I've just discovered that a contact that meets the goal criteria of a workflow won't technically count as having "met the goal" unless a marketing email was sent to that contact from the same workflow. This is an unnecessary limitation of what goals could be capable of accomplishing from an automation standpoint. Example Use Case: In my particular use case, I have a workflow set up which collects all contacts which have proven unresponsive during automated outreach. The workflow amalgamates all contacts which have previously been sent emails from potentially dozens of different sales representatives, each with their own personalized workflows. The goal criteria of the workflow includes the contact having opened, clicked on, or replied to any marketing or sales email - and contains an “AND” condition that requires the contact to currently be enrolled in the workflow itself (to avoid having the contact preemptively suppressed from entering the workflow due to having already met the goal criteria). The contacts are placed into a 28 day wait timer which allows drip campaigns and additional sales followup attempts to take place. Naturally, many contacts have at least opened one email, and they “meet” the goal criteria, unenrolling them from the workflow, despite no emails being sent from the workflow itself. I have a follow-up workflow set up which is supposed to use “has met the goal criteria” from that previous workflow as enrollment criteria, but it doesn’t work, because there’s an unnecessary caveat in place of having to have sent a marketing email from the workflow itself in order for a contact to “actually count” as having met the goal. Proposal: At the very, VERY least, the documentation in this article should be updated to clearly indicate that contacts that “meet” the goal criteria for workflows which don’t contain sent emails will not be capable of triggering workflow responses. The current semantics only indicate that the “goal conversion rate” will not be influenced, which omits the limitation of not activating workflow triggers. There are tons of other creative ways in which goal criteria could be used to manage various aspects of contact-based workflows in which no marketing emails are sent. My suggestion is to allow contacts which meet the goal criteria of a workflow to actually register as having “met the goal condition”, regardless of whether a marketing email was sent to them from that workflow. What are the benefits of otherwise having this limitation in place? Edit: I just read the workaround suggestion at the bottom of the main help article. It makes sense (effectively, you just copy all of the goal criteria into the follow-up workflow's enrollment trigger criteria, and add "is enrolled in the previous workflow" as an additional condition), but isn't the most intuitive. As an amended suggestion, I'd highly recommend adding a tooltip that makes the functionality of goal conditions vs setting the "has met the goal" status for contacts more clear as it relates to requiring a workflow to have sent a marketing email to a contact. The current functionality has detoured me through hours of troubleshooting, contacting support, and self-research (including some incorrect information in forum replies) to finally understand how this works - when realistically, if a contact "meets the goal criteria", they should simply be considered to, as one would imagine, be counted as having "met the goal criteria". I hope at the very least this post can help others understand how this function works if they end up searching for more information about it.
...その他を表示
