topic Re: Overlapping workflow best practices in Tips, Tricks & Best Practices

Overlapping workflow best practices

InciteJoe — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 15:26:27 GMT

Hi all,

Background

I have around 10 different workflows for when someone requests different guides on my website, the form fill triggers a copy of the guide to be sent via email too.

Change to current process

I am now thinking of adding more steps, so for example after a period of time send a series of follow up emails to the contact to ask how useful they found the content and attempt to schedule in a call with them.

Potential issue

Now say for example Contact A has filled in multiple forms for different guides, what is the best way for me to make sure they don't end up being spammed by multiple follow up emails for each guide?

Thanks

Re: Overlapping workflow best practices

danmoyle — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 21:02:41 GMT

@InciteJoe such a great question. I love that you're thinking about the UX in your content.

Background for me: I used to be the marketer for a mortgage bank, where we created home buying guides galore. Each one had a workflow email sequence attached. For those who would download multiple guides, I always figured they'd want all the information. However, I recognize it can be a lot, even when the emails all offer different content.

If you have marketing hub enterprise, you can set up an email frequency safeguard. Otherwise, it's a matter of thinking about your workflows in levels. If you have 10, are they split up by buyer's journey stages (awareness, consideration, decision) or funnel (TOFU, MOFU, BOFU) to where you can remove from specific workflows?

For instance, once they download a MOFU offer, your workflow could remove them from any other TOFU workflows.

I hope that helps get the thoughts going for you.

Re: Overlapping workflow best practices

karstenkoehler — Thu, 24 Nov 2022 05:07:38 GMT

Hi @InciteJoe,

I agree with @danmoyle, the email frequency safeguard feature and the option to remove contacts from workflows are great tools for this.

Personally, I would never want to receive two overlapping series of emails. From a marketer's standpoint it also doesn't make a lot of sense: You designed a series of emails specifically to work towards a specific goal, a next conversion, a meeting booked etc. If two or more nurturing workflows overlap, it's unlikely that this goal will be achieved, too much going on.

In my opinion it comes down to whether you want to allow the first conversion to continue its nurturing or the last. The first makes more sense in my opinion. For your workflow design that means that the workflow that delivers the content should never contain the follow up emails. It should only deliver the content and then 'nominate' the contact for a nurturing workflow where they enter if they are not being nurtured already. (This can of course be solved with if/then branches in the original workflow but I'm not a fan of it. Especially with a large number of content pieces this becomes unmanageable at some point.)

Lastly, you want to think about how to deal with scenarios when contacts have already downloaded a piece of content they're about to receive in a nurturing workflow. Here you'll have to work with if/then branches referring to those specific form submissions.

Hope this helps!

Re: Overlapping workflow best practices

InciteJoe — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 11:38:28 GMT

Thanks @danmoyle that is very helpful

Re: Overlapping workflow best practices

InciteJoe — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 11:39:52 GMT

Thanks @karstenkoehler