Create event triggered campaigns

Welcome to Adobe Campaign. In this video, 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-triggering 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 out 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. So let’s go to our workflow. We only need three activities to get this started. The first being a schedule activity to trigger the execution on a daily basis. It can be found on the flow control. Next, we need a query activity to identify recipients. This can be found under targeting. And finally, a continuous delivery activity which 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. Once complete, select the start time and make sure the day selection is set to every day, then select next. Next, make sure the validity period is set to permanent. This is because we want this to run 24-7 once this option is enabled. Select next and a summary is displayed. If you’re happy with the summary, select finish. We now have an execution scheduled at 12 o’clock a.m. every day. Select OK to continue. Now, when you run the workflow, it will not execute past the scheduler until the dates and times we 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 in the new window. From this list of restriction filters, select filtering conditions. A new filter window appears, giving us the ability to define expressions that will filter results from the database. We can define these expressions by invoking functions on attributes on a recipient. We can even go as far as to create SQL for complex queries. In this demo, we will only need two simple expressions. Using the edit expressions icon next to the text box, we can open the field selection window. For our own purposes, we require some extra logic to be applied to these fields. Select the advanced selection button down at the bottom. This opens the formula type window. We have a few formulas to choose from. For our demo, select the last radio button that says expression. Once complete, select next. Here, we can write an expression with the help of these available fields in this list and these lists of functions. Select the date dropdown to display all the functions for dates. Double click the day function, which takes in a date and returns a day from the date. If we input the recipient’s date of birth into the function, it returns the day. In the available fields, double click date of birth. Campaign, we’ll input it into our function for us. Once complete, select finish and we will see our expression displayed in a non-technical format. Make sure your operator is set to equal to. For the next part of the query, we will set the value. We can achieve this the same way as the first part of the query. Select the icon and expand the date functions. Select day, and instead we will use the get date function for today’s date, then select finish. We now have a fully qualified expression to compare our recipient’s day and today’s day. Finally, we will need to compare the recipient’s birth month as well. Select the add button. We need to 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, then select 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, then select finish. We now have the query to compare and filter recipients whose birthday matches today’s date. Select finish to complete this process, and select ok. So far, we have a scheduler that runs once a day and a query that will return our recipients who have a birthday on that day. The final part of the workflow is to use a continuous delivery. That continuous delivery activity is also beneficial because it allows us to execute our workflow multiple times with different inputs. So every day when the new query returns new recipients, the continuous delivery would accept them and execute the delivery. The standard delivery activities, such as the email delivery, because it can only be executed once. Double click continuous delivery. In the continuous delivery editor, we want to select the birthday template. This is a predefined templating campaign that contains a birthday greeting. Make sure the specified by the input events radio button is selected to receive the new recipients from the query every time the scheduler is run. We could also choose the specified in the delivery template option, which will look within the template we selected to send to any new recipients found. This is not suitable for our needs, as it is not dynamic and relies on a fixed set of recipients. We could also inject a file with recipients and the query would run that. Finally, we could define a script. In the script window, we can write our own implementation to retrieve recipients for this delivery. We will stick with the first option as it suits our needs. Selecting process errors checkbox creates a new output branch on the delivery. This means we can assign different logic if an error occurs, thus continuing the workflow instead of a hard error which will stop it. Select OK and we can now see that additional branch where we can specify our logic. We could use this branch to do any additional logging or follow a completely different delivery path if this error occurs. After all that, we will have a complete events driven campaign that runs every day and binds recipients whose birthday is today. The campaign will then send a birthday greeting to the recipients that meet this condition. After we execute the workflow, we will find that it is pending at the scheduler and not executing the workflow. This is because it is waiting for the predefined time that we specified before it continues. You should now be familiar with and know how to create an event driven campaign. Thanks for watching.