Triggering a Time Zone Queue Using Request Campaign

[Anonymous]

I am trying to setup a campaign that sends emails accoring to a timezone schedule. I have built all the child campaigns that group countries by time zone, and have built out the schedule for the sends in the parent (traffic cop) campaign.  I was expecting to just be able to activate the parent and be off at the races, but Marketo wouldn't allow me to activate the parent campaign w/o adding a filter. Thing is, I don't need a filter (all filtering and list building happends at the child campaign level).  

As a workaround I added the smart list criteria to the parent (e.g., member of list = child campaign list) but this seems to be causing unnecessary system processing. Has anyone figured out a way to activate a parent campaign w/ a less resource intensive smart list qualification?

[Josh_Hill13]

Without seeing the full setup, I'm guess a bit here, but I think if you did this, it might work:

Top Campaign - List Processor:
Smart List: Member of Smart List IN "Big Send List"
 (note: you may want to pre-process this by sending everyone to a static list first, which will lower processing time)
Flow: Request Campaign Choice 1: if Member of Smart List IN "Country 1", Call "Country 1 Send" etc
Schedule: Batch, Now.


Send Campaigns:
Smart List: Trigger: Campaign Is Requested by "Marketo Flow Action"
Member of List IN "Big Send List Country 1" (this constains the filter to ensure only those go out)
Flow: Send Email IS " Email Country 1"
Wait Step: Wait Until....X time on X Day
Schedule: triggered

But the problem here is you'll need to kick off the Top Campaign at the correct time to ensure this works well.

You may be better off splitting the Big List into separate static lists, then activating each country campaign one at a time on a scheduled basis. I'm not sure a Traffic Cop is your best choice here.

[Anonymous]

That's pretty much how I have it set (one big static list).  The parent campaign controls the timing however, and the child campaigns are responsible for finding the right email version based on contact attributes and then sending. I opted to have timining in the parent because that way I could have one point of control rather than setting this in multiple child campaigns (raises the likelihood of an error in the latter method).

Seems like this should be pretty a straightforward capability though. I don't need the parent to do anything but trigger the children (no processing, just call other campaigns). Basically this would work fine if the parent didn't require a "smart list" entry:

Parent campaign
-----------------------
Wait until (specified time)
Trigger child 1
Trigger child 2
Wait until (next specified time)
Trigger child 3
Trigger child 4
... so on and so forth

Child campaign 1
----------------------
check member of static list
find correct email based on (some contact attribute)
send email

Child campaign 2
----------------------
check member of static list
find correct email based on (some contact attribute)
send email
... so on and so forth