Turn off a triggered smart campaign to turn back on

[Melissa_Day]

We are looking to temporarily shut off a smart campaign that delivers three drip emails over the course of several weeks while we make some updates to the emails, then turn them back on and have everyone pick up where they left off.

If we turn off the smart campaign for a few days with people enrolled in wait steps, will they pick up in the wait step where they left off? Will they have been removed entirely from the flow as if they completed it?

Thanks in advance!

Melissa

[Christiane_Rode]

Anyone in the wait step will continue in their flow, even if you turn the campaign off, as they've already qualified to run through the campaign.

Depending on your setup, you could pause people and then when you're ready again, you could return them to normal. They won't get content while paused. 

If it's a traditional smart campaign (and not in an Engagement campaign) for anyone in the wait step, you could also add an additional step to remove them from the flow, too. If you do want to add these people back in, though, you will have to keep track of who you removed, so this may not be an option either. 

[STO555]

If you have a triggered and ongoing smart campaign going, even if you make changes it won't affect the people already in the flow, in fact it may even complicate things. Best is to pause or remove from flow just like Christiane noted. 

[Katja_Keesom]

Hi guys, as this is not an engagement program, but a triggered smart campaign PAUSING IS NOT AN OPTION!

You are both correct in saying that deactivating the trigger campaign will not impact people who are currently in a wait step, they will keep going through the flow and receive the emails even though the smart campaign is deactivated.

In order to stop this from happening, the only way is to add a "Remove from flow" step right after every Wait step in your flow. It would however be wise to also add these people to a static list so, you know which people were dropped from the flow half way through and you can set up new partial processes to only let them receive the emails they did not receive before. If you add the Add to list after the wait step and then the Remove from flow, you should be able to capture everyone at the right stage.

With scenarios like this, if you anticipate any changes may require you to stop the process at a later stage, this solution is not ideal as you can see. An engagement program is an alternative that makes pausing easier. Alternatively, you could break your smart campaign up in multiple smart campaigns, where at the end of each one, after the wait step, you request the next one with a "Request campaign" step. This makes it slightly easier to stop and start and manage participants.

[Melissa_Day]

Thank you all for the help and insight! We ended up adding wait steps with a ten day duration before any 'send email' step to buy us time to modify the emails, then went through and removed the wait steps. We left the smart campaign active while we made the edits.