How do you prevent one smart campaign triggering another due to data value changes?

[Barry_Dupont1]

Almost exactly a year we (hurriedly) did a few changes to our brand new Marketo instance, in working towards becoming GDPR compliant. One of the things we did was add a 'GDPR consent given' field (opt-in) to include on all forms.

We then created four campaigns to keep this field in sync with the unsubscribe fields as below:

This is the details of the first one, the others follow the same pattern:

A year on, and we are switching to a new instance, due to a change of CRM (don't ask). This has given me a chance to review these operational programs, and the first thing I notice is an issue where if one of the above campaigns is triggered, it then triggers another.

For example, in the above campaign. If the consent field is changed from false to true, it changes the unsubscribed field to false. All good. However, this then triggers the 'Unsubscribed: True -> False' campaign. As well as a waste of resource, this also changes the 'GDPR consent notes' field to an inaccurate value.

Now I'm a year into Marketo, having four campaigns to manage this seems very cumbersome, and I'm sure there must be a more efficient way.

So my questions are:

1) How do I prevent one campaign from triggering another?

2) Or, I assume a lot of others must have similar campaigns?  Is there a better approach altogether to solving this?

3) Grégoire Michel‌ I saw your idea here: https://nation.marketo.com/ideas/9052 and upvoted it. In that post, you said "Of course, we can create the field and create some smart campaigns to sync it with the unsubscribe one." Would you be able to share some more detail on this?

Thanks all, in advance.

[Bryan_Epstein · Accepted solution]

Ideally, you would only want two of those trigger campaigns running. If all 4 have triggers based on a data value changing, it seems like it would just continue to trigger the other campaign.

You should actually be able to accomplish this all by using one operational program.

Smart List

Data Value Changes : GDPR Email Consent

Flow

See below (Note that I don't have the same fields in my instance as you, but you can utilize this same logic for each of your fields [i.e. GDPR Consent Notes (Consent given vs not given)]. Considering that you have the GDPR Email Consent field already, the notes may seem a bit redundant.

EDIT: This would only manage the first way upon giving consent. If the logic that you want to achieve is to change the GDPR Email Consent field to false when someone unsubscribe value is true, you would want to just want to create a second campaign. (Smart List - Data Value Changes [Unsubscribed = TRUE] | Flow: Change Data Value - [GDPR Email Consent = FALSE]).

[Barry_Dupont1]

I was going down the incorrect route of trying to stop a campaign triggering, whereas the better route was to utilise the Choices in the Change Data Value flow steps.

With your example and some testing, I now have two campaigns managing this successfully - thanks for your help Bryan!