Acoustic Campaign is a comprehensive digital marketing tool enabling brands to design and automate multi-channel campaigns.

With Acoustic Campaign, marketers can manage their audience database, automate outbound messages, move leads through profitable sales funnels, measure performance, and make the 1:1, personal connections that customers increasingly demand.

Acoustic Campaign has robust capabilities to help businesses of all sizes achieve customer acquisition, retention, and maximization goals.

Our Comprehensive Acoustic Guide covers:

• Intro to Acoustic Database
• Adding Contacts to Acoustic
• Creating Acoustic Webforms
• Building a Query

Acoustic Campaign On-Demand Webinar

Want a head start? Check out our on-demand webinar, Acoustic Campaign Features You May Be Missing.

In this on-demand 30-minute webinar, we share our favorite (but all-too-often overlooked) email, automated programs, personalization, and reporting tips available in Acoustic Campaign and other automation tools.

Watch the webinar for tips and tools to work smarter (not harder) and get the most out of your go-to marketing automation platform.

Maximize Your Audience: Intro to the Acoustic Database

Acoustic Campaign makes acquiring new leads and nurturing customers simple. Import contact lists directly into your database or combine incentives and webforms to automatically capture new prospect information (like incentivizing prospects to sign up for your email list or download a piece of content).

Setting up your first Acoustic Database? Get a deep dive here.

While setting up your database, you must determine how Acoustic matches an individual in the database. Your goal is to capture important information and activity about each individual interacting with your brand into robust customer profiles.

Setting the unique identifier enables Acoustic to match up and add to an individual’s profile, not add duplicates to your database. For Whereoware, we use Email as the unique identifier to match individuals, to ensure we don’t end up with duplicates in our database.

Next, customize your Acoustic database to capture critical insights about your customers. Acoustic captures pre-set system fields, like Opt-In date, automatically for every contact added to the database.

Your team can define additional field types to capture extra customer data for marketing outreach. For example, you may want to capture a lead’s Industry or phone number, and you can easily add these new fields to the Acoustic database. Adding new fields or editing field names in the future is easy.

Once you’ve customized your database, you’re ready to add contacts.

Importing Contacts into Acoustic Campaign

There are multiple ways to add contacts to your Acoustic Campaign database, but a simple and straightforward option is through data imports.

For example, if your team collects a list of email addresses at an event or through a contest, you can follow Acoustic Campaign’s import process to add these leads directly to your database.

Before we jump into the Acoustic import steps, we highly recommend creating a strict marketing spec. Your team’s ability to successfully segment, query, report, and act on your data is directly tied to the cleanliness and consistency of your database.

A simple marketing spec details fields required for import, field types (picklist, text, etc.), and accepted values for each field. Once you’ve added your contact list to your marketing spec and cleaned the data of inconsistency, you’re ready to import.

Acoustic Import Steps

Under the Data tab in the left sidebar, select Import Update.

We recommend using Import Update, as it searches within your database for the unique identifier (in our case, this is always email) and if it does not find it, it adds a net new contact.

If Acoustic finds the unique identifier, it updates the record with any relevant new information, but will not add a duplicate. This can be a manual, one-off import as needed, or a scheduled recurring import.

2. Select the Contact Source (database) to update and the Type of Import from the following:

• Add new contacts: import new contacts into an existing contact source
• Update field values in the contact source: update data on existing contacts
• Add new contacts and update existing field values in the contact source: import new contacts and update data on existing contacts (this is the process we follow, described above)
• Opt out contacts: opt a list of contacts out of the contact source

3. Select Upload file from local hard drive and browse your computer for the file (the list of contacts captured in your marketing spec).

4. Select Next to get to the next screen.

5. Define the data format for the import. If your spreadsheet includes a top row with field names, checkmark the box that says “First Row Contains Field Names.” You can also determine the date formatting for any date fields in your file.

6. Dictate how you want Acoustic to update each record by mapping the fields in your CSV file to the fields in your database. If the Field Name matches the database exactly, the Field Name is filled in and visible in the right column. If not, select the field you want to map.

To Map the Fields:

For example: if your CSV file says Work Phone, but you want that information captured in the Phone field in your database, you map it here.

7. Define the field for Acoustic to sync on (meaning the unique identifier used to match a record to one in your database). “Email” is selected by default in our database, but we could instead choose another field.

8. Finally, submit your import. Congrats! You’ve successfully imported a list and updated your database.

Alternatively, Acoustic Campaign can be scheduled to automatically grab files from a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. By setting up this recurring import, the leads are imported into your database and ready to be targeted via queries.

Capture More Data: Creating a Webform

A smart digital strategy creates plentiful opportunities to capture new leads through landing pages and webforms.

The Acoustic Campaign Landing Page tab makes it easy to build custom landing pages and webforms (think: preference centers or gated content), stylized to match your brand, that can be embedded on your website, social media, or other places.

Targeted landing pages are used whenever you want your audience to take a specific action. This can be a webform as part of your email marketing campaign, a form to capture new audiences in pay-per-click advertising, and many more uses.

Webform fields are mapped directly to your database, so you can capture data over time to build a robust profile of every customer. Then, you can create audience lists or queries based on this data to deliver hyper relevant outbound marketing. (More on queries later.)

On the form, you can ask for preferences like how often they would like to receive emails, what topics they’d like to hear about, and what products or services interest them. Since 73% of leads are not ready to buy when they first give you their contact details, this is a great opportunity to provide information about your company, the benefits of signing up and shopping, and what to expect as a subscriber.

That way in the future, you can segment your audiences and send tailored, relevant content.

Each field on a webform has customizable properties, including the label, default value, and display size. The confirmation button is also customizable to match your call to action. Utilize hidden fields to keep track of important data, like where your leads are coming from or the content piece they downloaded.

When a lead fills out one of these forms, the data is immediately fed into your Acoustic Campaign database and available for you to start marketing.

A great way to elevate the “hottest” and most interested leads to the attention of your Sales or Marketing team is by setting up a Lead Alert to send a notification when anyone submits the form. You can easily set up lead alerts in Acoustic Campaign to ensure a proactive sales response to hot leads.

Audience Segmentation: How to Query Your Acoustic Campaign Database

Acoustic Campaign’s robust capabilities enable us to capture data to better understand our audience. More important, it gives us tools to act on that data by targeting the right individuals with the right content in the right channel.

Queries are used to create a subset of a database, based on specified demographic or behavioral data. A query is a set of criteria that creates a list to view or export, enabling you to dig deep into your audience and return select individuals based on recent goals or actions.

Follow these steps to build a query in Acoustic Campaign:

Select Data, then Queries

2. Select Create Query

3. Click Browse to choose the database you’d like to query

4. Name your query following a standardized naming convention. We suggest using date (year-month) and usage. For example: 21-Sept-NewsletterSend.

5. Choose where to save the query

• Shared – Anyone with access to your organization can view/edit the query
• Private – Only you can view/edit the query

6. Choose the Query type

• Query (our preference) – Includes the classic query capabilities, but is easier to use, and lets you add more behavior elements.
• Classic Query – Has less functionality and options than the Query option; has limited behavior criteria; cannot send to multiple queries.

7. Add criteria based on your query goal. Acoustic breaks criteria into four buckets: Profile, Behavior, CRM Opportunities, and Relational table.

‍Profile - here, you can select fields from your contact profile.

• Data Fields – Create a query based on a specific field in your database
• Contact List – Query contacts already in a contact list, or a targeted subgroup
• Query – Query contacts already in a query (you might want to filter a query further by adding additional and/or rules)

Behavior – here, you’re querying based on prospect activity

• Email Behavior – has or has not been: sent/clicked/opened a specific email
• Program Behavior – has or has not been in a specific automated program within a specific number of days
• Web Form Behavior – has or has not submitted a specific webform within a specific number of days
• Web Site Behavior – has or has not viewed a specific webpage, visited website, downloaded a file, or triggered a custom tracking event within a specific number of days

Other Options:

• CRM Opportunities – Used to see if an account is/is not associated with any Opportunity within a CRM system. This is only applicable if you have Acoustic connected to your CRM.
• Relational Table – Used to see specific values within a relational table. Again, this is only applicable if you use relational tables.

8. Add each criteria and select “Done” to add it to your query.

Add parenthesis to narrow the specifics of your rules, and be very careful of your “and” “or” selections.

9. Once you’ve added all the criteria, choose an option to execute your query from the bottom right:

• Save – Save the query.
• Save & Calculate – Save and run the query to see how many people are in the query, and then export that query for further analysis.
• Save & Close – Save and close out the query builder, without calculating the query.
• Cancel – Exit and do not save.

In this example, we select Save & Calculate to submit the query.

10. Confirm your query looks correct and click “Submit."

11. You are sent to a confirmation page where you can click the Data Job ID to view the status of the query.

Now, you are redirected to the Data Job Detail page. You may have to refresh the browser a few times until the query is finished calculating.

12. Your query is ready! To view query results, click the hyperlinked Query Name to view, edit, and export your query.

Simplifying Audience Management with Acoustic

Today’s guide covers how to use Acoustic Campaign to manage your audience in a comprehensive database, capture additional data using Acoustic webforms, and act on that data by using queries for audience segmentation. Use Acoustic Campaign to capture relevant customer data and engagement metrics to create targeted campaigns.

Acoustic Campaign is a customizable tool that allows you to acquire and nurture leads in a way that works for your marketing and sales teams.

Stay tuned for our second Acoustic Campaign Guide: Customer Nurture, where we’ll share how to engage your contacts using email, automated programs, landing pages, scoring, and round it all out with reporting.

With any marketing effort, it’s important to constantly evaluate what’s working and what is not. Acoustic Campaign helps you optimize your marketing to fit your company’s goals and objectives. If you need help getting started or maximizing the tool, contact our team of marketing automation and Acoustic Campaign experts.