Manage approvals in a campaign

Welcome to Adobe Campaign. In this video, we will be looking at managing approvals within campaign deliveries. By the end of this module, you’ll be able to differentiate between delivery and workflow approvals. Let’s dive right in and begin looking at managing approvals. We will begin by looking at configuring approvals on a campaign. From the dashboard, select the Edit tab and select the Advanced Campaign Parameters. This will bring up the Advanced Settings window. Then select the Approvals tab. Here we’re able to set various job validations. Make sure the Enable Content Approval box is ticked and select the Reviewer via the drop-down menu. For this demo, we will select ourselves. This type of approval allows the operator access to proofs that are sent which will the operator to confirm the content is appropriate and correct. We cover proofs in a separate video. This type of approval is most common with email deliveries. We also have target approvals. These types of approvals are used by operators to validate that the target is appropriate in the delivery. Budget validation is used when there are tasks containing budgeting and the operator needs to validate that this is correct. Lastly, there is extraction approvals. And these are used for direct mail deliveries only and are required to allow the operator the ability to review files in a delivery before continuing. For this demo, we only need the content approval. Select OK to close the window followed by selecting Save in the top right to save our changes. Our approvals are now set at the campaign level. This is useful because all our deliveries will inherit these settings. Approvals can also be set at the delivery level. In our workflow, create an email delivery and double-click the email delivery step to open the delivery window. In the delivery settings window, select properties followed by selecting the approvals tab. Our settings should be the same settings we defined at the campaign level. Let’s enable target approval. This approval is appropriate for almost all deliveries. Next, select a reviewer. In this case, let’s select ourselves again. By default, the tick box confirm the delivery before sending is selected. This is an additional confirmation that prompts the operator to confirm the sending of deliveries after all approvals have been completed. Let’s leave this enabled as this is useful to mitigate the risk of accidental delivery submissions. We can now select OK to complete the approvals. In the subject line and content, let’s add some dummy text and select OK. Next, let’s start the workflow by selecting the play button. To see the approval process, let’s go to our dashboard. Here, we can see our delivery and a prompt to submit our content and have approval for targeting. Let’s approve the content now. We are greeted with a window asking us to perform an action on this delivery, giving the option to accept or reject with a room for a comment. Everything looks good, so we’ll select content approval to continue. The content has now been approved and all that’s left is approving the targeting. This is only one of two ways we can approve. The second way is to do it via email. One of our emails is regarding the target. We select the approval link in the email body and enter our credentials. We are greeted with a tab containing the same element as our window and campaign asking us to accept or reject. Let’s accept for our target approval.

Going back to the interface, we need to refresh our delivery. Once we refresh, we can see all approvals have been completed and all that’s left is to confirm the delivery. We have the option to view the history of the approvals process. Next to the confirmation button, select open, followed by selecting the audit tab. A list of logs pertaining to this delivery populates. Navigate to the approvals tab and we’ll select the two actions approved for both targeting and content.

Now, let’s have a look at workflow approvals. Unlike the delivery or campaign approvals, we can set up an approval activity within a workflow. By doing this, we can create selection logic to target certain deliveries based on an approval step. Let’s add an approval activity to the workflow. Start by navigating to flow control and dragging an approval activity into the workflow. The approval activity provides you with two branches labeled yes and no. We’ll click the approval activity to open the approval window. Under assignment type, we can select a group or an operator. For now, we’ll select operator. In the assignees drop down, we will select ourselves, then select OK. Now, we’re able to test this by dragging the start arrow and applying it to our approval, then taking delivery and applying it to our yes branch.

To continue this workflow, let’s add an end activity to the no. Now, we have a workflow that when run, will hit this approval step which will ask for approval. Depending on the outcome, this executes the yes or no branch. Let’s save and execute the branch.

As you can see, the workflow is executed and it’s pending approval as indicated by the flashing approval step. This approval will not appear in the campaign dashboard as it is not a delivery. Instead, we will receive an email asking for our approval. Jumping to the email, we can see that the body of the email is a link asking us to click here to reply. If we select this link, it will ask us for our credentials. Once we enter our credentials and select login, we’re greeted with a form asking for our answer in the approval phase. Let’s select yes and select submit. It says our answers have been recorded. Navigating back to Adobe Campaign, we should see this branch get executed. Let’s refresh and the email changes to delivery pending because of the answer we gave and the yes branch was followed. In this video, we learned about delivery approvals and how they can be set at a campaign level or at an individual delivery level. These approvals are requested when a workflow executes a delivery and will not continue until all approvals are met. We also learned how workflow approvals are different and how we can use them to select logic based on an approval outcome. Thanks for watching.