Send Anniversary Campaigns In Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Anniversary campaigns are a brilliant marketing tactic that any marketer can deploy to help increase conversions from their existing customer base. Examples of anniversary campaigns can range from birthdays to wedding anniversaries, to service milestones. Regardless of the campaign messaging, each anniversary campaign centers around being able to send at a single, particular timestamp. This makes them often difficult to manage.

Luckily, Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC), a leading email platform, allows users to run anniversary campaigns seamlessly. However, doing so requires that the particular anniversary date is in Salesforce and stored with the individual user profile. Sure, marketing teams could manually input these dates, but that's nowhere near realistic at scale. Some of the top SFMC users have found a better, marketer-friendly, and automated solution by syncing the anniversary data directly from their data warehouse into Salesforce using Hightouch.

Let's say you're on the marketing team of an e-commerce pet store. Whenenever a new user sets up an account, you capture their email and pet information, like their date of birth. You are in your campaign planning meeting and decide that moving ahead, you want to send a happy birthday message offering a discount on their next purchase. These discounts should be dynamic based on the amount of money a customer has spent in the last six months.

In the cases of high-spending customers, you want to offer them a lower discount as you know you’ve already won their loyalty/business. For low-spending customers, you want to provide a more significant discount to try and entice them to spend.

To run this campaign, you know you’ll need to set up a journey in SFMC that references a pet birthday field. You’ll additionally need audiences that identify the two tiers for the discount: a high-value audience (spent >= $500) and a low-value audience (spent < $500).

Entering birthday fields and creating audiences manually at scale is simply not possible. Luckily, your data engineering team can do it for you, but you’ll need to wait two weeks before they can get to it–and once they do, it won’t be automated.

This playbook will walk you through how using Hightouch’s no-code audience builder, you can quickly and easily build the audiences to personalize your coupon codes before syncing pet birthdate fields to SFMC to determine when you should send your campaigns.

You can use Hightouch to help create an anniversary campaign in three ways.

The first would be to sync over just the anniversary date (date of birth or account created time, for example) to a marketing cloud object, so the anniversary date appears in contacts.

The second way would be to sync the data over as a data extension and set up a journey from a data extension.

The third way we'll go through in the example below is to sync data via Journey directly. This is a preferred method because Hightouch manages the adding and removing of contacts without you having to worry about them.

1. Navigate to your Salesforce Marketing Cloud, select Journey Builder and click on Create New Journey.

   
   

2. Select Transactional Send Journey and click Create. Click on the Transactional API Event and enter an Event Definition Key and then click Done.

   
   

3. Select the email you want to send and click Activate.

   
   

1. Select from our supported source types and click Continue.

   

2. Enter your source configuration details and then click Continue.

   

3. Name your source and click Finish.

   

1. Navigate to destinations and click Add Destination. Select Salesforce Marketing Cloud and click Continue and enter your SFMC credentials and click Continue.

   
   

2. Name the destination and click Finish.

   

1. Navigate to models in Hightouch and click Add model.

   

2. Select the data source you connected earlier and click Continue.

   

3. Next, you want to define your data model. You can define your data using either a SQL editor, table selector, your existing dbt models, or even your Looks if you use Looker as your BI tool. For this example, we'll be using the SQL editor.

   

4. Input a query that joins your events table onto your customer table.

      SELECT
            *
       FROM
             PUBLIC.PETS_ANNIVERSARY
   

5. Click Preview to verify your model output looks good. Then name your model, select your primary key, and click Finish.

   
   

1. With the model created, it's time to create your sync to Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Select Syncs, click Add a sync, select your Salesforce Marketing Cloud destination and click Continue.

   
   

2. Next, configure your settings and choose how you want your data synced to Salesforce and which journey you would like to add contacts to. After this, you simply need to select a primary key and choose which columns you want to sync to Salesforce.

   
   

3. After you've mapped your columns you can set your sync schedule and click Finish.

   

4. With your sync configured, simply click Run and your audience will begin syncing to Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

   

5. By sending the anniversary data into Salesforce Marketing Cloud you launch anniversary campaigns automatically.

With Hightouch, marketers have multiple options to quickly and easily create the audiences and syncs needed to power anniversary campaigns in SFMC. No more waiting on engineering tickets and no more CSVs.

Want to learn more? Check out our other playbooks or book a demo with our team of experts today!