Change flow step members are in and see what step they are in.

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I am still learning Marketo and getting to grips with my first smart campaign.

I originally had the flow:

1. Send Email
2. Wait 1 week
3. Change program status
4. Send email

During the "Wait 1 week" step (I activated the smart campaign about 4 days ago) I changed the flow to

1. Send Email
2. Change program status
3. Wait until 10am on Monday
4 Send email

I did this by first adding the new wait step and then deleting the old.  The reason I did this is because I wanted to control when the 2nd email sent.  

Is there a way I can see what step my members are now in (I ran this as a batch campaign of a "static" list), and can I change what step my members are in?

Thanks,

Simon

[Josh_Hill13 · Accepted solution]

Simon,
Deleting the Wait Step does not remove people from the original Wait Step. They will continue on to whatever the next step is, which is Send Email.

To remove people from a Wait Step, you have to use Remove from Flow. But now that you've changed it all, this will be hard.

So when you look at the Campaign Summary, you may not see an accurate Wait Step count.

A better way would have been to swap the Program Status and modify the Wait Step. You'd still have to run the Status again on leads w/o Status. 

In general, you want 

Send Email
Status
OR
Status
Send Email

[Anonymous]

Hi Josh,

Thanks for that, does that mean they wait the full week before continuing, or would they have continued on to the next step as soon as I deleted the original 1 week wait step.  The rest makes a lot of sense, thank you.

Simon

 

[Anonymous]

Hey Simon,
Any leads who ever entered the one week wait step will wait one week, regardless of what happened to the flow after they entered that step.

Best,
Will

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Also, Simon, based on what you've outlined above where the wait step was #2, after the 1 week, anyone who was in the wait step will now go to #3 which means they will wait until Monday at 10 for the next action to happen. That is one danger of changing around the flow steps while someone is in a wait step. You always need to think about the actual number order of the steps. 

[Anonymous]

Dory,

To sum this all up. All flow steps in theory are numbered. A lead in a wait step will "stay" at its originally numbered step (it will not move if the flow step it is in moves).

If a lead is in a wait step (ie. Step 3) and then additional flows steps are added to the top of the flow - when the wait step ends, the lead will move to the next sequential step  (i.e. Step 4) which at that point may be a completely different flow action from what was initially created.

I think I learned this the hard way.

Thanks!

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Hey Erica, that's exactly it. I feel like this isn't outlined anywhere in Marketo very well, so it is a lesson that most people have to learn the hard way. To be fair to Marketo, I'm not sure where I'd outline this since rearranging flow steps while someone is in a wait step is not something that people would normally be doing, and warnings wouldn't make sense out of context.