Top 5 Workflow Best Practices for Marketers from LoyaltyOne

Hi, I’m Adam Wilson. I lead a team responsible for managing the data and integrations that enable our marketers in Adobe Campaign. Workflows, a powerful campaign capability, help you manage campaigns and reach customers more effortlessly. Here’s a countdown on my top five workflow best practices to help make your job as a marketer easier. Tip number five. When it comes to logging, the setting to keep the results of interim populations between two executions is useful for developing and debugging workflow, allowing you to easily observe each activity’s result. This means you can thoroughly test and QA before deploying those workflows to production. Because these features take up database space, they should not be used for debugging in production. Within the production instance, avoid unnecessary database utilization, reserving space and resources for your marketing team’s day-to-day operations. Once tested and debugged, uncheck the interim populations checkbox and remove any information that’s been logged to the journal for debugging purposes before you move those workflows to production. Tip number four. Set up all production workflows with monitoring, especially those that are critical to environment health or maintaining marketing schemas. Custom operator groups combined with alerts will notify the correct individuals when something unexpected happens. For example, the campaign workflow may alert the campaign manager, while ETL workflows may alert a custom operator group that you’ve created for overseeing data management. Careful monitoring and alerts ensure your teams are aware of any issues as soon as they occur, minimizing interruption to your daily marketing operations. Tip number three. Workflow updates. Before updating live workflows in production, test them in a development or staging environment. There’s always a risk that untested changes to workflows will have unexpected results, especially if your workflows are writing data to schemas within the instance or they use significant resources. By testing first, you can evaluate the results of your updates without impacting daily marketing deliverables. Tip number two. Using external signals within workflows allows you to break more complex operations into smaller components, significantly simplifying both maintenance and monitoring tasks. With this feature, you can trigger an activity from a separate or potentially upstream workflow. To ensure your workflows are well understood, document the expected triggering origin workflow within the signal so that it’s clear which upstream workflow has triggered that activity. Another option is to include the original workflow name as a variable when triggering that downstream workflow. This will save a lot of time debugging should any of these workflows fail. Tip number one. Make sure your production environment is stable to avoid disruptions to your mission critical marketing operations. Planning workflows wherever possible will increase the likelihood that database usage stays steady, avoiding spikes during working hours. Schedule ETL or environments maintenance workflows outside of work hours. These workflows don’t deliver marketing to your customers. Run them overnight when they won’t consume resources that are better used for marketing. Spread workflows scheduled during working hours throughout the day to avoid many workflows running concurrently. If your marketing server is handling many tasks at once, it can slow down performance. To avoid this issue, coordinate with your team to stagger the start times wherever possible. Marketers actually tend to schedule email deliveries at the top of the hour to compete for visibility at the top of their customers inbox. So when you stagger sends, say in five minute intervals, sending at 10 10 a.m., 10 15 a.m., 10 20 a.m. for example, there’s a higher chance your email will be at the top when a customer checks their email. As a marketer, Adobe Campaign workflows power you to easily design and orchestrate customized experiences for your customers. Using these best practices will help you maintain a healthy campaign platform and enable your campaigns to run more efficiently.