In this tutorial I’ll discuss 4 time-based campaigns and how to achieve them. The three different scenarios will teach you how to start campaigns before something happens for a user or after something happens (or even doesn’t happen). These are the scenarios:

1. We miss you, come back buy more campaign
   In this campaign we will start communication with a contacts once he hasn’t done something. For example he hasn’t visited or purchased something for a while.
2. Your subscription / offer / access expires campaign
   This scenario will show you how remind people for an event in the future. The event is specific to the person, and it’s not the same time for everyone.
3. Party invitation campaign
   In this campaign you work with people who are invited to an event/webinar etc, and the event date is the same for everyone. The challenge is, that people can join into the campaign continously.
4. The Birthday campaign
   This campaign relies on anniversary. Unfortunatly it’s tricky to set up in Mautic, and breaks from time to time, but I created the fool proof always working version.

Let’s start!

But first a a Little Theory…

In order to deal with time in Mautic, you’ll need to learn to think in 4 dimensions.

You can set relative dates in Mautic, which is relative to the CONTACT. Each contact. Don’t forget, the campaigns will run for each contact separatly, so you need to tie the event to their timeline. The different events might happen at different times, as the contacts have different values we use for managing their endividual journey.

In Mautic relative days are set with a minus or plus when you compare to NOW.

Last visit one week ago is: Date last Active = -7 days

Event date in 14 days in the future is: Event date = +14 days

In Mautic campaing doesn’t run when something happens to the contact, but while something is true about the contact.

Uncredited Mautic expert

We have to start our campaign by placing the contact in a segment. You can place them 2 days before their subscription expires or 5 days after an event happened.

I’m sure you are confised enough, so let’s see concrete examples.

60 days before subscription expires:

If we put this on a timeline, then we are grabbing the following timeframe:

In other words the members of this campaign will be those contacts, who’s expiry date is equal or less then 60 days in the future. The dotted line represents the fact, that they will stay in the campaign AFTER expiry as well. What is less then +60 ? +30 for example. This solution helps us to keep the person in the segment during the time he is closing to “expiry date = today”.

Let’s see another example:

Something happened 30 days in the past, and you’d like to send a reminder. Or ask someone to come back, be active again.

The segment would look like this in case of 30 days no visits on the website:

Just think about it: you want people in the segment who haven’t purchased anything for 30 days. So anyone who’s relative last purchase date is LOWER then NOW should be in the segment. What is lower then -30? -31, -32, -60. In other words everything, that is lower then -30 is more in the past.

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