So, you have set up your first customer journey and are now looking at a good next step. This is where smart campaigns come in. First, let's establish what the difference is between a customer journey and a campaign.
Campaigns overrule customer journeys of your choice. This means that a visitor that matches your campaign's audience will see the campaign content before the customer journey content. If a popup is being shown by the campaign, a popup in your customer journey will not be shown. This is because only one popup is allowed per page view.
Campaigns are more narrow than customer journeys. You will generally focus them on a specific goal with more specified content.
Campaigns are not buying phase dependent. This means that you can target everyone who meets your audience targeting.
Campaigns can be set to 100%. When this happens, they will be excluded from the A/B test and will thus not receive a show or hide label. This means that visitors who see this campaign as the first thing on your website, will not be assigned a label. It also means that people who have previously been given a hide/control label will still see the content. This allows you to use campaigns to push content to everyone who matches its audience targeting. This makes it great for marketing campaigns (hence the name).
Now that we have established the difference, let's take a look at the types of content you will generally want to display in a smart campaign.
Embedded content. When people visit a page (product, homepage, shopping cart etc.) you can use embedded content to recommend products to visitors. You also have the option to use embedded content to display persuasive statistics. Want to know how to set up embedded content? Take a look at this article.
Popups. You will often want to display information to visitors no matter the buying phase they are in. These popups can display the remaining opening hours of your webshop, social media information, payment information or any other information that you want your visitor to be aware of. Take a look at this article for an example of a popup.
As you can see, the reason you use campaigns is to show content that is buying phase independent. You do not want to create touchpoints in a customer journey and have visitors miss out on it because they do not match the buying phase it was created in. Meanwhile you do not want to use campaigns if the buying phase is important to the relevance of the content.