Sending a single alert after a flow step

[trevlarrr]

We have nurture email campaigns that we drop batches of data in to and, whilst we have an internal calendar of when campaign emails are scheduled to send, our sales team were asking if they can get a copy of the email or an alert that an email has gone.

Issue we have is we only allow someone to run through a campaign once to prevent us re-contacting someone so can't just drop their email in the list, but when I tried sending an alert after the 'send email' flow step it obviously sends an alert for every contact that was dropped in, so they potentially get hundreds of alerts each time.

Is there a way to limit it so it only sends one alert or that we can include their email in each run without allowing other contacts through more than once?

[PeeyushSachdeva]

⚠️  This post has been edited by a moderator for accuracy.

Hi @trevlarrr , 

A simple way to keep your sales team in the loop without flooding them with hundreds of alerts is to create a separate notification campaign instead of sending alerts directly from the nurture.

• Set up a “Notification” Smart Campaign (Set flow once)
  Use a Campaign is Requested trigger and set to flow once so it only runs when you call it, not for every single lead.

• Update your nurture flow
  Right after the Send Email step, add a Request Campaign step that points to your notification campaign.

• Build the notification flow
  In the notification campaign’s flow, just add a single Send Alert step to your sales team (or a distribution list).

That way, no matter how many people run through the nurture, your sales team only gets one clean alert per send instead of hundreds.

Alternatively, you can make this even more scalable by building a centralized executable campaign and using program-level tokens. That way, all your nurtures can call into the same notification setup, while the tokens dynamically insert the right program/email details into the alert.

[SanfordWhiteman]

@PeeyushSachdeva your suggestion will not solve the problem at all.

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That way, no matter how many people run through the nurture, your sales team only gets one clean alert per send instead of hundreds.

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This is false. Every person who runs through the nurture will request the campaign & every person will send an alert.

The “even more scalable” version also will not work.

Please test setups before posting, thanks.

[Balkar_Singh]

Might be a better option to subscribe sales to a report, instead of adding them in a seed-list. A basic email performance report which keeps accumulating numbers every week - sent to the email addresses, indicating that the latest email-send has been run.

[SanfordWhiteman]

You’d have to turn off the built-in qualification rule and let people run through every time. Then build an equivalent limitation using, for example, Program Statuses (if the person is already status Sent for a given Program, then Remove from Flow). You don’t change the status for your internal seed list, which will let them run through every time.

[Miray]

Hi, 

Hi, could you please clarify—are you trying to send a sample email to the sales team? Does the email content keep changing each batch ? Or is your goal to send an alert for each batch to indicate that a batch email has been sent?

[trevlarrr]

Hi Miray, 

It's the latter, they want an alert to let them know each time a campaign email has been sent. The email content doesn't change often, and we have a static list per vertical so when we get new researched contacts we add them to the list and it triggers the relevant email sends, so the idea would be to send a single alert to the relevant sales person so they know when an email has gone.

The problem I had when adding the alert flow step was it would send an alert for every single lead added to the list, whereas we just want the salesperson to get one alert per batch (hope that makes sense)

[Michael_Florin]

I like @Miray's creative approach of forcing the alert to be something it actually isn't. 🙂

This feature - alerting somebody that a specific marketing initiative happened - has been requested pretty often here, but actually Marketo doesn't have a good concept for that. I could have been tied to the Marketing Calendar e.g., but that was never completely fleshed out.

So we bounce around between the Alert Flow Step or a Report or Smart List Subscription none of which really covers this use case.

[Miray]

Hi, 

I understand that the current process requires you to import or add people to the list before sending the email. Each time you add a new batch, you need to use one of the email addresses in the alert flow step. For example, if the email address is xyz@example.com, then the alert is sent.However, this process requires manual updates to the email address each time, which can be repetitive, but at least it will help you eliminate unnecessary alerts.