPush/target - Sends a particular web push notification campaign to the specified user.

For example, you might trigger these APIs from your server when your contacts complete particular actions on your website. To schedule the triggered campaign to send at a future time, include a sendAt value in the body of the request.

# Sample request

To view a sample request for your triggered campaign, open it and click the Show Sample API Request link:

You'll see a sample request such as the following:

To execute this request, use curl. Be sure to populate it with an API key from your Iterable project first!

# 6. Monitor campaign results

After activating a triggered campaign, you can use Iterable to monitor its results and understand how your contacts are engaging with it.

To do this, navigate to Messaging > Campaigns and open the campaign. You'll see its Campaign Analytics screen, where you can inspect various metrics about its performance.

For more information, read Viewing Campaign Metrics.

# Viewing past sends of triggered campaigns

To view past sends for your triggered campaigns, navigate to Insights > Logs > Sent Messages.

From here, you can see a list of sent messages, preview them, and resend them. To preview and resend, hover over the message and click the View and Resend links that appear.

# Viewing scheduled sends of triggered campaigns

To view message sends scheduled by a triggered campaign, navigate to Insights > Logs > Scheduled Messages.

Use the delete buttons at the top of the screen to delete scheduled sends.

# Workflow campaigns

It's also possible to send triggered campaigns from workflows, which are multi-step customer journeys that allow you to tailor your interactions with your contacts based on their interactions with your brand. To learn more about workflows, read the Workflows documentation.

# Further reading

• Creating Blast Campaigns
• Iterable's API documentation