In a workflow, you can divide your contacts in many ways. They can be split (based on what actions they have or haven’t performed, details about themselves, or properties about their order) and then targeted accordingly.
Conditions
These are segmentation criteria based on user property, such as cart or contact property. The first set of conditions you will encounter on your workflow is found when you click ‘+’ then ‘condition’.
The list of conditions you can input at this stage of the campaign refers to the contact, their order, and their past behavior. These include:
- Conditions around the ‘contact’, such as their name, country, language or average purchase amount.
- Conditions about the specific cart, such as the total ATI, the currency, the item’s ID or the availability of the item.
- Conditions around the properties of the order. These are similar to the cart properties, but also include things like payment method, order status, and whether the order has been given free shipping or discount code.
There are many possible uses for such conditions. For example, you may want to send a different email template to US customers and French customers within the one workflow. This can be done by selecting the condition ‘country is exactly USA’ = true. Then under ‘true’, you can input the email template you want to send to the US customers, while under ‘false’ you can create another condition that specifies French customers and send them the relevant template.
After inputting these initial conditions to segment your audience, you will send them a message through ‘actions’. After this ‘action’ is sent, you can choose another set of conditions.
‘Success’, ‘Failure’, or ‘Continue’ all refer to the previous action sent to your customers.
- Success means that the action (email, Facebook message, or SMS) was successfully sent and delivered to the customer. If the action was successful this may be where you would want to input a delay to give the customer time to consider the message.
- Failure means that the action wasn’t sent. This could be because the email or phone number on your contact list is out of date or wrong. If the action failed to send you would want to try another channel of communication right away.
- Continue means that regardless of whether the previous action was successful or not you want to continue your workflow in a certain way.
If you select a ‘success’ split on an action, the only other option from this action will be ‘failure’. You won’t be able to select ‘continue’ because all of the contacts will be accounted for in either ‘success’ or ‘failure’. Because of this, ‘success’ and ‘failure’ are always used in a dual relationship, while ‘continue’ is on its own.
Triggers
After sending your first message and selecting either success, failure, or continue, you will find the final condition that you can add to your workflow: trigger. By selecting ‘trigger’ in your workflow, you are able to divide your audience based on their level of engagement with your previous message. This is a very useful feature, as you would want to send different follow-up messages to customers who opened and read your past email compared to someone who ignored it.
Once you click ‘trigger’, the options will be:
- Last action = opened
- Last action = clicked
- Last action = unsubscribed
Then choose the amount of time since the message was opened/ clicked/ unsubscribed. Finally, divide your audience by selecting if this trigger is ‘true’ or ‘false’.
For example, you send an email about a seasonal sale and give the customer 1 day to open it and consider making a purchase. After 1 day you send customers who clicked on the email a reminder that the sale is ending soon while sending an SMS about the sale to alert customers who never opened the email (found by clicking ‘false’ on the trigger).
Note that the “If this/then that” logic creates branches in your workflow.