Understanding Campaigns
A campaign is all-encompassing of everything we've discussed to this point. It wraps together your offers which include your product and billing models, your payment gateways, along with other providers, shipping profiles, and a considerable amount more.
For a full comprehensive breakdown of creating campaigns, we've created a quick video for you below. Beneath the video is a glossary of everything discussed.
Navigating to Campaigns
To begin, let's navigate over to Products > Campaigns.
Creating Your Campaign
While on the Campaign UI, navigate to Actions > Add Campaign.
Campaign Information
The first order of business is to name our campaign and provide a description.
Name: This is internal and not customer-facing. However, the name should be unique and easily identifiable. This way, you can easily use our various Reporting & Analytic tools.
Description: Not as relevant and is not required. It's internal and could include a description of what is sold in the campaign or perhaps a link to the landing page where traffic is coming from.
Within the same UI widget, we have 2 additional options.
Default Channel:
Different campaigns can have different channels that are used to segment in our Reporting & Analytics. For example, you could have a campaign used for affiliate or email marketing. Segmenting the two enables you to keep track of conversion rates by channel, AOV per channel, and more.Expense Assumption Profile:
At this point, we've yet to discuss Expense Assumptions. Though they can be found under Products > Expenses. Creating expense assumption profiles enables you to have a more granulated view of your P&L in sticky.io. Keeping track of packaging costs, cost of customer service, and more.
Note: Regarding Default Channel: It's recommended to disregard this feature. As you pass orders to sticky.io via API you can provide a myriad of attributes to track that customer and use in Reporting. e.g. Affiliate Source, UTM Source, and more.
Offer Configuration
As we explored earlier in the guide, an offer is a marriage of your product and billing models. You can add as many offers to a campaign as you'd like. Search for the Offer Name or Offer ID.
Choosing Payment Methods
sticky.io supports a very large number of payment methods. Everything from your industry-standard American Express, Visa, Mastercard & Discover to international niche methods and cryptocurrency methods.
Select one or multiple options that you plan to support.
Windows
To multi-select, hold the CTRL key + Left click.MacOS
To multi-select, hold the COMMAND key + Left click.
Gateway Configuration
There are two ways to integrate Payment Gateways into your Campaign.
Choose the individual payment gateway via the dropdown menu. As seen below.
Or, enable Payment Routing and specify the Payment Routing Profile. Configurations > Payment Routing > Payment Routing Configuration.
Individual Payment Gateway Example
Payment Routing Example
Note: Payment Routing enables merchants to combine payment gateways. Distributing risk, increasing your overall processing cap, and creating redundancy. This is a feature we'll discuss later in the guide.
In addition, we will find you more processing if you need it. Liaise with your Account Manager to get the ball rolling.
Regions
Specify what countries you support for both physical or digital goods and services. This uses the customer's billing information to determine whether or not they qualify for the purchase. Not the shipping information.
Shipping
Next, we'll specify the shipping profiles that you're offering to customers.
We're far from finished, however, this is the baseline of what's required to simply create a campaign. Let's segue into the configurations and options.
Creating Campaigns - Configurations
Configurations while aren't a requirement, provide a considerable amount more flexibility to your campaigns and a deeper integration with sticky.io.
Payment Routing
This is one of the most used tools and something we'll visit later in the Onboarding Guide. To summarize, Payment Routing enables merchants to combine processing. Distributing risk, increasing overall processing cap, and providing layers of redundancy.
Enabling this will create a new widget on the left-hand side of the Campaign UI to specify the Payment Routing profile.
Include Tax
This is only if you're using sales tax profiles created manually in sticky.io. Inversely if you're using tax providers like TaxJar or Avalara this is considered a Third Party Provider and something we'll visit shortly.
Post Back URL
Tech jargon for webhooks. Get, Put, or Post all manner of data to and from sticky.io when certain actions happen. e.g. Fire a webhook when a new customer signs up.
By far one of the most used tools and something we'll visit later in the Onboarding Guide.
Include Returns
You can create return profiles to handle how refunds are handled, RMA windows, and more under Products > Returns. If you have a returns process, enable this checkbox and specify the Return Profiles.
Coupons
You can create Coupon profiles under Products > Coupons. If you have coupon profiles, enable this checkbox. A new UI widget will appear and you can choose one or all profiles.
That's it for Configurations. We're not out of the water yet. Let's segue into Options and wrap up creating campaigns.
Creating Campaigns - Options
Similarly to Configurations, Options are not a requirement. Though it allows for considerably deeper integration with sticky.io.
Third Party Providers
Enabling this will create a new UI widget at the bottom of the page. Allowing you to integrate any of your providers. From Fulfillment to Email Marketing and Fraud Mitigation Tools.
Black Pre-Paid Cards
Enabling this will block all transactions using a pre-paid credit card.
Note: Typically merchants use this option when they run risk-free trials. Helps to mitigate the bad actors who may attempt to 'game the system' by using a card with no balance.
BIN Blocking
BIN or bank identification number. BIN is the first four to eight digits printed on a payment card. To make use of this feature, you'll need to first create the BIN profiles in your sticky.io account.
BIN Profiles can be created under Payments > BIN Management.
Allow Custom Pricing
As the name implies, enabling this feature will allow you to override the price of products prior to placing the order.
Note: This is only applicable to placing orders via the UI. API calls can override the price of products irrespective of if this is enabled or not.
Daily Subscription Limit
If enabled, a new UI element will appear at the top under Campaign Information. With this new field, you can input a monetary value that once met will place any future subscription into a 'Pending' status until the following day.
Used by merchants with payment gateways that have a low processing cap.
Note: Regarding Daily Subscription Limit: Similarly, I recommend that you not use this feature. If you're concerned about hitting your processing limits with your gateways, we will find you more processing. Liaise with your Account Manager to get the ball rolling.
Collections
If enabled on both the product and campaign, when a transaction declines, the customer's information is added to a .csv file generated under Insights > Collections.
This is useful for merchants who want to take this decline data and send it outside of the platform for remarketing to get the customer to come back and provide a valid form of payment.
Note: While this is a neat feature, it's highly encouraged to use our automated tools such as Smart Dunning, Account Updater, or Cascading. This ends up being a more seamless experience for the customer and less overhead with having employees try to engage with these declined orders or tools to remarket.