For anyone interested in automations, today we published a series of automation workflows on our blog. If you missed the last automation sharing post, here’s that one.
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Hi @mfox. Thanks for the contribution here. I’m wondering what your trigger is for Email Open Recency Tagging and Email Click Recency Tagging? If it’s simple a click/open/subscribe, wouldn’t the ‘Start’ automations remove users from these ones as soon as they act?
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@willrussellmarketing I’m not fully understanding your question but I’ll answer to what I think you’re asking.
There are the two ‘Start’ automations. Those are triggered when someone clicks/opens/subscribes. These remove any of the tags in the Open and Click Recency Tagging automations and ends the Open and Click Recency Tagging automation. Then, they restart the Open and Click Recency Tagging from the beginning.
I originally set this up as 1 automation but I noticed there were multiple instances of the automation running. It was removing prior tags and I noticed contacts with a 7 day tag AND a 30 day tag. That was bad and meant they would end up getting the 60 day email when they shouldn’t.
If I didn’t answer your question, please fire away again with more detail please.
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Thanks for the response. Apologies for lack of clarity.
In these two instances, are clicks/opens/subscribes the trigger for both the ‘Start’ automation and the main automation?
Or, from what I read in your message, the beginning of the Open and Click Recency Tagging automations is triggered by the end of the ‘Start’ automations, and therefore require no start trigger themselves?
Thanks again!
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Ah. Got it now.
Yes. Exactly correct. There is no start trigger in the Tagging Automations. They are started at the end of the ‘Start’ Automation.
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These two automations tag contacts as engaged if they opened an email in the last 60 days and disengaged if it’s been over 60 days:
PART 1: Engaged (restart disengaged) — http://tplshare.com/672flq2
This automation starts every time an email campaign is opened. If they are already in Part 2 (indicated by the “waiting” tag) then it ends that automation and restarts it. If they aren’t in it yet, they are dropped into Part 2 and the automation ends.
PART 2: Disengaged? (waiting) — http://tplshare.com/GQHjiQU
This automation tags them as engaged, removes disengaged tags (if they exist), tags them as waiting, and then has them wait 60 days. If the 60-day wait expires (they haven’t been restarted by triggering Part 1 by opening an email) it tags them as disengaged and ends.
Depending on how you want to define “engaged,” you could easily modify Part 1 to have additional triggers for “Visited Web Page” or “Clicked a link.”
Thanks again @Barry for pointing out the issue with the other “disengaged” automation. For the past few days, creating this automation has been my white whale. After testing many approaches, and hitting a brick wall each time for one reason or another, I believe this is a working solution.
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This is just brilliant! Thanks a lot Brian for sharing it, I’m going to exchange my disengagement automation with yours.
And you just proved that with creativity a person can bypass a situation that others think as a limit.
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These are awesome words to live by!
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Which other “disengaged” automation are you referring to that has a problem that @Barry pointed out? The one shared at the beginning of this thread by @emmed? Just want to make sure I grab the right automation.
Hi Enoch —
The automation that @emmed posted was the one I was referring to. It’s not so much that it won’t work, but it serves a more specific purpose. That automation will tag contacts as disengaged if they have never opened an email.
The issue is that once they open a campaign, any campaign, it will always send them to the No condition and loop them back through because the “has opened” condition is a simple yes/no and it doesn’t “care” about the 60 day wait.
The automations I posted will look for activity over the past 60 days and tag them as disengaged if they haven’t opened an email in the last 60 days.
@Brian just so I can be clear:
You are saying that if someone is in the “wait 60 days” part of the automation by @emmed then as soon as they open a campaign they will proceed through the yes/no condition and then go back up to the “wait 60 days” action?
If there is a yes/no condition after a wait then the wait is ignored?
The only issue with that automation is that if a contact opens a campaign at any point in time, they will never make it to the “Yes” condition that would tag them as disengaged. They will just continuously loop in the “No” condition because ActiveCampaign will check “Have they opened a campaign at any point in time?” Yes, they have, so “No, they don’t meet the condition ‘Has not opened any campaigns.’”
Basically, once they open an email, they get stuck in a loop that waits 60 days and then checks if they’ve ever opened a campaign.
That automation could be used to identify “dead” subscribers and bogus email addresses. I’d just remove the loop on the “No” condition so no one gets stuck in it.
I hope that was clear. If not, let me know and I’ll come at it from another angle.
Ahh! Yes perfectly clear. Thanks @Brian. So in that case, I’m glad I grabbed your 2 automations that cycle back and forth.
Enoch ‘the thick-skull’ Sears
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Haha. Please don’t feel like that was a dumb question at all. I’m still trying to find the best way to breakdown and explain what an automation is doing. It’s not easy to understand how the logic and actions interact — especially if you are new to the platform.
HI @mfox - Thanks again for sharing these automations.
Quick question. Now that I’ve had these all running for a month, my reports for these are showing significantly more contacts in them than I actually have in AC.
For example, when I look at the report for the ‘Email Open’ automations some of the contacts are in there are being listed multiple times. In fact, the first email address that displays in the report is there 8 times.
Have I set it up wrong, or is this how it should be? If the latter, could you explain why each contact is displaying multiple times?
I appreciate the help!
Will
Question on these great automations, @Brian. Does ‘Disengaged? (Waiting)’ have no start trigger?
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Are you looking at the contact count in the reports? The contact will enter the automation multiple times. I’m assuming that’s what you’e seeing.
If you go to a contact who has entered the automations more than once you’ll see they’ve entered each automation more than once.
If that’s not it, I don’t know. Contact AC support and see what they have to say.
My guess, it’s just the contact entering multiple times.
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I really appreciate the quick response! I think you’re absolutely right. For the newbie AC user, could you explain why they enter the automation multiple times? Is it due to the different tags the automation uses for each time period that it’s monitoring?
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If you’re using the open and/or click open recency tagging, they enter the automations each time someone opens or clicks a link in an email.
That’s the purpose of it. They enter/restart the automation each time which completes/stops any previous started automations.
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