ACS: Best practice for workflow incl. several email deliveries

[sonjaluoto]

Hi!

I would like to create a workflow that includes four different email deliveries. First I want to pick up certain people and send them email 1, then wait for 3 days and if they haven't converted to customers, send email 2, and so on.. until they've received all four emails.

What would be the best solution for this kind of workflow? I'm thinking of just using incremental query for targeting, then email delivery with outbound transition and population, then wait activity and query to check if the prospect is customer or not. And another email delivery after query. Or would it make more sense to divide this as more than one workflow?

Couldn't find any useful best practices info in ACS or AC documentation.

Br,

Sonja

[florentlb]

Hi Sonja,

Yes you can do as you suggested:

1. A query to get your initial target. It can be incremental if you plan on executing that workflow again to avoid targeting those who already went through the 1st execution (and received many emails according to your use case ). Make sure you don't execute the workflow again before all 4 sends are finished.

2. An email

3. Wait activity

4. Query again people who received previous email but who are still not 'customers' (I'd guess you have a custom field for this parameter?)

5. Email.

etc.

I'm sorry but at the moment it is not possible to copy paste activities in a workflow (that would have been handful seing your initial message)

I'd also recommend checking typology and fatigue rules set on your instance to make sure your use case is possible and comply with the current rules in place (I don't know the default values but 4 emails in 9 days seem a lot to me).

Hope this helps,

Florent

[sonjaluoto]

Hi,

thank you for your answer. I will check the rules. I know 4 emails can be quite a lot, but they all have different content related to the subject that the recipient has subscribed to.

Why is this? I have people subscribing to the service continuously and I would like to use a scheduler to add recipients to the flow on daily basis. So that I would have recipients in different stages all the time, e.g. recipient A has just received email 1, recipient B has gotten emails 1-3 etc.

Br,

Sonja

[florentlb]

Hi Sonja,

Indeed if you use a Scheduler to manage the execution of your workflow, you should be able to do your use case as you described (unexecuted activities would go in a queue and still be executed even if the workflow is executed again).

This is not the case for workflows without Schedulers.

I'd recommend testing your case with other activities than deliveries (for example use Save Audience instead) to check if everything is correctly executed.

Florent

[sonjaluoto]

OK, thanks for your help!

/Sonja