Create event triggered campaigns

Welcome to Adobe Campaign Classic. In this module you will learn how to create an event-driven campaign and understand its various uses. Let’s dive right in and have a look at event-driven campaigns. Event-triggered campaigns are long-running campaigns spanning over weeks, months and maybe years. Instead of starting a workflow and letting it finish once all activities have been completed, we will rely on a specific event to occur which will continue the workflow and send our deliveries. In this demo we will set up a workflow that will send an email to recipients on their birthdays. To achieve this the workflow will execute on a schedule, query the database for recipients whose birthday it is and send a message to them. Let’s go to our workflow. We only need three activities to get this started. A schedule activity to trigger the execution on a daily basis. This can be found on the flow control. A query activity to identify recipients. This can be found on the targeting. And finally a continuous delivery activity. This can be found under actions. We will be using this instead of an email delivery because it can work with a template. To begin double-click the scheduler. From this view select the change button. From this window you can select the type of frequency for scheduling. We want the scheduler to execute daily so select the daily radio button and select next. Select the start time and make sure the day selection is set to every day. Click next. Also make sure the validity period is set to permanent. Given we want this to run 24-7 we want this option. Select next. This is now a summary and I think we all are happy with these settings so now let’s select finish. You now have an execution schedule at 12 a.m. every day. Click OK. Now when you run the workflow execution won’t proceed past the scheduler until the dates and time specified. Next we need to identify our recipients for sending emails. Using the query activity we will apply some filtering. Double-click the query activity and select edit query. From this list of restriction filters select the filtering conditions. You now have the ability to define expressions that will filter results from the database. You can define these expressions by invoking functions on attributes on a recipient. You can even go as far as creating SQL for complex queries. In this demo we will only need two simple expressions. You will see this little icon next to the text box saying edit expression. Select this and this will launch a window where you can select a list of fields to enter. For our own purpose we require some extra logic to be applied to these fields. Select the advanced selection button down here. This will allow us to use formulas. We have a few formula types to choose from. For our demo select the last radio button that says expression. Click next. Here we can write an expression with the help of these available fields in this list and these list of functions. Select the date drop-down and this will display all functions pertaining to dates. Double-click this day function which takes in a date and returns the day from that date. So if we input the recipients date of birth into this function it will return the day. In the available fields we will double-click the date of birth which will input it into our day function for us. Click finish and you will see our expression displayed in a non-technical format. Make sure your operator is equal to. For the next part of the query we will set the value to compare against. We can achieve this the same way as the first part of the query. Select icon and expand the date functions. Select day and instead we will use the get date function for today’s date and select finish. You now have a fully qualified expression to compare a recipient’s day and today’s day. Finally we need to compare the recipient’s birth month as well. Select the add button. We will now repeat this process for the month. Select the icon advanced selection expression and now we can edit the expression. Using our list of date functions we would instead use this month function which takes in the date and returns the month. We will do the same for the recipient’s date of birth. Click finish. Now we need to do the same for the value. Select the icon expand the date functions and insert month and this time do get date for today’s date. Click finish. We now have the query to compare and filter recipients whose birthday matches today’s date. Click finish to complete this process and click OK. So far we have a scheduler that runs once a day and a query that will return all recipients who have a birthday on that day. The final part of the workflow is to use a continuous delivery. The continuous delivery activity is also beneficial because it allows us to execute it multiple times with different inputs. So every day when the new query returns new recipients the continuous delivery will accept them and execute their delivery. The standard delivery activities like the email delivery is unsuitable because it can only be executed once. Double-click the continuous delivery. In the continuous delivery editor we will specify the birthday template. This is a predefined template in campaign classic that contains a birthday greeting. Make sure the specified by the input events is selected to receive the new recipients from the query every time the scheduler is run. You could also choose the specified in the delivery template which will look within the template you selected to send to any new recipients defined there. This is not suitable for our needs as it is not dynamic and relies on a fixed set of recipients. You could also inject a file with recipients defined within. Finally you could define a script. In here you can write your own implementation to retrieve recipients for this delivery. We will stick with the first option as it suits our needs. You can choose to select process errors box. This creates a new output branch on the delivery so you can assign different logic if an error occurs thus continuing the workflow instead of a hard error which will stop it. Press OK to demonstrate. You can now see this additional branch as well as the OK. You could use this branch to do any additional logging or follow completely different delivery path if this error occurs. After all that you will have a completed event driven campaign that runs every day and finds recipients whose birthday is today and send a birthday greeting. You execute the workflow. You will find that is pending at the scheduler and not executing the workflow because it is waiting for the predefined time that you specified before it continues. It will stay like this until that date is met. You should now be familiar and know how to create an event driven campaign. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time.