Trigger to start next campaign after another campaign finishes

[Michael_Mason]

My idea is for Marketo to have a specific trigger that waits for another program or campaign to finish before starting. I'm thinking this makes sense more for data manipulations.

Case: I wanted to back out a smart campaign that was a bit overzealous and had marked people as email invalid. I had to undo the first smart campaign and then re-do the SC with more a stringent smart list. I had separated the two smart campaigns by hours, but I wasn't sure that the first one would be done before the second one started. If there was a trigger that kicks off the second smart campaign after the first one was completed, I'd know that the two campaigns didn't overlap.

[Devraj_Grewal]

Hi Michael Mason​,

This would be a perfect case for using "request campaign". More info: Request Campaign - Marketo Docs - Product Documentation

[Michael_Mason]

Thanks Devraj,

My concern with doing that was being unsure how the request campaign would fire in the Flow step. In theory, I was concerned that on a data change value in the Flow step, the Request Campaign would start before all the data change values are changed. If the first flow step has to finish before the next one begins, then it totally makes sense. I wasn't 100% sure that was how the Flow step works.

[SanfordWhiteman]

On an individual basis, you are guaranteed that a person will run through Flow A before Flow B. Why would you be concerned about coordination across people in this case?

[Michael_Mason]

I'm guessing it's flawed thinking on my part? My main point was I wanted to make sure that everything was done with Campaign A before Campaign B started because I'm not 100% confident that what I'm asking Marketo to do isn't going to result in messed up data.

My use case was this: I had determined that I had overzealously market emails as invalid due to Category 3/4/9 soft bounces and said if this happened even once, they should be marked as invalid.

I set up a new smart campaign to undue everyone that I had applied that logic to. After that was finished, I wanted to re-run a separate filter smart campaign to say if anyone had a soft bounce with Cat 3/4/9 3x in prior 60 days, to mark them as invalid. In short, I'm trying not to cross the streams.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Like Devraj says, you can't mix up the order if you use Request Campaign, and the only thing that matters is if the same lead gets updated in the right order.

It's true that you cant directly know when a whole batch is done. It this becomes a concern, you could use another field to manage the "batch state" someone is in. Then repeatedly run another batch, filtering on the batch state, until it affects zero leads. But I think this is overkill relative to using Request Campaign.

[Michael_Mason]

Thank you both, Devraj and Sanford. I appreciate it. I think the Request a Campaign is what I was looking for, but didn't have sufficient knowledge to use it. Again, thanks for pointing me in the right direction.