Campaigns
Let's start with the following scenario: a contact is in our Drip campaign, which consists of various successive actions that are precisely tailored to his behavior and needs. He goes through them and finally reaches the end of the campaign. But what happens to him now? That depends, among other things, on what the final step of the campaign is. If it is the "Remove Contact" action, the contact is logically removed from the campaign.
This also happens when a contact is removed from the start segment of a campaign. By leaving the segment, it is immediately thrown out of all campaigns that have this segment as a start. Other possibilities are the removal of the contact when reaching a set score in the scoring system or by another campaign in which the contact is located.
If none of these actions take place, the contact will remain in the campaign after going through all the steps. However, if new actions are now added to the campaign, they no longer have any influence on this contact. So it makes no sense to let contacts stay in the campaign after completing all steps.
IMPORTANT: If you allow the contacts to run through the campaign again and they still meet the condition for it (e.g. belonging to the start segment), they immediately start the campaign again. This creates an endless loop. Therefore, it should be well considered whether or when to allow the restart.
But what happens if a contact leaves the campaign before completing it? For example, let's assume that our campaign has a segment as a starting point, whose filter is a tag. If the contact loses this tag, he will be kicked out of the segment and thus out of the campaign. The campaign is terminated at this point for the contact and he will not go through any further steps of the campaign.
However, if he gets the tag again, he will be re-entered into the segment and thus will be part of the campaign again, as long as the restart of the campaign was allowed. But where does he enter the campaign? One might assume that he enters at the point where he once left. But this is not the case. The campaign starts again at the very beginning for the newly added contact.
The following example illustrates the behavior well:
Our simple example campaign consists of sending three emails. After sending the second email, the contact no longer met the conditions for the start segment and was removed from the campaign.
At a later time, he again meets the conditions of the segment and starts the example campaign again. However, he does not enter the campaign at the point where he left it and would have received e-mail number 3, but starts the campaign again from the beginning by sending e-mail number 1 again.
Segments
At this point we would like to go into more detail about what the rules are for leaving and re-entering segments.
The first scenario has already been described above: The contact satisfies the filter, then it no longer satisfies the filter and leaves the segment. This would also happen if the filter is changed and the contact does not match the new filter. But as soon as the filter matches again, the contact comes back into the segment.
Another case could be that a contact leaves the segment due to a campaign action, for example, even though it still meets the filter. In this case, there is no way for the contact to get back into the segment via the filter. However, it can come back into the segment manually, via campaign action, scoring trigger or even form action.
But be careful: If a contact was added to the segment using the options listed above, its membership is independent of filters. It remains in this segment, regardless of whether existing or future filters apply or not.If, however, we have already added contacts to a segment manually and would now prefer to work with filters, there is a solution: we create a campaign whose starting point is the affected segment.Via campaign action we now set a tag to all contacts.Then we create a new segment that filters by said tag. Now all contacts from the old segment are also in the new segment, which is again based on filters and accordingly can now be extended with filters.
The most important findings at a glance
Campaigns:
- „Remove Contact", specified number of points or leaving the start segment.
- Contact is removed from campaign
- Contact leaves campaign before the end, but comes back in later
- starts again at the start
- Contact arrives at the end of the campaign (without any of the above actions) -> he remains in the campaign and newly inserted actions do not affect him anymore
restart of campaign allowed + contact still fulfills conditions for start - Endless loop
Segments:
- Segment is based on filters:
- If the contact fulfills these filters, it belongs to the segment.
- If it does not meet them, it is dropped from the segment.
- Contact can come in again as soon as it fulfills the filter again.
- Filters have no more influence on the membership of the contact, if he is
- manually
- by campaign
- Scoring Trigger or
- Form Action
- from the segment or added via one of these ways.