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Run your first campaign

With your platform connected and at least one snippet created, you are ready to run your first campaign.

Setting up the campaign

Navigate to Campaigns > New Campaign. You will configure:

  1. Channel: Select the channel for this campaign (email, push, SMS, or in-app). Each campaign tests one channel.

  2. Slots: Assign snippets to named positions in your template (for example, subject line, hero, CTA). Each slot is analysed independently.

  3. Primary metric: Choose the single measure you are optimising for. Your options are:

    • Open rate: what percentage of recipients opened the email
    • Click rate: what percentage of recipients clicked a link
    • Conversion rate: what percentage of recipients took the desired action (purchase, sign-up, etc.)
    • Tap rate (push): what percentage of recipients tapped the notification
    • Revenue per exposure: average revenue generated per recipient

    The primary metric cannot be changed after sending. This is a deliberate safeguard called pre-registration: it prevents cherry-picking whichever metric happens to look best after the fact.

  4. Traffic allocation: Choose how recipients are split across variants:

    • Equal split (recommended for your first campaign): each variant gets the same number of recipients.
    • Manual percentages: drag sliders to set a custom split.
    • Thompson Sampling (Growth and Scale plans): liftstack uses historical performance data to send more traffic to better-performing variants automatically while still testing alternatives.

  5. Audience: Select the segment or list from your CRM platform.

  6. Campaign group (optional): If you are running related campaigns across channels (for example, an email and a push campaign for the same product launch), you can add them to a campaign group for cross-channel coordination and reporting.

What happens when you click Prepare Campaign

When you click Prepare Campaign, liftstack runs the following steps in sequence:

  1. Syncs your audience: pulls recipient profiles from your selected segment or list.
  2. Runs assignment: randomly assigns each recipient a variant for each slot.
  3. Writes lf_assignments to profiles: sets a custom property on each recipient’s CRM profile so your template knows which content to show.
  4. Pushes the conditional template: creates or updates a template on your platform with conditional logic that renders the right variant per recipient.

Assignment happens before anyone sees anything. This is what makes it a proper randomised experiment, because liftstack knows who was shown what before the results come in. There is no additional latency at send time; when you hit send in your platform, the email renders using the pre-written profile property.

For large audiences (100,000+), the profile writeback step is the longest part and can take 15 to 30 minutes. Plan accordingly, but once all steps show complete, you can send immediately.