Resend email 2 weeks after non-open of a smart campaign email

[Sophia_Sellars]

We send out a welcome email that is triggered to send based on the join date of a new member. The smart campaign runs daily and sends the welcome email to any new members that have joined the previous day.

I want to set up another campaign that resends the email to anyone who hasn't opened the email 2 weeks after it was sent. I can't figure out how to configure the timeframe on the filters of "was sent email" and "not clicked email" to ensure that no one gets the resend unless they received the first email at least 2 weeks ago and haven't clicked on it. 

No one that has been sent the email within the previous 2 weeks should receive the resend. 

[Grace_Brebner3]

Hey Sophia,

This is totally doable, but because you can't use "between" with date non-specific options, the way to do it is using separate filters to handle each piece of the pie. 

You could do this with an email send filter or an added to list filter - in your case with such a short time frame, the email send filter is fine. It's important to note that there's one key distinction here: the second part must be NOT was sent email, not "was sent email, email is not X". The former option checks that they were not sent the specific email that you're looking at, while the latter checks that they were sent another email other than the one you specify.

Here's how I'd look to set it up...

Obviously any other mailability/suppression filters that are relevant for your use case should also be included. 

Hope that helps 🙂

[Jo_Pitts1]

@Sophia_Sellars ,

@Grace_Brebner3 's example is spot on.  As an extension of that, this link https://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Smart+List+Filter+Operators+Glossary will take you to a generic description of the date operators and how to use to achieve your outcome (and others that may be similar).

Cheers

Jo

[Jo_Pitts1 · Accepted solution]

@Sophia_Sellars ,

as always there are many ways to skin a cat 🙂

ONE alternative approach (and I can think of a couple) would be to Create a campaign that:

Sends the email

Waits 14 days

Sends the email

And have a triggered (on the open of the email) campaign that removes them from the first campaign.

Also, consider sending a different email, or at least with a different subject line to try and increase the success of the second email.

[Grace_Brebner3]

Hey Jo 🙂 Good to see you here!

Just to jump in, while this approach would absolutely function, I would personally advise against this approach with a wait step of this length. Personally, I avoid using wait steps that are longer than 24 hours or so; things just... have a habit of getting complicated.

With particularly long wait steps, there's a considerable period of time in which things can change and it gets tricky to try to back track when people are sitting there in the background waiting for their turn. As a few examples...

• if something on the customer record changes that may mean this person should no longer receive the email (other than standard criteria that Marketo always blocks from sends) you have to account for all of these possibilities in the flow step. This can become unwieldy.
• if you decide to change the approach after the smart campaign is activated, while people are in the wait step, things get a little hairy.
• and just in general, what we tend to see is that campaigns with long wait steps tend to have a greater tendency to go wrong, and when things go wrong when you've got a long wait step, they generally tend to be harder to troubleshoot. 

The options that look at either email sending or list addition might seem like they're a little more work, but as a best practice they tend to be the approach that will cause you fewer problems in the long run. So, while Jo's suggestion would functionally work, I would advise against it - sorry Jo, haha! In principle if everything always worked perfectly you'd be right, unfortunately as I'm sure we've all experienced... not always how it works out 😉

[Jo_Pitts1]

@Grace_Brebner3 , hey - at least if my ideas are being challenged it is by one of the best 🙂

One of the reasons I quite like the wait step is it suggests you'll be sending the email at the same time of day as they engaged with you the first time.

That being said, I also agree that it has it own sets of challenges and issues 🙂