When a lead is merged / associated how can I make previously anonymous activity send an email? | Community
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J
Jon_Wu
Level 4
June 29, 2017
Solved

When a lead is merged / associated how can I make previously anonymous activity send an email?

  • June 29, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 6868 views

Let's say I have a smart campaign that sends an email and is triggered by some activity such as Visits Web Page is example.com/promotion-confirmation. Then, let's say you hit that page anonymously, then we collect your email at a later time by calling associateLead to associate the previously anonymous activity with an email address.

At this point, I'd want my Smart Campaign to process all the events from when the lead was anonymous, and then send the email once the email is known, even though the web page visit happened in the past.

Instead, what seems to be happening is nothing. Next Generation Munchkin Tracking FAQ - Marketo Docs - Product Docs  seems to imply that my desired behavior (replay of anonymous events after merge) should be happening.

At the point of conversion (when the person becomes known in Marketo), all activities that occurred when the person was anonymous are appended to the person activity log and at this time they flow through the campaigns they qualify for.

To test, I visit the page in incognito, call associate lead and see if the campaign sent an email from the previous web page visit. Although the visit is added to history, the campaign isn't triggered. If I refresh the web page to add history now that the lead is associated, I do get an email.

This seems to be related to posts from @Grégoire Michel​ (Removal of "Is Anonymous" filters. ), @Mike Reynolds​, and Peter Szabo​ (Is Anonymous change >> will they get emails at merge? ).

Is what I want possible? Am I making wrong assumptions?

Best answer by Grégoire_Miche2

Hi Jon,

This is not possible as only a subset of the flow steps will execute retroactively when the lead becomes known:

1. Change Score

2. Interesting Moment

3. Change Data Value

4. Add to List

5. Remove from List​

So email send is not fired.

And secondary campaigns will not be triggered.

The only thing you could do is to use a batch campaign and filters, that will run after the merge, and filter them from the past activities (for instance a specific data that hast been changed), but I am not sure you will be able to achieve what you want.

-Greg

2 replies

Grégoire_Miche2
Grégoire_Miche2Accepted solution
Level 10
June 30, 2017

Hi Jon,

This is not possible as only a subset of the flow steps will execute retroactively when the lead becomes known:

1. Change Score

2. Interesting Moment

3. Change Data Value

4. Add to List

5. Remove from List​

So email send is not fired.

And secondary campaigns will not be triggered.

The only thing you could do is to use a batch campaign and filters, that will run after the merge, and filter them from the past activities (for instance a specific data that hast been changed), but I am not sure you will be able to achieve what you want.

-Greg

    J
    Jon_WuAuthor
    Level 4
    June 30, 2017

    Thanks for the replies @Grégoire Michel​ and @Sanford Whiteman​. I was having issues finding info on what to expect in terms of deferred processing after a lead merge.

    That list is super helpful. Is that documented anywhere?

    What are secondary campaigns?

    In terms of a batch campaign, what would my trigger be and what would I be looking for? If I ran something looking for past activity after a merge, would I run into duplicates when multiple merges happened unless I had some kind of state tracking?

    I'd love to hear more about the batch strategy, but that list of steps gives me 2 other ways I think could work.

    1. If I only want an action to happen once, we could use Add to List, then have a campaign that sends the email with Added to List as the trigger. This way, if they did something multiple times before the merge, they'd still get the email, but I could allow them to run through the email campaign multiple times in case they need to re-request the email later on.

    2. If I want to trigger something every time once merge, could I add an Interesting Moment instead of initially sending an email, then have a separate campaign that fires every time the Interesting Moment is seen? That seems like it'd work just like #1, but without deduplication since all moments would theoretically be processed.

    Would these 2 suggestions work as I think, and what's the batch solution you mentioned? Any gotchas I should be aware of?

    Thank you!

    SanfordWhiteman
    SanfordWhiteman
    Level 10
    June 30, 2017

    2. If I want to trigger something every time once merge, could I add an Interesting Moment instead of initially sending an email, then have a separate campaign that fires every time the Interesting Moment is seen? That seems like it'd work just like #1, but without deduplication since all moments would theoretically be processed.

    Nope, 'cuz nested triggers won't be fired for the backfilled events (supposedly).

    SanfordWhiteman
    SanfordWhiteman
    Level 10
    June 30, 2017

    +1 to Greg's answer.

    It's not that nothing is happening, it's the specific flow steps you want to occur won't be triggered.

    But I think you'll be able to get pretty close to it with batches.

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