Wait Step Issue

[Anonymous]

I'm running into a issue with a campaign wait step. The campaign runs on the 15th each month (scheduled), then sends an email and waits 30 days before calling a second campaign. The issue is even though more than 30 days have passed, members seem to be stuck in the wait step permanently and the campaign never calls the second campaign. Does anyone have any ideas what I might be doing wrong here?

Dashboard view

Here are the flow steps (Smartlist references the Chronic Non-Responders/Unengaged smartlist built into Marketo)

And the campaign that is called. (filters to make sure the member is still part of the non-responder list and has not opened the email sent) No members have passed into this campaign.

[Trevor_Parsell]

Hey Gary,

Can you show a screenshot of the "Chronic Non-Responders/Unengaged" smart list criteria? Have you confirmed that the people who are not engaged are showing up correctly in that smart list?

You may have to adjust the Non-Responders/Unengaged smart list criteria in order to ensure that leads who are hitting that list also qualify for the "Remove non-opens" campaign.

[Anonymous]

Hello Trevor,

The Chronic Non-Responder/Unengaged list does have members and it can be seen in the campaign history tab that members were added from that list on the 15th of the last two months and are still stuck in the wait step. (see below) This makes sense for those on July 15th, but all the members added on June 15th have already passed 30 days, should be moving to the next step.

Here is a screenshot of the Chronic Non-Responder/Unengaged Smart List.

This does make we wonder though if that last step in the chronic non-responders (not program Status success) is causing an issue, since simply being added to the operational program defaults to a success = true.

[Trevor_Parsell]

Hey Gary,

Based on what you mentioned above, my guess is that people do not qualify for the "Remove Non Opens" campaign because they do not qualify for the "Chronic Non-Responder" smart list (because their program status WAS changed to "Success=True" within the last 180 days)

[Devraj_Grewal]

Trevor,

Regardless if they do not qualify for the requested campaign, the "campaign was requested" flow step activity will still initiate. The issue is that it has not even been requested yet since those people are still in the wait step. The issue is with them being in that wait step.

[Trevor_Parsell · Accepted solution]

Hey Devraj,

That makes sense. My thinking was that the "Request Campaign" flow step may not show up as initiated if the lead is disqualified from the campaign being requested but I confirmed that is not the case.

I agree with you that this is related to adjustments made to flow steps after the campaign was launched. When a flow step is added to a campaign with wait steps, there may be similar issues to what happens when a flow step is deleted:

Delete a Flow Step - Marketo Docs - Product Docs

[Anonymous]

Well that is an interesting theory and could in fact explain all the folks still being in the wait step. I.e. there were 3 steps in the flow when the campaign first ran on June 15th @ 2am. I added an additional step to the start to correct the "non-membership" issue June 15th at 3pm. This made the wait step now step 3 instead of step 2. Folks who complete the flow step (step 2 before) move onto step 3 (which is now the wait step vs the call campaign). Effectively they exit the wait step only to enter the same wait step again since the wait step has moved from step 2 to step 3. If this is true, come August ~15th all these folks should process through (both June and July). I didn't realize the wait steps recorded the position when executed, so I just learned something there.

[Devraj_Grewal]

Precisely. So if you'd like, I would recommend manually removing these leads from the flow and then manually requesting the other campaign.

[Anonymous]

Thank you Devraj and Trevor. I think you both helped me figure out what was going on here and I gain some more knowledge on Marketo in the process. Thanks for your help.

[Devraj_Grewal]

Gary,

What you can first do is look at the results tab for the first smart campaign to make sure the "Request Campaign" step did initiate. If so, then run a smart list with these two filters:

"Campaign was requested" is (this requested campaign)

"Member of smart campaign" not in (this requested campaign)

The smart list will show those who have successfully had this smart campaign requested but did not actually qualify for the smart campaign. If so, it is possible the requested campaign's smart list needs to be modified.

[Anonymous]

Ok, I looked at the first campaign and didn't see any instance of the request campaign step being triggered, which is the step that happens after the wait 30 days step. It's' worth noting that this first ran on June 15th, so it should have triggered mid-July.

Also ran the smart list with the two filters you suggested. The result was 0.

[Devraj_Grewal]

Alright so if the request campaign didn't fire at all no one has come to that step yet and all people are still in the wait step. I would double check the date that everyone went through step #2 to make sure it actually was 30 days ago.

[Anonymous]

I did a spot check on a bunch of members, and definitely had members added to program on June 15th. Also, the history tab for the campaign shows 10,292 people qualified on June 15th. (see screen shot further down thread) Still not sure what's going on here.

[Devraj_Grewal]

Those people may have qualified for the smart campaign on June 15th, but what is the date that they all received that step #2 email and subsequently entered the 30 day wait? You can check the "Results" tab to confirm this.

[Anonymous]

Looks like June 15th they were sent the email. Screenshot of email insights for the email in June. Not sure why it's only 9.76k verse 10,292. Maybe it excludes bounces from the report.

[Devraj_Grewal]

My guess then is that this wait step may have changed duration. Note that when a wait step's duration is changed or removed altogether, those in the wait step will still wait the original duration while new people entering that wait step will proceed with the new duration. Is there any chance this wait step was longer than 30 days and then shortened to 30 days? If so, these leads still may have time in the wait step before they request the campaign. Check out Audit trail for this smart campaign to verify that the wait step duration was not modified.

[Anonymous]

That's an interesting theory. I checked the audit trail as you suggested and couldn't find any change to the wait step in or around the date of June 15th when this would have executed. I did however see that I added a step to the beginning of the flow(later on June 15th) after the campaign had executed and sent the email to the start to add the lead as a member to the program, probably when I noticed the campaign ran, and the email sent, and folks were in the wait step, but were not added to the program as members (which is odd in and of itself). Looks like I then ran another campaign later on June 15th to correct the membership issue for folks that were just sent the email and then made them members of the campaign.