Automated communications are a popular form of ‘set and forget’ marketing which can be configured in TalkBox. Automated communications allow you to send communications to contacts without continually having to manually active each campaign. There are a handful of different types of automated communications available in TalkBox. These are:
- Date triggered
- Recurring
- API triggered
Date triggered
Date triggered communications are the most commonly used type of automated communication. They are configured to send to contacts based on a date field and a defined offset period. This means each contact will individually receive the communication on the day they meet the date offset parameters.
For example below the field ‘signup date’ is used and the offset period is set to 1 day after. In this case contacts will receive the date triggered communication one day after their signup date.
Two subsets of date triggered communications exist, birthday and anniversary communications.
Birthday
Birthday communications are a specific type of date triggered communication where the date field used is predefined as a contact’s date of birth. Birthday communications have some extra filtering options to allow a communication to be sent for all birthdays or for specific birthdays such a 21st, 30th or 50th.
Additionally, birthday communications can be configured to use the standard date field and offset period shown above or they can be configured to send as a monthly batch. If using monthly batch birthday communications TalkBox will send the communication to all contacts within a given birth month at the same predetermined time.
Anniversary
Anniversary communications are also a type of date triggered communication. In this case the predefined field is anniversary. Like birthday communications, anniversary communications differ from standard date triggered communication because they can be set to send to all anniversaries or for specific milestone anniversaries such as 1st, 5th or 10th.
Recurring
Recurring communications differ from date triggered communications because they are not triggered based on an individual contact’s date field. Recurring communications are configured to resend at a pre-set interval. These intervals are:
- Days
- Weeks
- Months
- Years
Recurring communications will be sent to any contact who is filtered to receive the communication.
API triggered
API triggered communications are sent based on an external event. Typically this would be another system you use which tells TalkBox to send the communication to a specific contact via the API. These communications can be sent to any contact at any time based on these external trigger events.
See the API Triggered Communications article for details