The Rockbot Marketing suite is built on a defined lifecycle with four phases.
- Draft: Only visible to you. Focus is getting all the assets in place and ready to go.
- Pre-flight: Visible to all users and editable by anyone with permissions. All changes are logged for accountability purposes. The campaign can be scheduled to run in the future or set to in-flight at any time.
- In-flight: The campaign is live for subscribed Zones and Locations.
- Retrospective: Campaign Is over and no longer active. Once moved to Retrospective, Campaigns are not available for scheduling.
Campaigns can be run from either the Group or Zone versions of the Marketing dashboard. To learn more about the difference between the two and which you should be using, read the Getting Started guide.
Learn more about the Campaign Lifecycle
When you first create a campaign it begins as a Draft. No one else can see it or edit it. You can add assets to the campaign, configure them, set their duration, and preview the campaign. You can also set up a schedule that will take effect once the asset is Published.
- A Draft campaign will never run, even if its start date arrives, until it is Published.
- A campaign that is Published with a start date in the future will go to the Pre-flight stage until the start date arrives.
- A campaign that is Published without a start date or with the current date as the start will go straight to In-flight.
In the Pre-Flight stage a campaign is visible to everyone with permissions and can be edited, but is not actually running yet. Once the scheduled start date arrives, the campaign will automatically move to in-flight.
- In the Pre-flight stage, a campaign is visible and can be edited by other users with appropriate access.
- Any user with appropriate permissions can add or edit the start date for a Pre-flight campaign.
Once the scheduled start date has arrived, a campaign moves to In-flight. An in-flight campaign will display during the scheduled times.
- If you Schedule and Publish a campaign from the single-Zone version of the marketing suite, your zone will be automatically subscribed to the Campaign
- If you Schedule and Publish a campaign from the Group version of the marketing suite, you will have the option to either subscribe the entire Group or to only subscribe specific zones.
- A campaign that is published but has no subscribed zones will run but not display anywhere.
At the scheduled end date, your Campaign will automatically move into a Retrospective phase.
- You can end your Campaign and move it to Retrospective at any time.
- The Retrospective phase includes summary reporting for the campaign as a whole.
- In the retrospective phase the Campaign will not play anywhere and is no longer available to schedule.
- If you want to revive a Campaign from the Retrospective phase, you can Duplicate it to create a new Campaign.
The Campaign Life cycle in practice
You can see all your current campaigns and what lifecycle phase they are in by viewing the Campaign Browser at dashboard.rockbot.com..
The single-zone version of the Campaign browser shows the same information, but with the addition of a toggle to Enable (Subscribe to) or disable (Unsubscribe from) the in-flight Campaigns for this zone.