How to handle customers facing system errors, natural disasters, etc...

[koumotobayashi]

Say you created an engagement program, where you send e-mails to customers every two weeks.

But you do not want to send emails to customers who are facing system error with your product, dealing 

with natural disasters and other irregular troubles. (Seems very rude to keep contacting them when they are having troubles)

How would you automatically keep the list of the engagement program up-to-date? 

[Michael_Florin · Accepted solution]

Define "automatically". 🙂

If you told Marketo which person has that specific situation, for instance by adding them to a list or changing a field value on them, you could make that list membership or field value the reason for a pause.

As in:

Smart List: "Earthquake Victim = TRUE"

Flow: Change Engagement Program Cadence to Pause

Don't forget to unpause them once the catastrophe is over.

[koumotobayashi]

Thanks for your response.

Adding a smart list that holds the information of a certain situation seems like the best way.

[Matjaž_Jaušove2]

In theory, if you have a data point, you can define rules centered around that data point and its values. Like Michael explained.

What we often experience in corp environments is the pile of dirty data that makes many "automations" businesses want so dearly impossible. Like, I would even claim that if you ask a company a simple question "Who are your customers", many would strugle to come up with a rule that would get them the right and accurate info out of say... CRM. 😉