Your Ultimate Marketing Glossary

What is Campaign Scheduling?

As you know, the success of any business relies heavily upon its marketing. That's why brands need to launch marketing campaigns from time to time to promote their content. So, by scheduling these campaigns, they can better plan, process, organise, and execute the marketing strategies.

The scheduling of campaigns refers to a process. It allows the marketing campaigns to go live and target specific audiences at a predefined time. A timetable is prepared during scheduling that decides that time and date. When it arrives, marketing campaigns are automatically launched. Such as, sending of emails, showing social media posts, discount offers, advertisements, and other personalized website content to reach the target audience. It is made sure during scheduling that they are launched at the most impactful times. And this maximizes the chances of engagement and conversions.

The scheduling of campaigns is mostly used in personalization platforms, or email marketing systems, and ad management softwares. It enables businesses to consistently deliver all the relevant messages. They are based on the  behaviors of customers, trends of the season, or whatever is the goal of the campaign.

Why Should You Schedule Your Campaigns?

Scheduling a campaign can provide many benefits. They can increase the effectiveness of your marketing efforts: 

1. Better Time Management
   Since there's no pressure of running late, you can properly plan, prepare, and organise your marketing campaigns. You can easily work on making them free of errors and mistakes. Scheduling can perhaps also save you from going through the last minute hassles.
2. Maximized Audience Engagement
   By setting a schedule for the launch of your marketing campaign, you can easily target the right audience at the right time. You can choose the date and time of your campaign’s launch that  aligns with the availability of your target audience. This way you can increase the chances of engagement on your content. That can lead to successful conversions.
3. Dynamic Website Personalization
   Through scheduling, you can choose to show personalized campaigns on your website as well. They can show its targeted audience relevant content. For example, you can show holiday-related offers at the start of a holiday season. This gives a boost to the engagement rate, and delivers results.
4. Consistency Across Channels
   Scheduling also lets the marketing campaigns deployed across various channels run smoothly and consistently. Such as on emails, social media, or websites. So this way issues like overlapping of campaigns can be successfully avoided. It can create a seamless experience for the users.
5. Improved ROI and Data Insights
   With the help of a well-scheduled campaign, you can easily track the performance metrics over time. They can help you in analysing the outcomes, and you can then effectively plan and optimise future campaigns.

 What Are the Challenges of Campaign Scheduling?

While there are many benefits that campaign scheduling offers, it also presents some of the following challenges:

1. Understanding Your Audience
   Lack of awareness of the behaviours and patterns of the target audience can lead to a campaign's failure. Fir example, an ill timed campaign doesn't give any fruitful results. So the campaigns must align with the availability of the target audience. Not studying the data analytics and considering its metrics, can result in poor optimization of campaign scheduling. 
2. Time Zone Coordination
   While launching global campaigns, scheduling it across different time zones to target the same audience can be a big challenge. As when it is time for it to go live in one region, it might not align with audience activity of other regions. 
3. Personalization at Scale
   Setting up automated scheduled campaigns on websites that are based on personalization can be a challenging thing to do. As different people visit the website at different times, their needs and interests may vary. To figure out a system to adjust the content based on a visitor's preference can be complicated to set up.
4. Dynamic Market Changes
   Sometimes, pre-scheduled campaigns such as promotions on a website can feel out of sync with real-world events or the preferences of the customers. So the flexibility and real-time adjustments in these scheduled campaigns is important. Updating them from time to time can help them in staying relevant.

What Are the Best Practices for Campaign Scheduling?

To make the most out of campaign scheduling, consider the following best practices:

1. Analyze Your Audience Behavior
   One of the best practices is to know the availability of your audience. Learn through data as to when they are most active on your website or other channels. For example, some may prefer browsing during evenings, while others may prefer to do so while working hours. Keep that in time while scheduling a marketing campaign.
2. Segment Your Audience
   By segmenting the audience, you can successfully schedule personalized campaigns. These campaigns can be tailored to accommodate different users based on their preferences, behaviours, and time zones. For example, during peak hours on your website, offer personalized product recommendations for those specific users.
3. Incorporate Website Personalization
   You can use dynamic personalisation tools to adjust the content displayed on your website. Show different content to different customers based on their behaviours and preferences. For example, show a good morning banner to the customers visiting in the morning. Or, someone searching for winter clothes can be offered discounts on these items. 
4. Run A/B Testing for Timed Campaigns
   Keep on testing with different scheduling times for personalized content and offers on your website. This way you can find out which timing resonates the most with your audience. Then you can schedule your future campaigns accordingly.
5. Monitor and Adjust Campaigns in Real Time
   Monitor closely the performance of a pre-scheduled campaign with its real time performance. Check if it needs any adjustments. For example, if a scheduled campaign is not generating clicks, and not giving the desired engagement results. Then tweaking its content and timing according to the present day's needs can be helpful. 

How Relevic Helps You With Campaign Scheduling

You can use the “Start On” and “Pause On” features with Relevic to control the timing of your campaigns without any hassle:

Start On: With the start on feature, you can schedule a campaign to let itself launch automatically at a specific time. For example, To target morning audiences across various time zones, you can set the schedule for the morning discount campaign to start at midnight. This way it automatically adjusts itself according to the time zone of any region.

Pause On: With the Pause on feature, you can decide the time at which you would like your campaign to pause itself automatically. For example, When a sale ends, you can pause a homepage banner promoting flash sale. This helps in avoiding the outdated content from staying live on the website.

Examples of Scheduling Campaigns for Website Personalization

The following are some of the real-world campaign scheduling examples which are used for website personalizations: 

1. Homepage Personalization
   
   • During the holiday season, retail websites schedule holiday sale banners to go live at midnight. And when the sale is about to end, it automatically starts displaying the number of days that are still left to shop.
   • Example: Nordstrom changes the banner on its homepage to display the seasonal sales.
2. Personalized Product Recommendations
   
   • Websites start showing personalized recommendations to the customers that are based on their past behaviours. For example, If a visitor searches for winter clothes on the website in the morning, they will start seeing discounts offered to them on those clothes in the evening. 
   • Example: ASOS shows the products on its homepage that are suited for a specific region. 
3. Event-Based Personalization
   
   • During the holiday season, airline websites schedule flight deals that coincide with the season. It is based on the location of the users. 
   • For Example: Expedia starts promoting various vacation packages during the peak hours of a booking season.
4. Countdown Campaigns
   
   • On e-commerce websites, a countdown timer is launched that automatically starts ticking a couple of days before the sale begins. When the sale goes live, it stops and the website starts displaying the real time product page banners.
   • Example: Amazon uses a countdown timer on Prime Day to show how much time is left to purchase a deal. It creates a sense of urgency to buy among the shoppers.
5. Time-Sensitive Offers
   
   • All the subscription box services start displaying the time-limited offers on its website. These are personalized, they are based on users' past activities. For example, a new user is shown a “Sign Up Today for 50% Off” banner for the next 24 hours since their first visit.
   • For example: HelloFresh runs a limited-time discount campaign for its new users. They automatically update on the website for these users for a limited time.