Target profiles in a workflow

In this module you’ll learn to explain the use of campaign workflows and how to target profiles in a workflow. You’ll also learn to describe the targeting and filtering dimensions, create a targeting workflow and specify filtering conditions. Workflows are an extremely powerful tool in campaign as they allow you to automate logical processes. There are two types of workflows, campaign workflows and technical workflows. Most of the activities of a marketing campaign occur in a campaign workflow and the technical workflows are used for operations or jobs scheduled for periodic execution on the server. They let you carry out maintenance on the database, for example, and forward tracking information on deliveries. Campaign workflows are the focus of this module and they can be used for targeting, analysis and reporting purposes. In this module, we’re focused on the targeting capabilities. The query is the principle activity used in a campaign workflow to target profiles. The first step to configure a query is to set the targeting dimension and the filtering dimension. The next step is to select the type of filter you want to use. There are many types of filters you can choose from that will streamline the targeting for you. For example, you can target recipients that are included in a folder or recipients that have received a delivery. The available filter types depend on the targeting and filtering dimensions you selected in step one. The last step is to specify the filtering conditions to identify the profiles you want to target. For example, in step two, if you select a filter type of recipients included in a folder, in step three, you’ll need to select which folder. Now let’s talk a bit about the targeting and filtering dimensions. The targeting dimension identifies the type of population targeted by the operation, which in turn corresponds to a table in the database. When targeting for the purpose of sending deliveries, the most common targeting dimension is the recipient table, and it’s selected by default in the query activity. The filtering dimension is the table in the data model against which to apply the filter. Or in other words, it’s the table referenced in the from argument of the SQL statement generated from the filtering conditions. The filtering dimensions available when configuring the query depends on the targeting dimension you select, as only filtering dimensions compatible with the targeting dimension are made available. Please follow along with me in your campaign instance, as I show you how to create a targeting workflow, and this workflow will also practice specifying a variety of filtering conditions. In the Explorer view, go to campaign management and campaigns, in the List view over on the right, click New.

Set the label.

We’re going to keep the default start and end dates and click Ok.

Now let’s double click the campaign so we can see it in the full view and click on the Edit tab, again, just to avoid conflicts, we’re going to rename the internal name, click Save.

Now go ahead and click the Targeting and workflows tab, click New in the left corner.

So we’re going to create a new workflow and we’ll call this one Simple Targeting Workflow, and go ahead and click Ok.

Click refresh at the top, and click Yes to save if we’re going to save change. We can see our workflow has been updated here and created. Go ahead and click Properties and let’s set the internal name.

Click Ok. And save.

And just notice here, this defaulted back to new workflow. Just do another quick refresh here and now we’ve got everything updated. Over here we have the pallets. So, these are where we drag activities onto the workflow. This is the Targeting pallet, we can see the name there, but there are others like Deliveries here, Flow Control, and also Actions. We’re going to focus on the Targeting Activities. So, go ahead and select the query and drag that over onto your workflow.

Double-click, the query activity, click Edit query.

This is where we set the targeting and the filtering dimensions. If we wanted to select a different filtering dimension, for example, we can just click that dropdown list and select a different dimension.

For this exercise we’re going to keep the Recipients table for both the targeting and the filtering dimension. Another thing to point out here are the filter types that you can select. With these options here you can quickly create your filtering conditions. For example, I may want to target recipients included in a folder. So if I select that and click Next, I would then just need to select which recipient folder I want to target.

I’m going to click previous here.

Now we’re going to use filtering conditions, Because we want to actually set up our own filtering conditions. So, go ahead and select that and click Next.

In the Expression column just click in there and then there’s an Edit expression icon, so go and click that. And we’re going to target based on age. So double click on the Age attribute, we’re going to change the operator to less than or equal to.

And then in the Value column, we’re going to set that to 30. Go ahead and tab out of there. We’re going to add another filtering condition, so go ahead and click Add again, and then we’re going to double-click Age once more, this time we’re going to do greater than or equal to, and the Value is going to be 20. Now we can preview our audience or our target population. Click on the Preview tab at the bottom, and then what we can do, we can also configure this list and then add the Age column, click Ok.

And then we can just do a quick review of the results here to see if the ages are actually between 20 and 30. So it’s just a quick review, it’s not perfect, but just allows you to kind of do a quick test to make sure that you’re not seeing anything that’s not correct.

Go ahead and click Finish.

In the Label of the query, let’s change that to Age group 20 to 30.

Click Ok.

Go ahead and save the workflow and then go ahead and start your workflow. We can see it’s finished executing, the status is now at pause, so it’s waiting here. This is blinking here, this transition, so it’s giving you my results. Go ahead and right-click on that on the transition and select Display the target. Again, these are the results, so we can right-click Configure the list. And then in this Targeting dimension, we can double-click Age and add that to the columns. So again, we could also review in here as opposed to the preview or both. Go ahead and click Close.

Now we’re going to add another condition to the query, so double-click your query in the workflow, we’re going to change the label here, we’re just going to add to the front here Prospects and then click Edit query, click Add in the Edit expression, go to Status, so scroll down, find Status, double click that.

And we’re going to keep this with equal to, in the Value though, we’re going to select Prospect.

Now notice also there’s an operator here that’s set to And by default, but just note that you could change this to an Or or an Except.

Another option to point out here is that you can generate the SQL query. So, go ahead and click that option there. This allows you to see the SQL that will be generated using the filtering conditions you’ve configured. Notice that the NmsRecipients table is the value in the from argument of the query. As mentioned earlier in the module, this means the recipient table is where the query will start in the database because we kept the filtering dimension set to the recipient table. So, go ahead and click Close and then click Finish, click Ok.

And now we’re going to restart our workflow. You have a couple of options, you can go ahead and click Stop and then Start, but there’s also a Restart option. So, if you click restart, notice I haven’t saved my workflow either, it will do that automatically. So if I click Restart, it saves my workflow, so I’m going to go ahead and click Yes, and then it will restart that workflow for me. I know it’s executed, because I’m in a pause state again, and now my result is less than previously. So again, we could right-click on the transition there and Display the target, and we could see here, if we check this option, we can see that we’re seeing 200 of 205, and we could go and look through some of the data there. We’re going to close that. And now, as a best practice, we’re going to stop our workflow, Because we’re done executing. And click Yes to stop it. Now, go ahead and right-click again on that transition and click Display the target. Notice this time though, there are no results being displayed in this Data tab. This is because the results data is only available when the workflow is executing. Once you stop the workflow, the temporary workflow table, that’s storing the workflow results is dropped in order to free up the database. This demonstrates why it’s important to stop your workflow. If you leave it running, it keeps the temporary work table in the database and takes up space.

Go ahead and click Close, and this completes the exercise on creating a targeting workflow. -