4 MUST HAVES To LAUNCHING ADOBE CAMPAIGN

This post is focused on the absolute must-haves, the don’t start withouts, and the you better have’s before Adobe Campaign gets rolled out to the marketing teams. With that being said, this post is primarily for your marketing teams so it won’t speak much to server configuration, data packages, and other IT-focused development. These 4 gems are your path towards a more fully automated email marketing machine.

• Recurring Delivery
• Incremental Query
• Test
• Workflow Supervisors

-Recurring deliveries
Need to send the same email over and over again? Let’s say you have a birthday campaign. Well, you can schedule the workflow to fire once a day, but you don’t want to upload or duplicate that HTML every day. With a recurring delivery you set it up once and the delivery re-uses the same assets every time. I like to use recurring deliveries especially in onboarding or nurturing workflows, and welcome emails when signing up for newsletters.

Frist, create the delivery template in the templates section. Set the delivery properties and upload your HTML. Once everything is set you can send a proof of this template. Right-click on the template just created. Click on execute the delivery. Now in the top left the “Send A Proof” button should be available. Click that button, wait for it analyze, approve and send. If the proof is good to go, then navigate to the workflow. Drag out a recurring delivery. Open the recurring delivery and select the delivery template you just created.

Creating the delivery template.

Sending a proof from the templates section. Right-click on the delivery, then Actions, then Execute the delivery.

Dragging out a recurring delivery.

-Incremental Queries
Using the welcome email scenario, incremental queries find only the latest increment of people. So if a newsletter had a welcome email the query would be able to distinguish who in the subscription had already been processed to receive the welcome email. It would then identify only the newest subscribers to get the welcome email.
In a welcome email scenario, set the target the subscription. Set the frequency the workflow will run. Below I set “Several Times A Day” and every 10  minutes. It could also be set to hourly, or every minute potentially.

-Test
The test function gives you the ability to employ simple If, Else logic. While this can be done in a wide variety of ways the test option is the most straightforward. Let’s say you have a welcome email firing off every 2 minutes. Having the tester option configured it will first look at a number of new people is greater than 0, if yes then the recurring delivery will create a new delivery and send it out. Conversely, if the number of new sign-ups is equal to or less than 0 the recurring delivery will not create a new delivery to be sent. Without the test option, the recurring delivery would create a new delivery and try to send to 0 people. The win using this option is that saves resources in the processing load, especially once a high volume of automatic emails begins.
Drag out the test function into the workflow. Double click to open. Then label should be True and the condition should look like this vars.recCount > 0. The query should feed into the test, and the TRUE output of the test into the recurring delivery, and the False output into a Stop.

Double click to open the test. Then click on the area right below the condition and type in ‘vars.recCount>0’. You can also use the drop down to the right to see other options to test.

-Workflow Supervisors
If a workflow hits an error for any reason it will send you or a group of users the workflow name and the error code, letting you know that this workflow needs some TLC. This feature is extremely useful if workflows are set to run recurring tasks, or if a workflow is scheduled to run at some point in the future. This lets you keep an eye on the workflow without actually looking at it. The other reason to utilize workflow supervisors is that these type of alerts are not fully turned on.

To get workflow supervisors up and running create an operator group. If you are an operator already, or you want the alert will only go to a single person, you can just select your self.  In this scenario, the delivery notification is already set up so once the workflow is configured everything should work.

Select the operator or operator group in the Supervisor(s) section on the workflow properties.

Usually, only admins have access to create more operators or operator groups.

If everything works correctly, and the workflow errors out, you or your operator group should get this message.

I even went so far as to configure a filter in my Gmail so I can keep a close pulse on any workflow errors.