From all of us here at Privy we want to start off by thanking you for choosing our service. Our support guides are a little bit different than normal and we pride ourselves in not only making a great product for you, but to also make your life easier by giving you step-by-step guides so that you can accomplish everything that you need to. This guide isn’t just the basics. Its EVERYTHING. After this you will have your black belt in all things Privy.
Log into your Privy account. You can then click the New campaign button to the far right:
Provide a title for your campaign. This is strictly internal and this will not be visible to your customers.
Once you’ve titled your campaign you will have four distinct areas to work with within that campaign. Each area allows you to control different aspects of how your campaign will look and behave on your site. The first option that you will work with is the Form option.
Form Fields
Form fields allow you to choose which information your customer will enter when they engage with your campaign. Email address tends to be the most common. However, there are other pieces of information that you can collect if you so choose. It is also important to know that some form fields are only available on paid for plans. Please have a look at the images below to see what some of the primary differences are between free and paid accounts.
Paid Account:
Free Account:
Whichever plan you’re on, be sure to pick options that work best for your business strategy. Looking to send a follow up email on someone’s birthday? Grab that information while they’re spending time on your site. There’s lots of ways to use information to add a special touch to your communications with customers.
Key Question: Can I have a campaign that doesn’t collect any information but displays information on screen to my customers?
Answer: YES! It is important to keep in mind that whichever form fields you select will be displayed on your campaign. However, if you disable the form altogether, you can still display information to your customers. Here’s how: In the Form field options simply uncheck the area that says “Form enabled”. This will give you a blank campaign to display any information that you need to. Please click on the image below for additional helpful information!
Validations:
Validations are important. Let’s say you’re giving away free samples at a grocery store. Do you want the same person double or even triple dipping into your stash? Probably not. Validations are the way that you can control whether or not someone is eligible to participate in your campaign.
Limit one signup per email address- This limits your site visitor to one email address per entry per campaign.
First-time signups only- first time: This allows you to exclude anyone that already exists within your Privy contacts and NOT in any email accounts that you’ve linked to our service.
Supply limit: This allows you to end a campaign after a certain number of signups. Let’s say you’re giving out free hats and you only have three hundred of them. In that scenario you don’t want to allow four hundred people to signup as that means that one hundred of your visitors will be left without the goods.
Email Sync:
This one is the Kanye of all the form options. It’s kind of a big deal. Here’s the skinny: We do allow you to manage your contacts inside of your Privy dashboard. Most of the time, our customers prefer to magically beam their contacts over to their Email Service Provider (ESP) of choice. MailChimp? Oh yeah. Constant Contact? For sure. We integrate with just about any email service that you can think of.
Important: You cannot have more than one of the same ESP linked to your account. No two MailChimps, etc. Equally important is the fact that beaming your contacts over to these accounts is a three-step process.
Click on Settings:
Select Linked Accounts and click on the ESP of your choosing.
When prompted enter your credentials for that respective account. Please note that because all ESP’s work a little differently you may occasionally be prompted for different information. That’s totally normal and depends on the service you’ve used. In the example above you can see that a Constant Contact account has been linked.
Navigate back to the Form fields and select “Click to create”. You will then see:
Select the account and then select the list of your choosing:
Finally, click on create Sync. You will then see:
After navigating through all of these options your form is now set. The next step is moving onto the design!
Design:
Once you’ve clicked on design you will see:
Click to create a new display for your campaign and you will be greeted with the following screen:
In total there are five types of designs that can be displayed on your site in addition to another feature called landing pages which we will provide more details on. Click on the image above to view a screencast of how these options will behave when they’re live on your site. When you’re happy with your template, select one and it will allow you to customize what the campaign will look and feel like on your site.
The designs are:
- Popups
- Flyouts
- Banners
- Bars
- Embedded forms
We’ll use a popup as our demo campaign. Once that option has been selected your screen will look like this:
Key Question: Can I remove the Privy logo and the privacy link?
Answer: If you choose to upgrade from a free to a paid account the Privy logo is removed. The privacy link can be removed by a member of our support team. Feel free to jump into chat with us and we will be happy to help.
What you will notice to the far left of the screen are your “Elements” these are the things that dress up your campaign. Earlier on we designed a form which stores your customer information. Now we’re giving it that eye-candy makeover that makes it look and act like an integral part of your site.
Key Question: How do I switch between different campaign styles?
Answer: Once you’ve selected a campaign style there is not a way to automatically switch to a new campaign style. You must first delete the design that you’ve chosen by clicking on the trash bin icon and replace it with a new campaign type. IMPORTANT: This does not delete your campaign. It changes how your campaign will display on your website.
Key Point: Depending on your website, once you’ve installed the Privy code that we provide, changes to campaigns will be detected live on site. A common reason why you may not see a change in your campaign display when it is live is that your browser displays a cached version of your Privy campaign. To see the latest version, either view your page in a new browser or take advantage of your browser’s private browsing mode.
Key Question: Can I remove the tab that says Sign up! In the corner?
(More about tabs later).
Answer: Absolutely. More information on that is provided here. If you don’t want to remove it. You can also customize it to display how you want it to.
As you can see in the above image, all of the items or “Elements” from the left side of the screen correspond with what your customer will see when this campaign is live on your site. Don’t like something? Change it! Let’s click on:
When you select this option. The left side of the menu will change. This allows you to focus solely on that particular item on your campaign.
- Change Font
- Change Font Size
- Italicize Font
- Link Text
- Add a bulleted list.
- Add a horizontal line
- Alignment Options
- Change the spacing between letters
- Change the Font Color
Key Question: Can I use my own fonts?
Answer: For the time being only the fonts available in our editor are supported in most of our plans. Our higher level plans also include support for custom fonts. We also support multi-lingual capability. However, what we do not yet support out-of-the-box is the ability for right to left script.
Once you’ve created your overall design, its time to decide how your campaign should behave on your site:
There are four main criteria to consider in this particular portion all of which are self-explanatory. However, there are a few things to keep in mind:
Key Question: I notice my Exit Intent isn’t popping when I test on my site. What’s going on?
Answer: You can have one or more or popup triggers enabled at the same time. However, your customer will see the campaign based off of whichever trigger happens to come first. As an example, if your campaign is set on a timer for thirty seconds your customer will see the campaign after thirty seconds have elapsed while they’re on your site. At that point, the exit intent will not display because Privy understands that your customer has already seen the campaign and will not display it more than once as a default setting. This setting can be overridden by selecting the area labeled: “Trigger Automatically At Most” and changing it to another display setting.
Pro Tip: We encourage everyone to think of crafting the best user experience for their customers. Excessively displaying a popup can definitely have the opposite effect of what you’re looking to do. That being said, less is sometimes more. Also, there’s no harm in experimenting with your campaign to determine what will work best for you and your business.
Audience Targeting:
Please note that this is a feature that is only available on our paid plans.
Campaigns aren’t always a one-size fits all solution. Sometimes you want your campaign to do “this but not that” based off of criteria that you have in mind. What if you only wanted to display your campaign to customers that came from a specific URL? Yep. Privy lets you do that. And we call that a condition. A condition is basically a rule that tells Privy how to treat your audience based off of X,Y, or Z circumstances. Below is a screenshot of the main Audience Targeting controls. You’ll notice that there are groups and then there are conditions.
Just to be clear: You can have a bunch of conditions per group and a bunch of groups of conditions.
Pro Tip: Keep things as streamlined as possible. If you don’t need too many conditions or groups its best to avoid that rabbit hole.
What’s the difference?
Let’s say you have three conditions A, B, and C. You can tell Privy to display your campaign only if all three are true based off of your customer’s behavior. Alternatively, you can tell Privy to launch the campaign if only one of those conditions is met.
Tricky? It could be depending on what you’re looking to do. Take a look at the image below and you’ll see the different criteria that you can select for your campaign.
It’s always a good idea to think of the above categories as eligibility rules. They determine if the visitor on your site is eligible to see your campaign. That’s the first step in the magic formula.
We’re going to use the Current URL criteria as our example for setting up Audience Targeting.
What does that mean in plain English?
We’ve just told Privy: If any of the following is true, fire up the campaign. If the URL the customer is on contains example.com/page1 they’re going to see the campaign. However if that is not the case, they will not see it.
The other thing that is important to know about these controls is that they’re going to change depending on what qualifier you’re looking to use.
Generally speaking, for all rules that Relate to URLS you’re going to see this as the second series of choices:
Here are other examples of what you will see under these options:
Traffic Type:
Cart Value:
Country:
Session Count:
Page Views:
Device Targeting:
Campaign Seen:
Campaign Signed Up:
Tabs:
We’ve mentioned tabs before. It is definitely worth revisiting them because we’ve just granted them their own section under the design tab.
When you design a tab there are six items that you can configure.
In the image below we’ve included images of the menus that you will have access to when configuring your tabs.
There’s an important distinction to be drawn here: The numbers on the left side of the screen indicate the options that exist on this menu. The numbers on the right side of the image correspond to the menus that will appear for each option that you can configure. Also, the menus are not in the positions as they will appear in your account. They are displayed this way to give you an idea of what you will ultimately see when you select these options.
Important: There are exactly two tab settings in this portion of your account. One controls the tab experience on desktop and the other controls the tab experience on mobile. Respectively, these look like:
Not a fan of having a tab at all? You can simply turn this off altogether.
Please keep in mind that tabs are not a requirement for your campaigns. However, depending on the look and feel of your site you may decide to include one and give your site visitors the option of manually opening your campaign. Why do that?
Here’s a for instance. Let’s say that someone visits your site. They see the popup and close it. Then they do a little bit of browsing and want to take you up on the offer thats displayed on the popup. How can they do that? They can click on the tab to redisplay it.
After you’ve configured your tab you can then decide how your campaign will behave once your site visitor has entered their information.
You can choose to display the thank you page, redirect your customer to another page. Or do nothing. Simple right? The thank you page functions similarly to your original popup in that you can customize the look and feel. Take a look below:
Thank You Page:
Important: We don’t yet support linking Social Media Icons to your respective social media accounts. The ones that do exist can’t yet be customized and they’re intended for your customer to be able to share your campaign to their social media profiles.
All of this information covers the design aspect of your campaign. The next key area to focus on is going to be the “Behavior Section” which is broken out into three main areas as indicated below.
If you’re looking to offer coupons to your customers Privy definitely offers ways for you to do that :
Master Code: This option is best for when you want everyone to share the same code.
Important: The code at the bottom of this card can be placed in two possible places. The first one is the Thank You page and the second is going to be in any follow up emails that are going to be sent through Privy. The code will then pull whatever wording you’ve entered in the circled area on the first section of this screen. Also, the coupon code will not display while previewing any information from your campaign. Everything must be live in order for that functionality to work.
After managing your coupons you can then schedule your campaign.
Lastly, depending on whether you’re on a paid or free account you can tell Privy to send you real time notifications. If you do have this enabled anytime someone signs up for your campaign you will be notified via email. Depending on the volume that you anticipate. This may or may not be something that you want to have on your account.
Emails
Emails are the last consideration in your campaign design process. Whether you decide to use an external email service or emails through Privy it’s almost always a good idea to follow up with your customers. That being said, we aren’t going to cover any features that are specific to other email service providers. If you have questions about setting anything in up in MailChimp, for example, we have to defer you to their support. We appreciate your understanding on this point.
Important: On all free plans Privy does allow you one free Autoresponder email per campaign. That means that anyone that signs up for your campaign will be able to receive a follow up email that you can design and publish
That being said, we also do offer more robust email sequences which you can use to send out additional email campaigns on any schedule you choose for a $5.00 per month charge.
When you have both enabled your account will look like this:
If you click on Autoresponder you will see the options below:
Before the email can be sent you must first publish it. From that point you can make any other design considerations that you need by using the editor. When you’re done you can then save your changes.
Important: Preview emails will not display any coupon code information. Also, If you activate an Autoresponder AFTER someone has already signed up for a campaign they will not receive the follow up email.
If you do have our email sequences feature this is the display that you will initially have when designing your first email sequence.
Below you will see all of the options that are available to you.
The notable exceptions in this case are the Sending Conditions which all you to determine when an email is sent after someone signs up. You can decide to send the email based on signups OR on a fixed date. In that way you have some flexibility.
You will also notice that you have the ability of adding multiple emails to the series. That being said, almost all of your bases are covered with the Privy email features.
Of course, if you’re looking for something more robust. We do still let you sync with your email provider of choice.
This covers the entire campaign creation process within your Privy account. If you do have any questions concerns or feature requests absolutely reach out to our customer support team
Cheers from the Privy Team !