Why you should use ongoing campaigns rather than one-time ones

Ongoing campaigns are a great way to make your communications more efficient and effective.

But before we get into how and why that's the case, let's start with the key differences between the two:

• One-time campaign – A campaign that launches once and then stops, like a Black Friday sales campaign or a product issue you need to tell your users about.
• Ongoing campaign – A campaign that addresses users as they reach preset criteria, like an upsell campaign for lightbulb users with one month's usage.

Deliver campaigns that match each user's journey

The major problem with one-time campaigns is that you fall into the trap of a one-size-fits-all approach. With ongoing campaigns, the opposite is true.

You can set up campaigns for a range of specific criteria, for example:

• An educational sequence for users who haven't used one of your key features
• An upsell campaign for users who have used your product daily for one month
• A rating campaign for users with feature adoption over 80%

Once your campaigns and audience segments are set up, your users will receive your sequences as soon as they meet the criteria.

So instead of seeing a single spike during the holidays, you can enjoy a continuous flow of ratings, sales, feature adoptions, and everything in between.

Optimize your campaigns to maximize performance

Your first campaigns are all about experimentation. But once you find the right user set and delight moment and go through a few rounds of optimizations, you're there.

This frees your team up to target other opportunities, onboarding issues, and business objectives with new campaigns. And as long as you revisit your existing campaigns occasionally to keep them up to date, they'll keep delivering results.

Use one-time communications to complement ongoing campaigns

Here are three occasions when one-time campaigns can work wonders:

1. Holidays and sales – Users expect discount campaigns around the holidays and other events, but take advantage of your data to think outside the box.
2. Reaching older users – Depending on your criteria, some ongoing campaigns will never reach your older users. So if you have a new feature that you want to shout about, you may need to set up a one-off campaign just for them.
3. Testing for ongoing campaigns – One-off campaigns can be a great way to test new ideas with a broad audience. You can then segment the results to see which users acted the most, or to find the optimal conversion moment for your next ongoing campaign.

Before creating your first ongoing sequence, be sure to check out our best practices for audiences.