One-time vs. recurring donors

To capture all one-time: product name is One Time
To capture all recurring donors: product name is Yearly OR product name is Monthly
  • Note: in order to make sure a recurring subscription is active, use the “Charge Succeeded” custom engagement.

 

Donors who gave a certain amount

Limitation: The amount people give doesn’t get logged in a merge field. (It gets sent to Mailchimp but we can’t use it in segmentation!)

E.g. if you wanted one-time donors who gave more than $100, you could segment out people who gave, $100 One time, but you’d miss people who gave any Custom Amount >$100.

Workaround: You’ll need to sort the data yourself and tag accordingly.
  1. Export Subscription data from Pelcro for your campaign dates (Billing > Subscriptions in left nav). 
    • It will look like this (some columns are hidden).
    • Sort the data into the segments you need (example). For Custom Amounts, check the quantity column to see how much they donated.
Import into Mailchimp and tag, e.g. [CAMPAIGN NAME] One Time $100+
 

Additional segmentation

Exclude canceled subscriptions

Custom engagement “subscription canceled” has not occured: 
Note: this won’t capture contacts whose credit cards have expired, just those who have actively canceled their subscriptions. You might want to use this for a re-engagement campaign.

Capture recent donors/active subscriptions with “Charge Succeeded”

To capture monthly supporters who have (or have not) paid recently:
 
To capture yearly  supporters who have paid recently (set the date to one year before your email goes out):
This is helpful if you want to:
  • Avoid making a financial ask to recent donors (e.g. within 1 month)
  • Capture lapsed donors
You may want to save these as segments so you can select the segments when you are targeting your email.
 

Customer Journeys

Abandoned Cart

To set the starting point:
  • Go to the API & Integrations tab and select Event API
  • From the drop down, select “customer_created”
This will capture every user that creates a new Pelcro account.

Then, set a time delay — 1-3 hours after the account was created. After the time delay, we want to check to see if the user completed their donation (i.e. if a subscription was made).

Use an if/else point to check if subscription ID is blank:

  • If blank, send abandoned cart email
  • If not blank, contact exits
You can set up a series of emails for the customer. Here is an example from The Land. (According to Hubspot, series perform better than single emails!)
 

Welcome Series Financial Ask

If you’re including a financial ask in a welcome series, you’ll want to exclude current recurring subscriptions or people who recently canceled their subscription.

Limitations: While Mailchimp allows you to use the creation of a custom engagement as a starting point, it doesn’t allow you to use custom engagements elsewhere in the journey. So we can’t just check to see if a charge has succeeded/subscription has been canceled in the last month.

Workaround: Use two “if/else” journey points after a time delay to check if the contact has donated. This segmentation should capture all contacts who are not existing supporters.

  • Previous email sent out
  • Time delay
    • Note: it’s important to use the if/else journey point after the time delay, in case the contact donates in the time between the last email and the next planned email.
  • If/else: product name is blank
    • If true, that means the contact has never donated before → send financial ask email
    • If false, that means the contact has donated before → check to see if they are a one-time or recurring supporter
  • If/else: product name is One Time, custom engagement Charge Succeeded has not occurred within 1 month
    • If true, send financial ask → repeat this for any subsequent financial asks
    • If false, don’t send ask

Customer Journeys for Clients on the Essentials Plan

Limitation: Mailchimp only allows four points per journey. You’ll need to break up the Welcome Series into 2-3 automations, depending on length. 

Workaround: Use a time delay at the beginning to keep the emails on schedule. 

For example, if you have four-part welcome series that you want to send out across one month (1 email/week), you would set up three customer journeys:

Journey 1
  • Starting point: contact signs up
  • Send email #1 (immediately, no time delay)
  • Time delay: 1 week
  • Send email #2
Journey 2
  • Starting point: contact signs up
  • Time delay: 2 weeks (this ensures it goes out a week after email #2)
  • Send email #3
Journey 3
  • Starting point: contact signs up
  • Time delay: 3 weeks (this ensures it goes out a week after email #3)
  • Send email #4
You can also look at how The Ridge’s welcome series is set up (under Constellation Media in Mailchimp).
 

Pelcro Merge Fields (Definitions)

Merge field

Examples

Potential Use Case

product name

The type of donation that was made, with no indication of amounts. 

In Pelcro: corresponds to “product” in the left nav.

One time

Monthly

Yearly

Segment out recurring vs. one-time donations

plan name

The type of donation that was made *and* dollar amount (either a set amount via the Pelcro module, or a custom amount).

In Pelcro: corresponds to “pricing plans” under each product.

$25 Monthly

$100 One Time

Custom Amount

TBD?

NOTE: we can’t actually use this to segment out donations greater/less than a certain amount, as we can’t pull the Custom Amount $.

gift start date

If the subscription was gifted, this tells you when it started

 

TBD?

is gift

Whether or not this subscription was gifted.

0 (means no)

1 (means yes)

Segment out people who received a gift as it is about to expire, and ask them to renew their subscription

address state

State or province of the customer

BC

ON

QC

Segment out people in a specific geographic region to make them a more personalized offer

address city

City of the customer

Vancouver

Toronto

address country

Country of the customer

CA

US

address postal code

Postal code of the customer

 
 
These are the other merge fields that exist but don’t really have use cases:
  • customer ID: a unique ID generated when someone subscribes
  • subscription ID: a unique ID generated for each subscription?
  • address line 1: the customer’s actual address
  • address id: a unique ID generated for each address
  • address last name: the last name of the customer (same as *|LNAME|*)

Custom Engagements

Custom Engagements are where all the merge fields about invoicing and payments can be found. You can specify whether or not they occured, or when they occurred. 
 
Limitation: these are only accessible as customer journey starting points (i.e. the custom engagement happens). Set the starting point as Event API, and select the custom engagement you need. (see: Abandoned cart example above)