What is a Drip Campaign?

A Drip Campaign is a series of messages sent over a designated period. It’s fully customizable and it allows you to relay messages without overwhelming your target audience in one go, and to develop a personal connection by engaging your contacts for a prolonged period of time. It also has the flexibility to add new subscribers to your campaign at any point after the campaign is launched.

If you have used Mailchimp before, you are probably familiar with email drip campaign – a series of automated emails that go out over a period of time.

engageSPARK introduces the same idea through SMS and Voice messaging making it possible to reach more people offline on an on-going basis. Stay top-of-mind of your contacts with engageSPARK’s new and improved Drip Campaign that combines both SMS and Voice.

Let’s explore it together on the Campaigns page of your account.

Step 1 – Content

1. Go to Campaigns page, look for the plus sign button at the upper right corner, and select Drip Campaign in the dropdown.

2. Step 1 (Content) is where you can select what content you want to create.

SMS Message
SMS Question
Voice Message
Voice Question
Action only

Once you’ve selected what content you want to create, you can either start composing your SMS text message or upload your pre-recorded Voice files. Then, you can set when you want your message to go out (immediately, in minutes, in hours, days, or weeks).

SMS question feature allows

SMS Message

You can use this to blast one-off SMS message to your contacts. Use either a registered sender ID or virtual number to send your SMS message. You can also personalize your message using the personalization tool .

SMS Question

This is perfect for conducting sms surveys or getting feedback from your contacts. To allow people to reply to your SMS question, you need to use a virtual number or shortcode (whichever is available).

You can allow multiple possible answers per choice (see screenshot). Like for the below example, you can allow people to reply either 1 or female if they are female. To give room for possible errors.

On each choices, you can add actions – what you want to do when a contact replies with either of the choices. You can either send an SMS or trigger an API request. You can also add more choices as you like by clicking this icon .

The SMS question feature allows you to enable additional actions in these cases:

Invalid Reply – a contact sends an invalid reply (none of the set choices).

Timeout – the contact does not reply within the allowed time-window that you specify.

Failure – the contact has not replied with a valid choice, after all chances have been exhausted.

Voice Message

Pre-record a one-off voice blast audio message and send it to your contacts. When they receive it, they can listen to your audio message but they won’t be able to do anything until the call hangs-up on its own or they drop the call. If you want to set a caller ID, the number that shows up on your contact’s phone when they receive the call, let us know and we’ll register it for you in your account.

For your audio message, you can either record your message right into the platform, upload a pre-recorded audio file, or use text-to-speech. Your audio file can be a .wav, .mp3, or .ogg file.

Voice Question

If you want to do surveys or ask questions through a voice call, you can use this content-type. This is better than SMS question in terms of getting real-time answers and not having to worry about renting a virtual number. Your contacts can answer your voice questions while on the call by pressing keys on their phone or by speaking their answer.

Just like in SMS question, you can add actions depending on your contact’s answer to your question. You can either play another audio message, send an SMS, trigger an API request, or hangup the call. If you want to add more choices, you can do so by clicking this icon .

Other than that, voice question allows you to enable additional call settings in cases where a contact presses an invalid key, timeouts or no reply at all, and failure to press a valid key within the allowable time or has exhausted the number of retries for a valid keypress.

Action only

Allows you to do API POST and GET requests and you can trigger a SMS message. You can even subscribe a contact to another campaign using the Action only feature via an API request. Or, send airtime top-up to your contact.

3. Once you’ve selected what content you want to create, you can either start composing your SMS text message or upload your pre-recorded Voice files. Then, you can set when you want your message to go out (immediately, in minutes, in hours, days, or weeks).

• • Immediately – if you’ve set your message to go out immediately, the system will automatically send it out as soon as you subscribe a contact or group of contacts.
  • Minutes – depending on the number of minutes you’ve set, the system will send your message X minutes after you subscribe a contact or group of contacts. For example, you set your message to go out 5 minutes after – your recipient will receive it 5 minutes after you subscribed them to the campaign.
  • Hours – the same rule applies, only this time it’s in hours. Depending on the number of hours you’ve set, the system will send your message X hours after you subscribe a contact or group of contacts. For example, you set your message to go out 1 hour after – your recipient will receive it 1 hour after you subscribed them to the campaign.
  • Days – the system starts counting the beginning of a day at 12:00am. It will send your message X days at X time after you subscribe a contact or group of contacts. If X time has already passed from the time you subscribed your contacts, the message will go out on the next scheduled time. For example, if you schedule your message to go out 0 day at 9am, it will go out at 9am after you subscribe a contact or group of contacts. Another example is if you set your message to go out 1 day at 9am, it will go out 1 day after you subscribe a contact or group of contacts at 9am.
  • Weeks – the system considers Sunday as the beginning of a week. It will send your message X weeks at X time after you subscribe a contact or group of contacts. If X time has already passed from the time you subscribed your contacts, the message will go out on the next scheduled time. For example, if you schedule your message to go out 0 week at 9am the system will send out the message at 9am after you subscribe a contact or group of contacts. Another example is if you set your message to go out 1 week at 9am, it will go out 1 week after you subscribe a contact or group of contacts at 9am.

4. Because the drip campaign allows you to create a series of messages that go out over a period of time, you can click the Add message button to add more messages to your campaign. There is no limit to the number of messages you can add. You can combine different content-type within 1 campaign (see screenshot).

After creating your messages, you can either Save your campaign as draft to continue working on it at a later time or you can proceed to the next step.

Step 2 – Contacts

5. When you are done composing your series of messages you can hit Next button at the bottom of the page to start subscribing contacts or groups of contacts to your campaign.

Note: You can skip this step if you don’t want to subscribe contacts just yet. You can manage your subscriptions later on even after launching your drip campaign.You can use the search tool to look for a specific contact or group name.

Contacts – if you want to manually select individual contacts to be subscribed to your campaign, you can do that here.

Groups – you can put your contacts in a group to make group selection easier.

Segments – also known as Smart groups. You can create segments with conditional clauses to automatically put your contacts in a group based on the conditions you created. You can segment your contacts based on the dynamic contacts data and specify conditions such as is equal to, is not equal to, contains, does not contain, is empty, and is not empty.

6. Whether you decide to select a contact, group of contacts, or no contact at all – you can hit Next button to proceed to the last step.

Step 3 – Confirm

7. If you selected individual contacts in step 2, it will show how many contacts were selected in the contacts counter. If you selected groups or segments, it will show how many groups or segments were selected in the groups/segments counter.

8. For one-way SMS blast messages in your drip campaign, you can set your preferred sender name (a.k.a. sender ID, mask name, and brand name) so it shows on your contacts’ phone when they receive your message. If you already have a registered sender name in your account, you can select it from the dropdown. If not, your messages will be sent using a System Default sender name.

Note: Contact customer support to register your sender name at helpteam@engageSPARK.com or use the live chat facility.

To know more about sender names click here.

To allow your contacts to reply to your message, you need to use a virtual number. If you have one available, you can select it from the dropdown. Otherwise, you need to purchase one from the platform or contact customer support.

9. You can set when you want your campaign to go live: immediately or at a later point in time.

Immediately

• • When you click the Launch Now button, messages will be sent based on when you subscribe each contact to this campaign or based on the timings you have set in Step 1 (Content).
  • All other messages will be sent as configured, relative to when the first message is sent.
  • You will no longer be able to edit this campaign after it is launched.
  • If you want this campaign to launch at a later point in time, choose “on a specific date and time”.

On a specific date and time

• • When you click the Schedule for Later button, the campaign will be scheduled to go live on the date and time you have set based on the timezone selected.
  • Messages will be sent based on when you subscribe each contact to this campaign or based on the timings you have set in Step 1 (Content).
  • All other messages will be sent as configured, relative to when the first message is sent.
  • You will still be able to edit this campaign before it goes live by selecting “Return to Draft & Edit” in this campaign’s Actions menu.