Adding new campaign members to a flow in progress

Question

How do you add new members into an email campaign flow to join existing members who are already mid-flow?

Here's the problem I've run into:

I have an email campaign with 3 emails in the flow separated by "Wait Until this date" steps.

Wait Until Date 1

Send Email #1

Wait Until Date 2

Send Email #2

Wait Until Date 3

Send Email #3

On Date 1, I send Email #1 out to 40 campaign members.

The next day, I have 10 new campaign members that I'd like to include when sending out Email #2 on Date 2.

However, when I click "Run Once" for these 10 new members, they start off by receiving Email #1. This even occurs if I hit "Run Once" after Date 1 has already passed since it's a "Wait Until" command.

In order to circumvent this, I tried removing "Wait Until Date 1" and "Send Email #1" from the flow, after it was sent to the original 40 campaign members. I then clicked "Run Once," and the 10 new members successfully joined in at the step "Wait Until Date 2" since the previous 2 steps were removed. HOWEVER, the original 40 campaign members incorrectly received Send Email #3! This is even with the "Wait Until Date 3" step in place to prevent this from happening.

Marketo clearly does not like its flow to be messed with once running; is there another way to add new members into an email campaign, and have them jump right into the flow at the same step as the existing members?

Dory_Viscoglio · Answer

Hey Steven, you're touched on a couple of issues here... let's break them down individually:

1. Adding additional people after you've already set a campaign up

When there are multiple emails like this I will typically just set the campaigns up independently of each other, and then schedule them to send on a specific date. This way, you can always capture the people who correctly meet your send criteria at the time of the send. Otherwise, I often find myself having to create "remove from flow" campaigns which basically eliminate the benefits that I was getting from having all of my sends in one campaign anyway. This means that once your date 1 batch sends, people can only be eligible to fall into date 2 and 3 batch sends. After date 2, they'll only be eligible for date 3 batch send.

2. Messing with flow steps while people are in wait steps

This can be a tricky one, and hopefully you only found out about it for your original 40 people.. Anytime someone is in a wait step, after they exit they will immediately go to the next numbered flow step. So, when you had people in step 3 below and you deleted steps 1 and 2, step 6 became step 4. Upon exiting step 3, they went to step 4. That's why the wait until date 3 step was completely ignored -- since it was now step 3, which people had just exited.

1 - Wait until date 1

2 - Send email 1

3 - Wait until date 2

4 - send email 2

5 - Wait until date 3

6 - Send email 3

I hope this clarifies things a little, and will help you with future programs!

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