The post-purchase campaign – Splio - Knowledge Base

This article addresses users of the Scenario module. If you are using Campaigns for your post-purchase campaigns, please refer to our dedicated article.

What - Definition & concept

In general, any campaign intended to make the recipient purchase anything is commercial (this includes asking to join loyalty programs). It is important because you can normally send commercial messages only to your opt-in contacts. Sending commercial messages to people who have not opted in to receiving them is equal to sending unsolicited messages, or spam, which you want to avoid.

Transactional messages, on the other hand, are strictly informational. You can use them to confirm a password change or send an order. This means that, unlike commercial messages, you are not limited to sending them to your opt-in contacts.

How to - Steps

Step 1 - Creating the order filter

To build your transactional campaigns, first, you need to create a sales filter: ‘order’. Kindly note that you shall create an orders' filter and not a contact one. Using this type of filter will allow the campaign to target contacts who are not subscribed to a list (but it will not target the ones in blacklists).

Indeed, this is because trigger campaigns are only sent once per object (contact, ticket) so the use of contact will mean that each contact can be used be targeted once per event (ex: a purchase). To avoid this situation of the trigger campaign, we use the orders' filter instead as the population of your scenario. By doing so, the contact will be able to receive several transactional campaigns, because a sales' filter is always linked to a contact and each contact can have several unique order ID generated.

Once your filter has been created, you can select the condition 'date of creation' as shown in this example. Most transactional campaigns are usually sent in real-time and therefore will require a real-time import of your data via API.

Step 2 - adding variables to your design

Splio gives you a tool, in the form of transactional loops, to present data directly connected not to a contact, but to an order as explained earlier. Below, you will find some examples of order loops.

To learn more about loops you can use in campaigns targeting your contacts, check out our article about products and stores loops.

Use the ORDER keyword to refer to orders (that is, orders which have been placed and paid). Such a loop is processed once for every product found on the order.

{SPLIO FOREACH PRODUCT IN ORDER}
    <h3>Product ID: $product.sku$</h3>
    <p>
      Name: $product.name$ ($product.brand$) <br/>
      Price: $product.price$ 
    </p>
    <img src="$product.img_url$" />
{SPLIO ENDFOREACH}

Explication:

1. Splio goes over the loop once for every product in the current order (that is, line in order).

2. Each time it goes through the loop, data from the product fields (name, brand, price, image) is added to the current message.

Exclude items from an order loop

Use case: You need to make sure that when you display all items found on an order, you never show certain products (e.g., made by a competitor or belonging to a certain group).

{SPLIO FOREACH PRODUCT IN ORDER LIMIT="4"}
    {SPLIO IF $product.extid$ != "987153" AND $product.extid$ != "777787" AND 
              $product.extid$ != "777781" AND  $product.extid$ != "227526" AND 
              $product.ProductType$ != "box"}

        <h3>Product ID: $product.sku$</h3>
        <p>
          Name: $product.name$ ($product.brand$) <br/>
          Price: $product.price$ 
        </p>
        <img src="$product.img_url$" />

    {SPLIO ENDIF}
{SPLIO ENDFOREACH}

Explanation:

The instructions to display a product image and its name are enclosed not only in a loop but also between “{SPLIO IF}” and “{SPLIO ENDIF}”. Whenever the external ID of the product (“”) equals 987153, 777787, 777781, or 227526, or if the product type (“”) is “box”, Splio will not display them. (Because all the negative conditions must be met to display the product.)

Step 3 - The campaign creation

Once your filter created and your design updated with its relevant variables, you will be able to move forward with the campaign creation. The type we will use for a post-purchase campaign will be the automatic campaign.

Sales filters are not available on manual campaigns.

Automatic campaigns types

It is important to distinguish the different types of automatic campaigns you have available in the Splio platform. The trigger and real-time trigger are the types which can be used for this type of campaign.

Frequency and types of automatic campaigns

Note on the trigger campaign behaviour:

Make sure that your filter works as intended before launching any trigger campaigns. You should never, ever modify a trigger campaign filter once the campaign is running. This is because trigger campaigns are sent to all contacts (or, e.g., owners of orders) entering the filter.
Trigger campaigns are not retroactive, this means that if your filter has 50 contacts today and you activated your trigger, the trigger will hit contact number 51, 52 (not the previous 50 contacts).
For trigger campaigns based on batch import, you shall start the campaigns after the imports have been processed (if you import gets processed at 9 AM, your trigger shall be activated after 9.30 on-wards so the update is fully processed in the platform)
For trigger campaigns, if you decide to update the design, this change will only be taken into account once per day regardless of the send out of the campaign (event triggering).

Real-time triggers

As their name indicate, these campaigns are launched immediately after the object (contact, order, or abandoned cart) is updated via the API. This can happen only once, and further updates to the same object will not launch the campaign.

Triggers

Trigger campaigns are also launched once per object. However, in other aspects, they are processed like automatic campaigns (periodic). When an object lands in the target filter, it gets queued and the message will be sent the next time the campaign is processed. The timing and frequency of the campaign are defined in the scenario. This type of campaign can be sent from the minimum of once per month to the maximum of once per day.

A common misunderstanding takes place when clients update their data via batch (e.g., DataHub). Contrary to some expectations, such campaigns are sent on schedule, once per day maximum. Again, this is because batch uploads work with plain triggers, the real-time sending is reserved to API connections.

When - Our tips to time your campaign well

The data import frequency to consider:

Through SFTP/Data Hub: you will hit your customers the day after. We would recommend scheduling your campaign to start early in the morning (as soon as your customer checks their phone or just after breakfast. 8.00 – 9.30 AM): keep in mind that the start date of your campaigns shall be always after the data has been synced in Splio
Through API: you can hit your customers in real time, right when the event has happened (a few seconds | minutes after they fulfilled a condition or an event).

Different strategies:

The different one:

Who doesn’t want to be asked their opinion? Send these customers a survey asking about their experience with your brand.
Cross-selling emails to encourage repeat purchases.
Product how-to guides to ensuring your customer gets the most out of their purchase. For example, sending a product care guide for a new sofa or beauty tutorials for a recent make-up purchase.
A major holiday may be around the corner. Send all new customers post-purchase welcome campaigns wishing them a wonderful holiday season.

The organised one:

Product updates: let customers know about updates to products that they’ve purchased in the past. Build campaigns around products that have had high purchase rates and enough innovation that it’s relevant to the customer.
Send communications based on customer behaviour; let’s say you want to invite only your most loyal customers to a VIP rewards program. You may segment your list to deliver this post-purchase email to customers who’ve purchased more than 5000€ in the last month and rated your support team with 4 stars or above.
Targeting return customers: online shoppers who receive emails based on previous shopping habits were at least somewhat likely to make a purchase as a result of targeted email.

The standard one:

Don’t leave preview text to chance, make it count.
Reassuring your customers: a relevant message after a purchase may include an order with the total amount, a status update about the delivery of the item, or contact information to connect with customer support.
Ask for feedback or a review to enhance the post-purchase experience.

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